Reducing errors, maximizing results and optimizing time is what marketing automation software promises! But what is marketing automation and how to evaluate the best solution? Continue reading and clear all your doubts!
What is marketing automation software?
The objective of marketing automation software is to use technology to automate marketing actions and processes, reducing manual work and increasing the organization’s results.
We can say that marketing automation is the main tool for nurturing and advancing potential customers until the moment of purchase.
Benefits and advantages
Hiring a marketing automation application brings numerous benefits to the organization, from increasing the company’s sales, generating greater revenue, to reducing the cost of acquiring customers.
But, let’s list some of the application’s benefits:
Nurturing unprepared prospects
It is normal for there to be potential customers in our base who are not at the ideal time to buy, therefore, who will not buy anything at that moment, but who may buy soon.
Relationships are key in these situations, as what is often missing is for the company to improve contact with potential customers, providing more information to generate demand, adding value and credibility.
Automation allows you to improve relationships efficiently and with little effort.
More efficient funnel
Every buyer goes through stages before making a purchase. One example is that there is no point in offering a discount on college tuition for those who have not yet decided which career they want to pursue.
Therefore, marketing automation tools allow you to identify user behavior based on the interactions and information they provide, and be able to identify their purchasing stage and interests.
This way, you can send personalized content to the contact, which makes sense for them to advance to the next stage within the sales process.
The result of this is a funnel that moves more, that is, among the contacts that enter the funnel, a greater number reach the final stages and become customers.
Personalized communication for each persona
Within the customer journeys in marketing automation tools, you can segment contacts with numerous criteria, from interactions they had with the organization (for example: opened a certain email, checked in at the event, signed up for a certain form ), to contact fields (for example: position, current company, time of purchase, interests, etc.)
Based on segmentations, the company can personalize communication for the contact, making different personas follow their own journey, and no longer a generic path.
As a result, the company will have a much better relationship with the contact, adding value and keeping them eager to receive future communications.
Less recurring work for the marketing team
With automation, much of the prospect preparation that the marketing team would have is now automated!
After creating an email marketing, a form, a segmentation and a journey, you only need to execute it once! No need for individual rework for each contact, analyzing where they are, which path to take based on their response and/or interaction, etc.
Key Features of Marketing Automation Software
Segment the contact base
Segmenting and qualifying the potential customer base is one of the main reasons to invest in a marketing automation tool. This feature ensures that potential customer nurturing is appropriate for each stage of the journey they are on.
Schedule social media posts
Social networks are essential tools in most digital marketing strategies. The process of communicating with the public is facilitated and outreach can yield very positive results.
In this sense, one way to make processes more agile is through marketing automation, as you can integrate the automation tool with publications on social media.
In a very simple and quick way, social media professionals can organize posts and schedule them using a daily, weekly or monthly calendar, which makes the team’s day-to-day life easier.
Carry out email marketing campaigns
Automatic email marketing triggering is an essential practice within Digital Marketing, isn’t it? After all, it is one of the paths to the relationship. In this aspect, using specialized email marketing software will help you build and manage good nutrition flows.
And the best part: you can also take advantage of features such as personalized templates, various segmentation filters, among others. And of course, this is in addition to all the tools that allow you to measure the results of each shot to constantly improve your campaigns.
Customer journey
Through the customer journey, you can define all the interactions that the company will have with a certain segment.
For example, you are going to hold an event in São Paulo, therefore, you created a segmentation only with contacts who reside in São Paulo.
For these segmented contacts, you will create a journey, where you will send an email inviting them to the event.
Within the journey, you can create branches. So, for users who registered for the event, you send a thank you email, and the day before the event, you send a reminder email.
For users who opened the email, but did not register for the event, you create a phone call-type activity for the marketing team, so that they can get in touch, to try to convert the registration.
Therefore, you can create a completely personalized journey, based on the actions that the contact takes with the company.
Generate and monitor leads
Lead capture is an important step; after all, it is a decisive moment that separates entry into the sales funnel from the prospect’s withdrawal. Therefore, creating landing pages that attract visitors and generate conversion should be highlighted within your marketing strategy.
Invest in creating forms to request information that will be interesting for the sales funnel. When conversion occurs and leads enter the funnel, a new stage begins to continue nurturing and take them to the end of the purchasing journey.
Therefore, the marketing automation tool is essential for monitoring, as it offers specific features: Lead Scoring and Lead Tracking.
Lead Tracking consists of tracking lead actions, such as visiting website pages, opening emails or signing up for events. All this information is recorded so that monitoring can be carried out. Therefore, everything that is done is recorded and evolves into Lead Scoring, a score according to the lead’s stage in the funnel and other information about their trajectory in the purchasing journey.
Data analysis
Data is essential for evaluating the performance of your marketing campaigns and understanding more about your audience’s preferences. However, collecting and processing different information can take considerable time without suitable software.
To generate more detailed reports and access information and data more quickly, marketing automation tools are the ideal solution. This way, monitoring sales funnel metrics and strategy results becomes simpler and more efficient.
With this information in hand, you can make changes to your strategy in real time, to achieve your desired goals, for example.
A/B Testing
Each market niche has its particularities. In this sense, even if you create an incredible strategy for a certain client, it doesn’t mean that it will be effective for another audience. This is the magic of Digital Marketing: experimentation and testing make processes more accurate.
A/B tests are created to study public behavior and understand which of the alternatives will have the greatest impact. By changing just one element, two variants of a material are created and tested to find out which one pleases the public more.
There are several possibilities for putting this type of test into practice. For example, you can change the title of the email, a form field on a landing page, work with two different CTAs, among other possibilities. With a marketing automation tool, you can quickly find out which of two versions performs better in an A/B test.
Simplicity
Some automation tools, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, aim for simplicity. In other words, you don’t need to hire a designer to create your email marketing or form, the tool itself provides “elements” such as: text, image, buttons and fields so that you can drag and personalize your email, in a very intuitive way.
This applies to practically all functions, such as: marketing emails, marketing pages, forms, events, segmentations and journeys.
How much does marketing automation software cost?
Regarding values, each tool has a charging method. The vast majority work with plans, so everything varies according to the plan chosen, which will impact the available features, the number of users who will use the tool, and the number of contacts that will be used within the application.
But among the best-known tools, plans vary between R$20.00 and R$10,000.00 per month.
If you are interested in receiving Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing plans and prices, for example, you can contact us!
What to evaluate in marketing automation software?
Usability of marketing automation software
Usability is one of the main points for you to analyze before hiring a marketing automation tool. Have you ever imagined buying a plan and it not being suitable for what you need? Or is the system too difficult to use? There are some tools that make it easier to use on a daily basis because they contain fewer processes to perform the same action.
Therefore, always evaluate the usability of the tool before hiring it!
Data measurement
If there is one thing that is necessary for the marketing team, it is data. And most marketing automation tools lack accurate reporting of information.
Each tool on the market is at a different stage of development. They all have the bare minimum, like email open reports. But in more complex data, such as conversion and lead tracking, not everyone has it!
An example of a tool that has complete data analysis is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.
Marketing automation deliverability
Email deliverability is a very interesting item to take into consideration. Some tools have a very high deliverability system.
However, some tools can also help you increase deliverability to the lead through a dedicated IP. Therefore, if you opt for a good tool, but which has a lower deliverability, pay attention to whether you have a dedicated IP available to improve this rate.
Integration with current tools
It is important to know whether the marketing automation tool you choose has a good integration rate with other software.
Imagine that you use an e-commerce, you don’t want to leave the e-commerce data scattered, right? You’ll want to integrate them into your marketing app!
Native integrations of marketing automation software
These are those interactions that marketing automation tools have for other channels, such as social networks. Therefore, pay attention to these additional features because they can complement your strategy very well.
So, see the possibilities of the tool, analyze between the lines and that way you will always have the best choice of marketing automation tool at your disposal. After all, the best option is the one that works for you!
