Digital marketing automation is an opportunity for marketers to automate their repetitive or ongoing marketing activities, improving efficiency and driving leads that will result in new customers.
Using digital marketing automation also opens up new opportunities when you partner with the right digital marketing tools. These not only increase efficiency but also open new marketing channels that you didn’t have time to leverage previously.
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How do you automate digital marketing?
While digital marketing automation may sound like a challenging task, it can be broken down into a few key steps that will get you started.
Even if you’re a single digital marketer looking to grow and thrive without building a huge marketing team, you’ll find digital marketing automation easy to implement and highly effective for growth.
The best approach is often finding a complete automation platform to run your digital marketing campaigns, rather than buying a large range of different digital marketing tools. This could lead to higher costs and more complexity for teams to navigate.
Determine what can and should be automated
Go through your team’s current tasks and see what tasks are heavily repetitive and could be optimized with marketing automation; this can include tasks that you wish you had time for but keep on the backburner.
One of the easiest things to start with is automating marketing emails, and there is a huge range of email automation tools that help you build email lists, categorize leads or customers into different segments, and send out follow-up emails for new products or services.
Once you have laid out the tasks you currently perform or would like to achieve, you can start researching automation tools available to take over those tasks. You might be surprised by the number of options available.
Select the best software to automate your digital marketing
For almost every marketing task you have, there are a plethora of automation tools on the market that can either fully automate an activity, or make it less time-consuming.
You should find the best industry tools that fit your budget and see what differentiates each tool and whether any offer more benefits to you than others.
You may find that one tool is more expensive but could be used to automate multiple tasks, which saves you from an overly complex structure of tools, the fewer you need, the easier it is for you and your team to utilize them effectively.
Determine the effectiveness of automation
Once you’ve selected and implemented your digital marketing automation tools, you should continue to follow up on the effectiveness of those tools and measure them against the historical effectiveness of your manual digital marketing efforts.
As an example, how effective was your lead generation or sales from email marketing, and how effective is the automated process in comparison? Are you seeing better results, and how much better are those results?
Automation is great, but you need to keep reviewing and adjusting based on the data from your reporting.
Marketing intelligence and Big Data
Big Data is opening up tremendous opportunities to improve marketing intelligence and speed up marketing decision-making. It’s a way to track customer response, competitor engagement and effectiveness, and build better marketing campaigns.
When used with digital marketing automation tools, the process can provide a fully automated and adjustable marketing strategy that is driven by customer engagement and responses, rather than best guesses by digital marketers who are much slower to analyze and adjust marketing strategies.
Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning with Big Data
Consider how your digital marketing automation campaigns would run if you used artificial intelligence. AI can automatically adjust activities based on how users are reacting or even responding on social media.
The longer your AI runs, the more effective it becomes as it learns from relevant data and is even able to predict how different campaigns may run on different digital platforms. It analyses historical data and continuously adapts as new information is collected.
Most marketers already know that a single campaign won’t work as effectively in different channels and customer segments. With limited time and resources, can become a hassle to optimize campaigns for each of your targets. Having a dedicated AI running and adapting campaigns can be of great help to automatically personalize and boost conversions.
5 best marketing automation tools
There are a huge number of digital marketing automation software, and often the best will depend on your unique context and requirements. However, there are five marketing automation tools that you should be checking out as they’re highly effective and versatile for most digital marketers.
1. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation and customer conversion tool for your website. It is one of the most effective tools for halting customers from exiting your site without becoming a lead or purchasing something.
It provides the final piece in your marketing campaigns to convert website visitors through enhanced and automatically adjustable landing pages, offers, promotions, or a range of other opportunities to keep the website visitors from simply leaving.
2. Constant Contact
Constant Contact provides enhanced, automated, and intelligent email marketing campaigns that can automatically take in new leads as they’ve developed through your website, social media, and other channels.
Initial lead information will determine how and what you market to the user, and response factors from those emails will determine future marketing opportunities or methods.
It provides you with enhanced reporting to see how your email marketing progresses and allows you to adjust or retire campaigns that are not effective for your leads.
3. SendinBlue
SendinBlue provides a number of digital marketing automation tools in a single easy-to-use package. You can build landing pages, plan email and SMS marketing campaigns, create ads for digital platforms, and you can even implement the tool into your website for an AI live chat tool.
It helps you plan the best times to communicate with different leads, which marketing templates are more effective, and generally makes the decision-making process when connecting with leads much easier.
SendinBlue is a great all-in-one tool that can save you a lot of money and give you a huge array of opportunities to engage with leads automatically.
4. Drip
Drip helps with eCommerce marketing automation by creating personalized marketing campaigns for every stage of your visitor’s journey through your website.
It’s a powerful CRM tool specifically designed by eCommerce sites that helps gather visitor and customer data, and then provides the best marketing campaign based on the actual user, which results in higher conversions rather than throwing the same marketing options at all visitors.
5. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most well-known and used customer relationship management (CRM) tools for all online businesses. It’s a central location to build customer data from all channels so that you have a single source of data to analyze and make marketing decisions.
You can also use HubSpot for real-time customer tracking on your website and provide follow-up marketing campaigns based on their use of the site, making it highly effective at converting or encouraging purchase behavior.
You’ll also be able to create landing pages for inbound marketing, capture data, build ongoing marketing campaigns and integrate with a huge range of other tools to build the most effective campaigns based on the data you gather and analyze through the software.
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