Marketing Automation as a Synonym for Operational Efficiency
The goal of marketing automation, which is common to all forms of process automation, is to allow professionals who manage the customer lifecycle to focus on strategic tasks, such as designing and planning campaigns, defining KPIs and adapting the strategy data-driven during the process, instead of dealing with more operational activities and, as such, manageable through workflows that can be fully or partially automated. In this sense, marketing automation leads to an increase in the productivity of company resources.
Marketing automation, in itself, is a very broad expression that includes different automatisms and multiple workflows within the entire relationship path between the brand and the customer. The company can facilitate the work of its professionals by adopting different automation tools and integrating them with the CRM, which in fact acts as a centralized repository of the entire relationship between the structure and its interlocutors ; alternatively, it can adopt an integrated platform, whose purpose is to manage the entire customer experience (CX), with the additional advantage of the end-to-end approach that enables further automations.
Winning the customer with personalization
Many companies associate the term marketing automation with just email marketing, when in reality automation can involve a variety of tasks, processes, and activities throughout the customer journey: lead scoring, lead nurturing, social media marketing, lead management, audience segmentation, and A/B testing are just a few examples of areas that can be potentially automated.
Marketing automation offers many benefits, including increasing the effectiveness of campaigns thanks to content personalization . In other words, marketing automation is able to provide personalized content to the right person at the right time, reducing the phenomenon of cognitive overload typical of today's hyper-connected world. In other words, the company can be very specific about how much to show to its customer, based on the analysis of their behavior.
Of course, personalization would never be manageable france whatsapp number data 5 million manually , especially in a B2C context. The adoption of advanced techniques, such as machine learning, enables a higher level analysis of customer behavior, hence hyper-segmentation and an even more customized and effective relationship.
Automation that enhances customer experience
According to Hubspot, which also confirms the example above, the typical marketing automation scenario is lead nurturing performed through automated email sequences. However, the company suggests adopting a more systemic, holistic approach to marketing automation. What is truly effective is an approach that extends across the entire customer lifecycle and, consequently, does not involve a single company division.
Automation is therefore part of that customer centralization process that presupposes the elimination of process, communication and data silos between all the functions that take part in the customer journey (in particular, marketing, sales and service). Indeed, we could argue that automation represents an accelerator of the transformation towards the RevOps paradigm , based precisely on the synergic integration between the divisions that govern the customer journey.
Working “ behind the scenes ”, continuously acquiring data, accelerating cross-functional processes, defining priorities and providing the right information at the right time, automation can accelerate the customer's passage from one touchpoint to another , guaranteeing a better experience regardless of how they decide to develop it.
