An average buyer’s journey has witnessed a significant transformation over the course of the last few years. Now, leads tend to complete more than half their buying journey even before interacting with your company’s sales representatives for the first time. While the internet has to play a role in this, so do changing customer expectations. Fortunately, using marketing automation gives you the ability to reach out to your target audience during the first half of the cycle, and then service it post sales as well.
Number Speak
Marketing automation is not new. Consider these statistics to understand just how well-entrenched the technology has become.
- More than 75% businesses already use at least one marketing automation tool.
- The marketing automation software industry was worth more than $4 billion in 2018, growing at a rate of around 30% per year.
- While around 80% marketing automation users see an increase in their leads, more than 75% witness an increase in conversion.
Improving Customer Experience Through Marketing Automation
The top benefits of marketing automation, as accounted for by users, include saving time, enhanced customer engagement, and timely communication. As a business owner or manager, you need to understand that automating marketing activities help marketers develop and maintain engaging relationships with existing and probable customers. Personalizing Customer Engagement Marketing automation gives your business the ability to create cross-channel campaigns to make your target audience feel special across different touch points. For instance, integrating an automation tool with your custom customer relationship management (CRM) software enables you to deliver any message you want to any particular customer segment at any desired time. Reducing Response Time Not having enough number of employees in a sales team is a fairly common problem. As your marketing efforts start to bear fruit, you experience an increase in leads. While your sales team members might be able to respond to every lead, they might not be able to do it in a timely manner. With an automated system in place, your leads may expect acknowledgments as soon as they try to contact you online. The automation tool can also provide prospective dates and times surrounding when they might expect further communication from your end. By reaching out to leads as quickly as possible, you increase the possibility of converting them into customers. The converse holds true as well, as it results in poor customer experience. Managing Customer Journey Most consumers now live in a hyper-connected online world. Switching between devices has become seamless, giving people the ability to complete a variety of tasks without limiting use to just one gadget. For example, an individual could browse for products using a mobile phone and eventually place an order through a laptop. From a marketing automation point of view, it is possible to create individual micro experiences for consumers, so they may engage with your business using a laptop, a tablet, a mobile phone, or even a smart speaker. Since micro experiences are not channel-reliant and don’t follow set patterns, marketers can combine content and data from different sources to provide consistent experiences across all channels. If you adapt marketing automation, you may integrate different touch points such as emails, push notifications, and text messages to develop relevant content that you can send to your target audience across multiple channels with the aim of encouraging and building user engagement.
Conclusion
There is much to say in favor of marketing automation when it comes to improving customer experience. Other than personalizing customer engagement, reducing response time, and managing customer journey, businesses may also look forward to assessing lead requirements, identifying and supporting brand advocates, getting customer feedback, as well as delivering seamless customer experiences across all channels.
