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Marketing automation essentially makes the sales and marketing process easier. Salesforce defines marketing automation as the process of utilising technology to streamline marketing efforts and make them more effective.
When marketing automation emerged in the 1980s, it was reserved for large enterprises due to cost. Now, there are a range of tools available to all businesses that can be tailored to specific business requirements, including budget.
That’s why we’ve identified five tools that you should utilise to automate marketing and increase efficiency.
Email marketing software
Instead of manually creating email newsletters and campaigns, an email automation tool enables you to set up campaigns that send automatically when an individual meets a trigger e.g. signing up to receive updates.
Email automation allows you to completely personalise emails, which in turn increases conversion rates.
In fact, research shows marketers who take advantage of email automation, which includes everything from cart abandonment programs to birthday emails, have seen conversion rates as high as 50% (Campaign Monitor).
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
A CRM provides a central place to store and manage customer data and track interactions, meaning you won’t miss opportunities to close deals or grow customer accounts.
Key features include contact management, lead management, sales forecasting, instant messaging between colleagues, email tracking and integration, and content sharing. But, the level of functionality you choose depends on individual business requirements.
Social media marketing software
Different social channels allow you to show personality, but too much automation can result in posts appearing computer generated. However, if you vary posts and avoid simply repeating the same posts on all channels, social media marketing tools are essential scheduling, network management and analytics. This is especially true from a time-saving perspective, as automating social posts and ads can save more than 6 hours per week (Instapage).
And, most social media automation tools suggest optimum posting times for content to achieve maximum engagement.
Marketing analytics software
It’s important for businesses of all sizes to measure the performance of marketing strategies to focus efforts and maximise ROI. Marketing analytics software simplifies this task and can collate data from different channels to enable comparison.
Social media marketing software can measure social performance, but marketing analytics software provides deeper insight into website performance and visual representation tools such as heatmaps.
Marketing Automation software
Comprehensive software that has varying levels of capability in all of the above are an option if you want to centralise all your marketing efforts, and usually suit small business requirements.
A marketing automation platform tends to be web-based and doesn’t require software installation, so it’s easy to begin using and quickly gain a holistic view of your marketing efforts.
