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How does marketing automation work?

Marketing automation uses pre-defined conditions and setups to create targeted and personalized customer experiences.

As customers interact with your brand, they go through different stages, from first contact to making a purchase. Usually, these interactions differ based on customer preferences, values, and interests. This makes marketing campaigns challenging, as you cannot send the same message to every customer in your database.

Ideally, you may want to fragment your audience into different segments based on preset criteria or attributes that define the groups. This will help you provide offers that appeal to your users. Moreover, it will enable you to craft and run targeted campaigns tailored to a specific audience.

More personalized experiences will lead to more sales and, eventually, improved customer satisfaction and healthier relationships.

However, these processes are so complex that you have a higher chance of ruining your campaigns if you handle your operations manually. This is where marketing automation comes in – to handle the repetitive tasks on autopilot and to let your teams focus on other, more critical business operations.

So, with an automated system, you can collect real-time data from customers who visit your site, create smart segments, and map out different journeys for each of them. Consequently, you can use preset workflow and triggers to deliver timely and relevant messages that appeal to them.

So, with marketing automation technology, you can simplify the following processes:

  • Lead generation
  • Lead scoring and nurturing
  • Customer segmentation
  • Email marketing
  • Reporting and analytics

Challenges businesses face with manual methods

As customers' needs change, there’s a corresponding demand for businesses to meet these needs. Gradually, these changes become complex and require sophisticated processes and advanced operations to stand out from the crowd.

Marketing operations have evolved to include more complex processes like journey mapping, smart segmentation, and lead scoring. While handling these tasks manually is possible, it may affect some areas of your business processes and harm your overall growth.

Businesses that don’t employ automated technologies in their marketing strategy may experience the following challenges:

  • Decreased productivity: Sending emails manually to a few customers may seem easy, but dealing with hundreds or thousands of subscribers can take a whole day to reach every customer on your list and take a hit on your operational efficiency – even if you’re copying and pasting the same emails.

    This reduces your productivity as you spend time on basic activities instead of more important tasks that bring value to the company, including customer retention, personalized messaging for your target audience, and more.

  • Increased errors: Automated technologies are programmed to follow a specified process, making errors less likely. However, humans are more prone to errors, especially for repetitive and mundane tasks. As businesses use manual processes to handle customer data, there’s a higher chance of having inaccurate, inconsistent, or incomplete results.
  • Increased costs: Manual operations are time-consuming and tedious, so businesses will require more resources to run their activities and accomplish their goals. Adopting an automated solution that handles multiple operations is more cost-effective than using manual methods to handle your tasks, where labor costs, customer acquisition, and other operational costs will be significantly increased.
  • Redundancy and repetition: A typical challenge with manual methods is unnecessary repetition and redundancies. It is easy to lose track of what you or a team member has done, so completed tasks may be repeated, and unfinished tasks may be omitted. This can lead to missed opportunities and wasted business resources.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

In line with simplifying your operations, marketing automation can help your business in the following areas:

Data management

It is one thing to gather your customer data, and it’s another thing to organize them into a format that can easily be accessed, analyzed, and stored for future campaigns. This data comes from several sources, such as your site, mobile apps, forms, social media platforms, etc.; arranging them manually with a spreadsheet program is problematic.

But with a marketing automation tool, you can easily collect, store, and consolidate your data into a unified database for easy analysis and to help you gain valuable insights into your customer interactions.

Improving conversion rates

Lead capture and nurturing are tedious processes, and when done manually, you may spend more time than necessary carrying out mundane and repetitive tasks. This can affect your email campaigns, limiting the number of users you can reach.

Automating these processes allows you to track your leads and ensure proper retargeting. Even more, you can deliver more optimized campaigns to increase your sales.

Accurate reporting and insights

Manual methods don’t have seamless provisions for analyzing customer data and providing valuable insights. Reporting and analytics are complex marketing processes requiring real-time, consistent, and up-to-date customer data.

This enables you to extract actionable insights and spot specific trends and patterns in customer interactions. Streamlined reporting using marketing analytics tools lets you understand your customers' preferences and behavior, thus helping you create targeted offers that appeal to them. This also helps you understand the customer journey and lets you adjust your marketing tactics accordingly.

Enhanced personalization

Marketing automation will allow you to place your customers in different segments and create relevant campaigns tailored to each user. Marketers can send trigger emails using pre-built workflows based on preset conditions or actions.

This way, your marketing team doesn’t have to manually monitor customer activities on the site. The automation can be set to send a welcome email whenever a user signs up, an appreciation email after a purchase, or a follow-up email after a few weeks of inactivity.

Scalability

As your customer database grows, managing different profiles can become daunting and challenging. You could often end up with inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated data, especially with a small team.

A scalable automation platform grows with your business and supports unique functionalities, allowing you to manage your increasing customer base.

Introducing EngageBay Marketing Automation Software

EngageBay is an all-in-one customer relationship management system offering specialized capabilities for understanding customer profiles, engaging potential leads, and improving satisfaction levels. EngageBay’s marketing automation solution lets businesses manage both outbound and inbound marketing from a single platform. The marketing automation tools within EngageBay can be used to run successful marketing campaigns across several marketing channels.

Our CRM solution also offers mobile marketing automation, social media management, sales automation, and more.

EngageBay Marketing Automation Software supports unique functionalities well-suited to help small and growing businesses execute targeted campaigns and measure their impact. With these streamlined processes, marketing teams can maximize efficiency, reduce human error, and tackle more pressing customer issues.

Key Features of EngageBay Marketing Automation Software

From acquiring new subscribers to retaining loyal customers, EngageBay supports sophisticated digital marketing automation features for boosting customer engagement and business growth. Some of these features include:

Email marketing automation

With EngageBay’s email marketing tools, you can automate and publish engaging email marketing campaigns, launch drip campaigns, send welcome emails, and get feedback from your customers.

EngageBay lets you track key metrics for each email marketing campaign, A/B test them, and improve clickthrough rates.

Email templates

EngageBay has many attractive, compelling, and responsive email templates across several industries and for different conditions. These templates are customizable and use a drag-and-drop feature to craft engaging emails in minutes.

Additionally, you can create custom templates to match your brand style and tone. This way, you can have multiple layouts and styles for different campaigns, thus eliminating the need to always create emails from scratch.

Customer segmentation and personalization

EngageBay lets you create highly personalized and targeted content with smart customer segmentation. Proper segmentation allows you to fragment your customers into smaller groups with similar characteristics.

You can group your customers based on unique attributes such as age, gender, likes, dislikes, etc. Custom segments can also be created based on specific actions the user takes. For example, when they click on a product category, visit a webpage, abandon their carts, or purchase an item.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring helps you identify and prioritize high-quality leads. Predictive lead scoring adds scores to your leads based on their actions, giving insights into your warmest leads.

This feature uses your customers’ interaction and engagement history to help you discover prospects and other visitors who are not ready to buy. This gives your sales teams more time to build better relationships with qualified leads instead of sifting through many leads in your database.

Email autoresponders

EngageBay’s email autoresponder system enhances engagement with your leads and prospects. It uses trigger-activated emails to automatically send an email whenever a user takes a particular action.

The autoresponders enable your teams to confirm subscriptions automatically, develop pre-built email sequences, send timely responses to user queries, and promote high-value offers on autopilot. It eliminates the need to spend time on repetitive emails or manually create a new email for every user action.

SMS marketing

The SMS marketing feature lets you run personalized SMS campaigns and send bulk messages to customers. It allows you to segment your contacts using several filters and attributes and build automated workflows to send trigger-based messages when customers take specific actions like cart abandonment, failed payment, return purchase, product views, etc.

Push notifications

EngageBay supports customizable web push notifications that enhance engagement, improve customer interactions, and boost traffic. These notifications deliver timely and relevant messages to nurture your leads and increase conversions.

Push notifications are opt-in alerts or pop-ups on your subscribers’ browsers, notifying them of an update, announcement, or any other important information you can send using text and rich media.

Reporting and analytics

EngageBay’s reporting and analytics feature lets you use your marketing data to understand your customers better. It offers accurate predictive modeling and allows you to monitor your campaigns and record specific stats to track your progress over a specified period. EngageBay’s marketing activity dashboards offer a visual way to ingest complex marketing metrics.

This feature also provides actionable insights into your customer behavior and preferences. You can create more personalized and targeted campaigns for different segments.

Landing pages and forms

You can use strategic landing pages and forms to attract new subscribers, generate qualified leads, and increase your customer base. EngageBay’s responsive landing page builder uses a drag-and-drop designer and customizable templates to provide attractive pages that can increase your conversion rates.

Similarly, the web forms give you much flexibility to choose the data you want to collect from your customers. With real-time analytics, you can monitor key landing page metrics like subscriber data, visitor count, click-through rate, etc. Our marketing automation software also lets you A/B test your landing pages and forms to let you focus on the variant that will most likely convert.

EngageBay Integrations

EngageBay, as a standalone tool, doesn’t have all the capabilities your business needs to run its operations. From finance to content management, eCommerce, social media, shipping, etc., your brand will require a set of well-designed systems that work together to simplify your operations and improve your processes.

As a marketing automation system, it supports unique integrations with the following third-party applications:

  • Shopify: EngageBay’s built-in Shopify integration lets marketers set up online stores, promote products/services, and sell to existing or potential customers. You can share your product, order, and customer data by connecting your Shopify account with the EngageBay marketing automation platform.
  • Twilio: Twilio is a communications app that helps marketers send and receive SMS and voice calls. It enhances voice, text, chat, and video communication with customers. Using Zapier, EngageBay connects with Twilio to improve your customer engagement and interaction, thus enabling you to manage another marketing channel from a single app
  • Asana: EngageBay - Asana integration enables your marketing teams to collaborate smoothly with other teams, assign tasks, view activities, and track project statuses. It lets you view and join workspaces to review and give tasks. This improves communication and team productivity.
  • Trello: EngageBay integrates with Trello to help manage your tasks effortlessly. Like Asana, it is a project management and automation tool that allows you to collaborate with your team, join workspaces, and track project statuses. It provides a visually appealing dashboard that lets you organize your marketing operations and focus on high-priority marketing campaign optimization strategies.
  • BulkSMS: BulkSMS is a communications app that allows you to send text messages from different devices to several networks globally. Its integration with EngageBay lets you send single and bulk SMS text messages to your leads and contacts directly from the marketing automation platform. This way, you can customize your messages to run targeted SMS campaigns.

Other EngageBay integrations include Outlook, Trello, DocuSign, Stripe, Xero, Thinkific, etc. With these integrations, you can extend EngageBay’s functionalities and increase productivity – all from a single platform.

Marketing automation without the sweat. That’s EngageBay!

Run targeted campaigns, manage all contacts, track your KPIs, and convert leads to customers with this affordable marketing automation software.

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