Introduction to marketing automation

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation refers to the use of specialised tools to schedule automated or automated mailings.

Put this way, it sounds strange and confusing, let’s explain it in a simpler way. Let’s say that today the ability to receive potential customers is much greater than in the past. Let’s say that thanks to the internet we find a large number of potential “buyer personas” or people who are interested in our product/service.

Hence, the need arises to be able to interact with them in a relevant way. And consequently generate the corresponding marketing automations. To do so, it is essential to:

(1) analyse whether they are really potential customers (lead scoring). Given the large number of potential customers, it is necessary to categorise them.

(2) interact with them to educate them and achieve the objective you have set (lead nurturing). basically try to approach/educate the potential customer through different communication techniques (email, whatsapp or SMS), nurturing the user with different contents.

And what does this allow us to do? It allows companies to dedicate their efforts to the most value-added or creative tasks.

Benefits of email marketing

Thanks to the implementation of marketing automation there are a number of benefits but I would like to explain it better with an example. Let’s imagine that we know that statistically

• 10% of our customers “A” → are the ones who buy a printer
• they buy product “B” → they buy cartridges
• in a certain situation “C”. → after one month, which is when the cartridge that came with the initial product purchase runs out.
  

Marketing automation allows us to create automatic communication flows to send these emails to our entire customer base A (those who have not bought a printer) after a month (situation C) so that 10% buy cartridges from us (situation B). But take a look at the benefits of marketing automation

• With marketing automation we can automatically and accurately generate 100% of the aforementioned flow.
• It allows us to develop complex upselling and cross selling marketing processes.
• It is highly effective and helps to reduce costs.
• It facilitates the identification of users with more interest in your products or services and, consequently, they are likely to receive a much more direct commercial offer.
• It is 100% configurable and customisable. We can adjust if we think we can improve the flow
• It provides the ability to have a conversation with your subscribers and therefore maintains the interaction from the beginning until they buy.

How to start? What do we need to know? Let’s start by understanding the pillars of email marketing, lead scoring and lead nurturing.

There are several marketing automation techniques, but among the most prominent are lead scoring and lead nurturing.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring is a technique that basically allows us to classify the leads in a database. This classification is based on a points system or “scoring” that depends:

• how close the lead is to the buyer persona you have identified for your company
• Loyalty: considering all the interactions they have had with the various channels, whether they have visited us, downloaded our ebooks, and the stage of the buying process or “pipeline” they are in.
• the buying process, as well as the stage of the buying process or “pipeline” they are in

Through a good lead qualification you can:

• Send much more personalised and therefore more effective messages.
• Align marketing strategies with the sales team to be able to execute more concrete actions.
• Identify the level of interest of users in your products or services, for example, by how they interact with them.
• Locate the leads that are closer or further away from purchase and define strategies for each of them.
• Develop better loyalty strategies for your leads and customers.

Lead nurturing

Once we have classified the leads (through lead scoring) we can implement a lead nurturing strategy.

The objective of this strategy is:

• add value

• capture

• build loyalty

leads to achieve your business objective, which can be a direct sale or the contracting of a service.

Through lead nurturing we can define several interactions that the company will carry out with the user in a fully automated way. Thanks to tools and techniques such as:

•  remarketing

• chatbots

• or the smart CTAs or intelligent call to action

we will be able to carry out a good lead nurturing strategy after having done the scoring.

The strategy that usually works best is to carry out lead scoring first and then lead nurturing. In this way, the most direct techniques, such as sending an email offering a product, are executed based on the knowledge of the customer or potential customer to whom the email is addressed. That is, it would not make sense to send an email selling a product to a lead with a low score or far from our buyer persona.

Marketing automation applications

Broadly speaking, we could say that marketing automation includes three main areas:

• engagement or product loyalty. 

• Automation of repetitive marketing processes.

• Automatic database education.

Engagement or loyalty with the product. We can launch emailing campaigns that are automatically launched when the user meets a series of characteristics related to their behaviour and the company. We can even automatically re-engage their attention and interest after a period of inactivity.

Automation of repetitive marketing processes for example when users have performed a specific action such as downloading an ebook.

Automatic education of the database, through classification. With this process, a chain of actions is set in motion – usually via email – that help the company’s database records to mature and move forward in the buying process. As we have seen in one of the previous points, there are two basic systems for automatic education: lead nurturing and lead scoring.

Closing

I hope that with this short video you have understood a little better:

What is marketing automation?

What are its benefits?

What is lead scoring and lead nurturing?

How or what applications does it have?

If you found it interesting, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel because in the next video I will introduce you to the essential tools that we use in all our marketing automation projects.