3 ways marketing automation can make your job much easier

Your customers are interacting with your company through multiple channels, experiencing various touchpoints. Yes, you have marketing campaigns to address all the channels, but are you actually aware of the complete experience someone has with your brand and do you adapt your activities and content based on previous interactions, no matter the channel?

Marketing automation software can help you break marketing channel silos by uniting all your awareness, acquisition, activation, retention and referral channels and campaigns to offer a holistic and personalized experience to your customers.

At TradeGecko, we use Hubspot. It wasn’t an easy decision to adopt the technology as it is quite resource-intensive. Further, we had the false impression that our previous combination of multiple marketing tools like email automation, web analytics, CRM and so on already covered all areas.

However, we’ve learnt that when using marketing automation, 1+1=3. Here are 3 reasons why we love it:

1. We can wow our potential customers and generate more revenue

We now know much more about each customer and potential customer, by automatically collecting data about them from every single channel and using it to delight them through personalized experiences no matter where they interact with us.

For example, we know that if someone visited specific website pages but did not use those elements on our product, we trigger an automated email to them and re-target them on social media with content aimed at removing any friction points related to those interests.

Another example would be that our sales team is notified when a potential customer is ready to buy, judging by the content they browsed, or the fact that they have downloaded our features list, logged in 5 times while on trial, and are right now on our pricing page. Wouldn’t it be great if they receive a call from us then?

2. We have a better understanding of our performance and take better decisions

When we were using a multitude of tools the numbers just didn’t add up. We had to connect data from web analytics about our acquisition performance to data from our email marketing sales CRM about conversion rates, and so on. All we wanted to know is which acquisition channels and campaigns converted better.

Now we have ready-made reports and dashboards at our fingertips. We know how much revenue SEO brings. We know how many trials and customers come through a specific media. We know which content or campaign has contributed to the conversion. We know how many qualified leads we have based on their activities across all channels.

3. We save time by reducing time spent on reporting

Another advantage of connecting all data from all channels is that you don’t have to manually combine it anymore to understand your whole funnel. Everything is already there for you, at any point in time. And even better, you can get regular email reports if you wish. I for sure don’t miss the days spent on reporting for the closed month or quarter.

(For those interested, the automation software we've used can be reviewed by clicking here.)

Adelina Peltea is vice president of marketing at supply chain management solutions provider TradeGecko. 

Peltea will be speaking at Marketing's inaugural B2B Marketing conference, which is happening on 28 November. More information can be found by clicking here.

For those interested in attending, please contact Carlo Reston at carlor@marketing-interactive.com or call +65 6423 0329.

For sponsorship queries, please write to Che Winstrom at chew@marketing-interactive.com