It’s time to “Learn from” Omisend, folks! Our guest today comes from a powerful omnichannel marketing automation platform that’s helping e-commerce businesses grow via personalized messaging. Omnisend is empowering 50k+ customers worldwide (among which Samsung and Unilever) to rise above the promotional noise and get better results than ever.
Digital marketing is an incredibly complex field, and manually managing your campaigns involves far more work for little to no benefit. More and more marketers are offloading various tasks to automation programs that streamline their campaigns and offer a variety of advanced features.
With as many as three-quarters of all businesses leveraging the capabilities of marketing automation, companies that continue with more traditional strategies will only fall further and further behind. In this article, we’ll take a look at five of the best reasons to consider automating your digital marketing campaigns.
1. Automation is more efficient
Overseeing campaigns on your own might work if you’re running a tiny business, but this approach is extremely difficult to scale. Your marketing needs will grow with your business, and automation allows you to continue managing the key aspects of each campaign without spending too much time on tedious or repetitive tasks.
For example, there’s no reason to write a welcome message yourself every time a new lead joins your email list. It’s far more cost-effective to configure a pre-set email to send automatically following each new subscription. Delegating this and other tasks to automation software will free up more time to focus on other areas of your business.
Whether you look at it as saving time or money, automation simply adds value to contemporary brands. You’ll be able to achieve the same or even more ambitious goals while spending a fraction of what you would on traditional marketing practices.
2. Automation gives customers more choices
One of the main concerns holding companies back from investing in marketing automation is that they view automated campaigns as generic or even boring. The reality is that automation opens up new opportunities for personalization that wouldn’t be as easy to implement without the right software.
Rather than being added to a stock email list, for example, you can ask customers which types of content they’d like to receive. If they’re only interested in sales announcements, they won’t have to receive any other kind of email. Some brands also give subscribers the option to set their own desired frequency.
Segmentation is one of the key advantages of marketing automation. Along with explicitly defined preferences for things like frequency and content type, you can also segment leads in a number of other ways. Age, gender, location, and purchase history are just a few of the criteria marketers use to create audience subgroups.
With that in mind, it’s clear that efficiency doesn’t have to come at the cost of relevance. Far from limiting your possibilities, automation can actually expand your marketing toolkit and give your audience more control over the customer experience.
3. Automation helps you improve the customer experience across every channel
Email marketing automation is the most common marketing automation channel. Some automation software focuses exclusively on email rather than other platforms. That said, automation can also be incredibly effective for other channels including SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even push notifications.
With this in mind, automation will allow you to support more channels than ever without expending more resources on those campaigns. Over 90 percent of all retail brands are already advertising on multiple social media channels, and every additional channel gives you the opportunity to reach out to a new audience.
Automation doesn’t just enable you to distribute the same messages on more platforms—it also helps those platforms work together to form a more cohesive customer experience. For example, a customer might make a purchase on their computer and receive an order confirmation push notification on their phone.
These techniques are virtually impossible to implement at scale without robust automation tools, and they can help move customers through the sales cycle more efficiently. Supporting as many channels as possible makes it easy for customers to engage with your brand in whatever way is easiest for them.
4. Automation helps you gather and leverage data
As mentioned above, marketing automation gives you the opportunity to quickly collect and apply customer preferences on frequency, types of content, and more. It also opens up other segmentation opportunities based on flexible criteria depending on your audience and goals.
These are powerful tools on their own, but automation goes even further by helping you gather data on your own campaigns. Consistently collecting and analyzing that data is crucial for optimizing your tactics and improving your ROI over time.
Data collection is critical for everything from sales to customer support. Instead of starting from scratch every time a customer reaches out for help, automation software can give your support team immediate access to their past purchases and support tickets. This will allow them to provide a more personalized response, successfully resolving more tickets and spending less time with each customer.
Similarly, A/B testing is a reliably effective way to analyze your own ads and make the adjustments necessary to achieve your marketing targets. A/B testing involves comparing results from multiple ad variants to determine which one is most conducive to your campaign goals.
For example, you might want to try two different email subject lines in order to maximize the open rate. With the right marketing automation software, it will only take you a few minutes to set up a small-scale A/B test to collect that information and identify the right variant for your campaign.
Some tools go even further by offering support for multivariate testing, which involves more than two options and not just an A and B variant. A/B testing is a foundational tool for ecommerce email marketing in 2020, and it can be just as useful when applied to other channels including SMS and social media.
5. Automation can increase your sales
There are a number of good reasons to consider automating your digital marketing, but the one that will motivate most marketers is simply the opportunity to generate more sales. Along with lower costs, businesses that switch to marketing automation also achieve 53% more conversions along with a 34% increase in revenue.
You’ll be able to frontload most of the work involved in marketing automation, so you’ll see a bump in sales at the same time as freeing up more resources for other tasks. The combination of less work and more sales gives marketing automation an incredible ROI for most businesses.
While some of the benefits of automation take effect over time, others will become clear almost immediately after switching. Three-quarters of all companies that automate their digital marketing campaigns experience a jump in ROI in their first year with automation.
Automating your digital marketing can’t guarantee better performance on its own, but it will give you the tools you need to develop more sophisticated campaigns and provide a more responsive customer experience. Even after the initial increase in sales and traffic, you’ll have the opportunity to achieve even better results by continuing to analyze and tweak your tactics.
Final thoughts
Although digital channels were once a relatively small part of the marketing landscape, a good digital marketing strategy is now essential to success in almost any niche. These are just a few of the many ways in which adding automation to your digital marketing practices can help take your campaigns to the next level, we hope you found them useful!
Evaldas Mockus
Evaldas Mockus is an experienced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and Saas companies. Currently, he is associated with Omnisend, an e-commerce marketing automation platform built for growing e-commerce businesses. Follow him on LinkedIn.
