How marketing automation is converting engagement into sales

Today, marketing is all about effective management of time all across, it has become imperative to focus on strategies that not only improves the efficiency of day to day operations but also leads to better ROI. This translates into who gets the first mover advantage, engagement with customers more frequently and faster conversion of leads. This is where Marketing Automation Solution (MAS) steps in. From financial services to IT and now marketing, it has revolutionized the way organizations are managing their time and targets. It has enabled streamlining sales and marketing organization by replacing the repetitive processes with automated solutions which has less probability of human error.

[1] According to a B2C Marketing Automation Report India 2017 by Research NXT and Netcore, India is at an early age of adoption and has ascended to third spot from ninth spot in 2016 in terms of using MAS and has been growing in order of importance to marketers across sector. With ROI as one of the major parameter to measure investment in activities, 57 % marketers in India have a well-defined marketing budget allocated for marketing automation spends and 10% of them have allocated more than 8% of their budget allocated for MAS. It further states that 48 % of marketers in India have already decided to include MAS in their marketing strategy.

So what is marketing automation? Simply put, it’s the use of software and web-based services in order to manage, automate or execute marketing tasks and processes. It aims to replace manual and repetitive marketing processes with specific software and apps that are designed to perform and deliver results.

Every marketer aspires to efficiently take care of tasks, such as customer feedback, mobile campaigns, emails, social media management, that are usually of repetitive but are integral to the marketing process. Leveraging the power of data and analytics, marketers engage customers with tailored content basis their profile date and purchasing behaviour. This leads to collection of valuable data that can help them convert leads into customers, while ultimately resulting in superior revenue generation.

To establish a successful marketing automation strategy all the relevant pieces should be sewed together, two key principles to consider while designing a strategy that can be scaled-up and customized for our customers, firstly understanding that MAS does not do only do marketing and lead generation for you, but can help you pad-up your efforts. Secondly, focusing your messaging around the person targeted for the end of the funnel of your campaigns.

Amazon’s marketing automation strategy serves as a great example of effective automation in marketing. The company uses customer search history and previous purchases to customize home pages, while greeting visitors with products of their interest on the landing page. Amazon also converts potential customers by sending emails with suggested purchases soon after a website visit, based on customer queries or abandoned cart items. It’s not a wonder then, that Amazon enjoys the kind of supremacy in e-retail as it does.

A powerful marketing automation software like Mautic is easily available to customize automation solution that can fetch the required data from the site using a JavaScript snippet. Based on the incoming data, the user’s journey is identified and certain workflows in Mautic can be defined; and on the basis of touch points, the campaign can be triggered, and the email sent out to the target. The results can be encouraging as the open-to-click rate can be mapped, which could be as high as around 40%. Marketing automation can run array of jobs in terms of functionality and effectiveness of a high traction campaign.

New age digital marketing firms in India are increasingly introducing marketing automation as a tool to target customers on social media platform for their clients specially in e-commerce space where it is easier to map their footprint, this helps to target who left the conversion path midway while bringing them back to the purchase path, who already converted from the site and upsell/cross sell to them, who weren’t active for the last few months and to re-engage with them via sweet deals to re-route them to the site.

The trend of marketing automation is gaining momentum in the Indian market rapidly. The rate at which it is growing, we are sure that in the next couple of years or sooner India will be on the same platform as US in terms of usage of technology in marketing.

[1]Reference:https://www.researchnxt.com/martech/b2c-mas-report-india-2017/b2c-marketing-automation-report-india-2017-release/