When it comes to engaging with the modern customer, few marketing technology innovations have caught the attention of those in B2B marketing as much as marketing automation. The idea of providing prospects with targeted, needed material right at the proper moment is tantalising. This strategy makes it easy for brands to improve their ability to nurture customers through the buyer’s journey.

Brands who have already adopted marketing automation are seeing success. Forty-nine percent of companies say that they use marketing automation technology in some way. Of organisations classified as ‘best-in-class’, more than two-thirds report using it. 91% of marketing automation users agree it is "very important" to the overall success of their online strategy, which is not surprising with results like:

• 14.5% increase in sales productivity

• 12.2% reduction in marketing overheads

• 80% of users report an increase in leads

• 77% report an increase in conversions

We want to help you see how you can put marketing automation to work for your organisation and the impact it can have on your ability to nurture your prospects. Let's explore some of these powerful tools.

What makes marketing automation so powerful?

When brands employ marketing automation, they greatly enhance their ability to reach customers at precisely the right moment, and at scale.

Imagine a salesperson sitting next to your prospects as they move through your site. They see the visitor has checked out a few white papers about a specific topic. Alternatively, perhaps they visited the pricing page without actually making a purchase. In both scenarios, the ideal situation would be that the sales team reaches out to this visitor in this moment and provides them with further information pertaining to what they were reading. 

Your team member would give them information to keep them engaged with the brand and further encourage them towards converting. They would help to address potential reasons for not completing a purchase and keep the dialogue active with the prospect.

Brands cannot implement this level of personal attention or provide such targeted information without assistance. Marketing automation provides the technology so that the organisation can:

• Reach customers at critical points in the buyer’s journey. By looking at the information that people access, they know when to send them further essential information that encourages them through the sales funnel.

• Since the sales team will not have played such a direct role in nurturing customers at these precise moments, they will be able to spend their time on other activities. In other words, the organisation will have the ability to manage its budget and resources more effectively.

• Since the act of reaching out to people with precise information becomes automated, brands can effectively reach more people.

• Do not also forget the importance of personalisation to the modern customer. People want to know that brands care about their individual needs. They want a personal experience. Marketing automation makes it easier for brands to deliver a more individualised experience on their website and in their communication with the lead.

If you want to learn more about the incredible benefits of marketing automation, please check out our other post on marketing automation 101 right here.

How can marketing automation build brand engagement?

Now you see the powerful ways marketing automation can benefit brands, let’s dive into how companies can implement the technology to increase engagement with their organisation. These are just a few different strategies that you can use to begin to harness the potential of marketing automation.

Welcome programmes

Let customers know that they are welcome on your site and that you look forward to helping them. The same way you would have a salesperson greets a customer entering a brick-and-mortar store to let them know that you will help them any way you can, you similarly want to greet your online customers. 

When someone joins an email list, your marketing automation platform can help you greet them in a timely way. The welcome sequence can help them learn what you have to offer and how you want to help them. Invite them to get to know your organisation on social media and generally help them feel personally welcomed. Encouraging them to remain engaged with your organisation and continuing to learn about what you have to offer gives you more opportunities to convert them further down the line. 

Keeping customers engaged

When customers respond to your lead magnet and join your email list, they are generally not yet in a position to make a purchase. They still want to do more research and learn about their options. To keep the prospect coming back to your organisation, you want to keep them engaged. Marketing automation makes it simple.

Rather than relying on search engines or memory to bring customers back to your site, marketing automation empowers you to reach out to customers in a timely manner. You can send relevant content to those who fall into particular stages of your buyer’s journey. You can also reach out individually to those you have not heard from in a while with content designed to re-engage them and let them know that you still want to help them.

Campaign automation

Email campaigns require a considerable amount of finesse as brands work to send out the campaign emails at precisely the right time and to the right people. With an automation platform, brands can set up a series of emails and triggers so that campaigns can run automatically. Customers who click on particular messages will receive the next email in the sequence, while those who do not click receive different messages. Customers will receive the content that they need to boost their chances of returning to the website and learning more about your offering. Sales teams and marketing teams can also breathe easier, knowing that they will not overlook sending the right message to someone at a particular moment.

Personalise interactions with prospects

Customers expect personalisation. They want to know that the brands they consider purchasing from care about their needs at a  personal level. They do not want to be just another number; they want someone willing to help them solve a particular pain point.

Technology has only increased this drive within customers. Social media allows customers to interact directly with the organisation, long before making a purchase. They can ask questions, speak with other customers, and receive the latest information about the organisation. A similar phenomenon occurs on your website. Rather than shopping from an impersonal catalogue or waiting until they have time to go to a store, customers can now reach out to brands through their website whenever they desire. They can research the brand’s opinion on their pain points and ideas for potential solutions. 

These customers then take this potential to the rest of the buying process. Eighty-one percent of customers report that they want brands to get to know them and know when to approach them and when not to. Over 78 percent of customers say that they only engage with they receive offers tailored to their previous interactions with the organisation.

Fortunately, marketing automation makes it much simpler to speak with customers in the way they desire. With automation, you can ensure that the emails people receive correspond directly to their behaviour. Customers receive communications based on what they read, clicked on, or other otherwise engaged with, keeping the information relevant to their unique needs.

Lead Qualification

Marketing automation can also help organisations with their lead qualification and lead scoring. Not every person who visits your site is destined to make a purchase. To make more efficient use of your time and budget, you need to be able to give priority to those visitors who are most likely to become customers. Therefore, you need to carefully qualify your leads to understand their likelihood of buying and where to focus your energy.

With marketing automation, you can easily track what types of content people engage with and how they respond to email campaigns. Someone who downloads a coupon or requests a demo should receive more consideration than someone who only downloaded an e-book but never returned to your site. Similarly, someone who enters your funnel by downloading a white paper and continues to engage with your emails receives a positive score, but the software will deprioritise a lead who downloads one case study and deletes all subsequent emails.

With marketing automation tracking, marketing and sales teams will have a better understanding of whom to pay attention to, better allocating the resources. 

How do I measure the difference my marketing automation efforts are making?

To understand how well your marketing is performing, you need to dive into the analytics. The concrete numbers will help you better understand how well your targeted emails trigger the interest of your prospects, convince them to click through, and then demonstrate to them that your brand is worth the investment.

The importance of integration

To create a robust analytics database, you want to make sure that your automation platform easily integrates with your CRM software, or has an integrated CRM. This allows you to watch your site visitors become leads and then further progress through the sales funnel. Marketing automation automatically updates your CRM with information regarding what the prospective customer engages with, thus enhancing the ability of the sales team to drive interest and conversion. 

You also want to use a program that easily integrates with Google AdWords. Your PPC strategy will include AdWords, so you want to make sure you are tracking the visitors you gain through this aspect of your campaign throughout the rest of their buyer's journey.  This helps you see how your PPC campaign aligns with your automation strategy to bring in new customers. 

Metrics to use

The key to identifying quality metrics for your marketing automation platform is looking at data points that allow you to see customers moving through the sales funnel. You want to see how the automated messages coax them from moving from the beginning of the buyer’s journey towards conversion. 

End-to-end conversion cost and revenue

To gain a complete understanding of the ROI for your marketing efforts, you want to track your visitors' movements through the site until they convert. You want to see which material helps them convert throughout the buyer’s journey until they make that purchase. This helps determine the cost of the process and how it compares to the revenue generated.

Email success

A key component of marketing automation is the email messages you send. Therefore, a critical metric to track will be the impact these messages have on prospective customers. You want to know how often your emails are opened and clicked on. You also want to see how this email success fits into the larger picture of prospect nurturing and how well these email subscribers move through the sales funnel to conversion.

Customer behaviour

Finally, you also want to make sure you can track how your customer behaves as they move across the site, including when they use multiple devices. You do not want to lose out on valuable information about a potential buyer because they switched from their desktop to a mobile device. 

Understanding how customers move through your site, setting targeted email to reach them following particular behaviour, and then gauging how they respond to these messages is the core of marketing automation analytics.

The Sharpspring marketing automation makes it easy for organisations to track all of these bits of information and more.

Marketing automation offers a tremendous amount of inbound marketing potential for brands who understand how to implement the technology effectively. It makes it easier for brands to reach their customers at those crucial moments in the buyer's journey and gives them that additional motivation they need to keep moving closer to conversion. Consider some of these ideas for implementing marketing automation and see if they can help you enhance your marketing strategy.

Seeing is believing. Let us show you how marketing automation can revolutionise your business.

Further reading: CMO Mind Blowing Stats on Marketing Automation