Businesses can face many challenges when it comes to digital marketing. There are a lot of moving parts that can become difficult for one person or even a team to manage. While many people know about automating email marketing, you can actually automate all of your digital marketing channels.

We’ll explain what exactly automation is, and seven great benefits of digital marketing automation.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the practice of using software to manage repetitive marketing tasks. For example:

• Collecting your customer data based on their activities with your website and targeting content and messaging
• Sending weekly or monthly email newsletters at a specific time for your subscribers
• Sending out reminders for customers that abandon their carts
• Sending an SMS message containing a discount for a customer’s birthday
• Scheduling content and posting to social media channels

These tasks take minutes to hours for a person to do on their own. Automated software can handle the tasks within seconds and store that information.

You may have heard of popular automation tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, Hootsuite, MailChimp, Omnisend and Constant Contact. Some automate just one aspect, like email or social media, while others can manage multiple marketing channels in one platform.

Now let’s look at the specific benefits of marketing automation.

1. Save Time

If you want to save your company some time, you should definitely consider automated marketing. Some people may worry about the time and effort that it takes to set up automation software, but the process takes less time than you’d expect.

You can get a professional or agency to set up the software, too. Either way, the long-term payoffs make it worth your efforts.

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The image above shows that 3-out-of-10 marketers feel that saving time is the biggest benefit they get from marketing automation. Marketers feel this way because automated software handles so many of the time consuming aspects of digital marketing.

You can program it so that the software will send emails, messages, or other types of communication based on specific situations. It provides flexibility while handling it as efficiently as possible, which saves time as it continues to do these things.

2. Reduce Staff and Other Costs

As you consider the fact that automated marketing saves you time, it will also save you money. Think of it this way: if your business has to handle all of those messages on their own, it takes time and people to manage that task. They need to access emails, look at information, and send specific messages one-by-one – it can become one person’s full-time job, writing and responding to messages.

This is doable for a small business, but as your customer base expands and grows, you need more staff to keep up and prevent avoidable mistakes.

This doesn’t mean that you should fire all of your employees if you use automated digital marketing! Instead, it means that you can use your team members and their time more effectively, to help cut down on costs in other areas of the business.

Since a machine can handle this aspect of your marketing, why not have those employees do something that machines can’t do? You can also cut back on staff as needed, if you feel that you don’t have enough work for everyone to do.

Either way, you can save money.

3. Increase Revenue

While marketing automation will save you time and cut down on costs, it will also increase your digital marketing revenue, resulting in higher profits.

Businesses recognize the effectiveness of automated marketing, so they continue to increase their spend in this area. The revenue increases happen for multiple reasons:

• • Automated messages to encourage interactions and sales can be sent more quickly, and to more people, than a human could do the task
  • It enables quicker responses to customers, helping them overcome problems and come out more satisfied – leading to positive reviews and recommendations
  • Automation makes it easy to segment messaging, which increases the odds of people opening messages and making purchases

As the system effectively interacts with your customers in a more personalized manner, it will encourage them to make more purchases. Automation helps you continue to build strong relationships with your customers, resulting in more sales.

4. Collect More Accurate Data

Your automated marketing software can easily collect data for your business. Do you want to know your current open rate? You can instantly access it and see how it has changed over the past few months. On top of sending messages, your software will collect data for you and put all the information in one place.

Getting someone to look at all of the emails and to figure out the calculations on their own takes a lot of time to accomplish, and can have less accurate results. People make mistakes, it’s unavoidable.

Software will automatically collect all of this information, organize it, and make it easy for you to see the data. From here, you can look over the data to see if your metrics have improved over the past month. If you see improvements, you know to continue with your current strategies. If your metrics are lower, then you know to try different approaches for your business. There are a lot of useful resources to learn about B2B email marketing.

If you want to improve your digital marketing ROI, automated software that collects the data will help you reach your goals. This will save you time, effort, and allow you to make changes that will help your business.

5. Better Communication Between Teams

Teams need to communicate with each other if they want to maintain consistency between different digital channels. This includes sharing information, data, and regularly contacting each other so that they can improve individual marketing channels and your business marketing as a whole. If they don’t effectively communicate, it could have a negative impact on your business.

Technology has become a key part of collaboration and communication for the business world. This image shows that productivity increases when employees use technology to collaborate. It also shows that over 80% of employees rely on it. Automated software can easily help with the communication process, to make things easier and faster for both sides.

For example, a person handling email marketing may need to get statistics and information from the person who handles Facebook messaging. They can all access it through the automated software, making the process easier for everyone.

By using automated marketing software, you can make communication easier between your different channels.

6. Collect, Track, and Nurture Leads

If you want to successfully use your business online, you need to make sure that you collect, track, and nurture your leads to help convert them into customers.

While you can do this process on your own by spending all day making phone calls and sending emails, automated software can do it as well. This way, you can focus on other areas of business growth.

Here is an example of what a lead could do and how your software would respond:

• • Software sends welcome emails to people who signed up for your email newsletter
  • A customer opens the welcome email, clicks on one of the links, and spends some time looking at your products online
  • Software detects that the customer clicked on a link; it sends the customer an email containing a deal for the product that the customer looked at
  • The customer accepts the deal and puts some products in the online shopping cart
  • Software detects that the customer abandoned the cart, then sends the customer an enticing reminder
  • The customer opens the email, returns to your website, and makes the purchase

Automated marketing software can find you new leads, keep track of their progress, and help them to become customers.

7. Improved Testing

When you work with digital marketing, it’s a good practice to conduct tests to see which approaches draw the most customers. This can include different platforms, creative content, messages, and other aspects of how you reach customers. As you test different approaches, you can find one that works best for your company.

As shown above, A/B testing benefits businesses by increasing conversion rates and allowing you to make more money. Not only can automated marketing software handle different tests for you, but it will also segment groups and deliver specific messages based on their needs and interests.

You won’t have to worry about organizing the messages and trying to sort through the A/B testing. The automated software will figure out who should get each message and it will track how each side performs. Better testing yields better results, which means a more profitable marketing program.

When it comes to digital marketing, the benefits of automation are hard to ignore. As you automate your marketing, you can greatly improve your online presence and more effectively reach out to your customers – and bring in more new ones.