Marketing has advanced by leaps and bounds since the arrival of the internet. Larger businesses still use mediums like TV and billboards, but these are now outdated thanks to new technology. Digital signage screens have helped to modernize some of the more traditional advertising methods, but they still remain a rather different discipline than online marketing, which uses different techniques for success.
If you handle your own online marketing, you might have noticed more mention of a particular topic in recent months: automation. It’s not that marketing automation is new – it’s been around for years. What has changed recently is that automation platforms have become more advanced and more effective at helping campaigns be successful, and they can be very beneficial in numerous ways.
It Will Save You Time
Many of the tasks involved in marketing can be time-consuming. Imagine having to send out emails to a database of thousands whenever somebody performs a certain action, like signing up for a newsletter. That in itself would be a full-time job in some cases. With marketing automation, sending emails and other mundane tasks can be done automatically with cold email software, saving you considerable time. You will need to spend some time setting up the platform, but once that is done you can leave it to run itself until adjustments are needed.
You Can Gather More Information
Performance feedback is essential in online marketing because it helps marketers identify what is going well and where improvements can be made. Marketing automation platforms often come with tools that help you gather information on the behavior of your prospects. For example, the software will often be able to record which pages on your website have been visited and how long they are staying there.
Once you understand the numbers and you’re armed with information like this, you will be able to fine-tune your campaign for maximum effect.
It Helps You Segment Your Leads
Segmentation will be the first answer given by many marketers when asked why you should automate. It’s a feature that’s potentially very powerful and uses information gathering and lead scoring to deliver impressive results.
Lead scoring is a system that helps marketers to rank individual leads according to where they are in the sales cycle. This ranking can then be used to segment leads into different categories, and each category can then be interacted with in a different way.
This also helps marketers nurture their prospects and can yield very impressive results. Indeed, leads that have been nurtured are, on average, 20% more likely to result in a sale and purchases are also likely to be larger.
It’s Easier to Split Test Your Campaigns
Many marketing automation platforms also come with split testing tools. These are tools that allow marketers to make changes to the campaign, such as using different images or text in emails and testing the new configurations against the existing ones. If the new configurations work better, they can be used instead. With the new configuration up and running, marketers can then set up another new configuration to test against the latest one.
This can be an ongoing process that helps marketers to be constantly fine-tuning their campaigns. Split testing, also called A/B testing, is far from new in online marketing, but it has become a lot easier to use and more effective when it’s bundled in with an automation platform.
Conclusion
The time-saving aspect alone is likely to convince a lot of marketers to automate, but it allows you to not only save time but also automate a lot of the more tedious tasks. On top of that, automation can help you enhance the effectiveness of your campaign considerably. You can get more leads and more conversions at less cost while also gathering information that will help make later campaigns a success. You will also find a range of automation platforms that can meet the needs of any operation, whether it’s run by an individual or a large corporation.