By Boomi
Marketers who rely on inefficient manual marketing processes can struggle to keep pace with the demands of personalized communication across multiple channels. The solution is marketing automation. It’s helpful to know how marketing automation combats the time-consuming nature of traditional marketing and offers a strategic approach to targeted communication, collaboration, and data-driven decision-making to foster collaboration between marketing and sales teams.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation uses a comprehensive platform to improve various processes across multiple channels. One key aspect is the creation of automated workflows that enable marketers to efficiently manage and execute repetitive tasks at scale, such as email campaigns, social media posts, and customer segmentation. Through triggers and rules, marketing automation allows for personalized and targeted communication with leads and customers.
Additionally, marketing automation allows easier, simplified collaboration between marketing and sales teams through automated lead scoring, nurturing, and handoff processes to create a synchronized and efficient approach to customer engagement. Marketing automation also provides robust analytics and insights to help marketers track and measure the performance of campaigns and data-driven decisions.
How Does Marketing Automation Work?
The basis of marketing automation processes is the collection of customer data from various channels to draw a portrait of your customers based on your interactions with them. That information allows you to automate the segmentation, targeting, and scoring process.
For example, consider a scenario where an ecommerce business implements marketing automation.
A visitor lands on the website and abandons their shopping cart after browsing and shopping various product categories. With marketing automation in place, an automated workflow is triggered. The system sends an abandoned cart email to the visitor, reminding them of the items left behind. It also offers them an exclusive discount or free shipping to incentivize purchasing.
Suppose the visitor clicks on the email but doesn’t complete the purchase. In that case, a follow-up email is automatically sent after a specified period, possibly including customer reviews or additional product recommendations. Simultaneously, the system updates the customer’s profile based on those interactions, allowing for personalized follow-up communication and targeted promotions in future campaigns.
Why Use Marketing Automation?
There are many benefits to implementing marketing automation processes:
- Improved Efficiency: Marketing automation handles repetitive tasks. That reduces manual effort and aligns marketing and sales teams to focus on more strategic activities, ultimately enhancing overall operational efficiency.
- Easily Scalable: The modular nature of marketing automation platforms makes them easily scalable, so businesses can adapt and expand their marketing efforts when needed.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: The robust analytics and insights of marketing automation platforms allow marketers to optimize their strategies and campaigns for better performance.
- Personalization at Scale: Marketing automation enables delivering personalized and targeted content to a large audience. As a result, each interaction is tailored to individual preferences and behaviors, fostering stronger customer relationships.
- Better Lead Qualification: Automated lead scoring and nurturing processes help identify and prioritize high-quality leads and intent data so sales teams can focus their efforts on prospects most likely to convert.
What Are Marketing Automation Best Practices?
Before you get started with setting up marketing automation, remember to follow these best practices:
- Defining Clear KPIs: Clear KPIs ensure that marketing automation efforts align with specific goals and evaluation of success.
- Knowing Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): Understanding your customer base and creating an ICP guides personalized communication so marketing efforts resonate with the target audience.
- Creating Relevant Content: Developing content tailored to customer needs and preferences fosters meaningful connections, increases the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and improves customer engagement.
- Using Personalization: Leveraging personalization features in marketing automation ensures tailored interactions to each customer’s needs.
- Implementing Lead Scoring and Nurturing: Lead scoring and nurturing processes, including efficient lead routing, help prioritize and guide prospects through the sales funnel to increase conversions.
- Measure and Analyze Performance: Analyzing metrics allows for data-driven optimization and aligning marketing strategies with business objectives.
Advanced Techniques To Use With Marketing Automation
Once you have the basics covered, it’s time to dive deeper into marketing automation techniques for even better insights into your customers’ journey:
- Integration With CRM and Other Tools: Marketing automation integration with CRM and other tools enhances data visibility and collaboration.
- Advanced Segmentation and Behavioral Triggers: Advanced segmentation and behavioral triggers will help you set up highly targeted and relevant communication.
- AI and Machine Learning in Automation: Incorporating AI and machine learning into your marketing automation processes will help you get predictive data to optimize your future marketing strategies.
- Omnichannel Automation Strategies: This ensures a cohesive and consistent customer experience across various platforms.
How Boomi’s Integration and Automation Solution Can Support Your Sales and Marketing Goals
Marketing automation integration tools are varied, and there are several within Boomi’s suite of connectors. Application connectivity is one of the most essential marketing automation features. Boomi can connect data sources such as CRM systems, marketing databases, and customer data platforms (CDPs), such as NetSuite to Shopify, ChatGPT, Salesforce to HubSpot, and Twilio. With Master Data Hub, Boomi can also centralize records to create a single source of truth.
Workflow automation is a great feature for marketers. Once the rules and logic are set up, the automated workflows can send emails, schedule tasks, set up reminders, and launch drip campaigns without human help. Low-code interfaces like Boomi’s make it easy to create user interfaces, build new applications, build APIs, integrate platforms, and create and manage workflows with little coding knowledge.
Earlier in this article, we discussed the importance of real-time insights. Boomi enables real-time access to critical marketing data so marketers can stay agile and immediately adjust their marketing campaigns or respond promptly to their customers.
Ultimately, marketing automation processes streamline workflows, enhance customer engagement, and drive efficiency. Thanks to marketing automation, businesses can deliver targeted, personalized content at scale, improving conversion rates and a more impactful overall marketing strategy.
More than 20,000 of the world’s leading organizations trust Boomi’s autonomous capabilities and use the Boomi platform to spend more time on innovation and less on manual processes.
Watch our Demo To Understand How Boomi Can Help:
- Automate your manual processes
- Integrate your EDI/B2B transactions as well as modernizes your trading partner network
- Synchronize your critical business data across applications to ensure systems are up-to-date and in sync
- Create and manages APIs to establish new controls and services for your business
- Builds web-native applications, like a dashboard, to provide your business users the ability to view and interact with data
View the Boomi platform demo to get one step closer to automating marketing campaigns with an industry-leading platform as a service (iPaaS).