When it comes to Marketing, one of the hottest topics in 2022 is Marketing Automation.

Marketing Automation is a set of strategies and processes for automating marketing campaigns in various channels (email, social media, website and online advertising and other tools).

Marketing Automation allows you to amplify, personalize and automate marketing communication and positioning with various tools and techniques.

In this article we are going to see in detail what marketing automation is, its advantages and how to set up an effective strategy (b2c and b2b).

Marketing automation is a great opportunity for growth for companies, in a rapidly growing market

If up to 8-10 years ago marketing automation tools were complicated and very expensive to manage, in recent years the trend has changed.

Thanks to the development of the Software As Service market, today any business can implement a marketing automation strategy to enhance its marketing campaigns.

The numbers confirm that the adoption of these new technologies by companies is growing sharply.

According to the analysis conducted byDemand Spring “Marketing Automation Platform Insights” in 2021, almost 50% of companies started using the platform for the first time in the last 4 years.

It is interesting to note the recent growth, despite the fact that some software has been available for at least 15 years.

This market scenario has practically made the implementation of a marketing automation strategy accessible to every type of business, regardless of the available budget.

Before discovering how to set up a marketing automation strategy, it is useful to review the definition and to analyze in detail the advantages and potential.

What is Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is a set of strategies and processes for optimizing and automating marketing campaigns in various channels (email, social media, website and online advertising and other tools).

Going back to the definition, we can note several important elements:

• It is a set of strategies and processes.
  Often, wrongly, marketing automation focuses only on the technical aspect of the software when instead the strategic part is the heart of the entire activity.
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• To optimize and automate marketing campaigns.
  In Marketing Automation, it is important to first have an optimized and effective process and then to automate everything. Otherwise, the risk is of having an automated process that is not optimized and does not bring tangible results.

• In various channels.
  Marketing Automation is not only email marketing, as it is often incorrectly understood, but it also includes other channels such as online advertising campaigns, social media, websites and other tools (depending on the business and the type of customers).

Marketing Automation is the tool to make your campaigns and marketing messages perform “squared”.

One of the most common mistakes is to consider marketing automation only a technical aspect and tools.

Software and best practices are certainly important, but without an effective marketing strategy it is very difficult to achieve the goal.

As we will see later, in marketing automation it is important to start first from the marketing strategy and, once the processes have been optimized, proceed with the technical phase of implementing the automation.

The Advantages of Marketing Automation

The advantages of Marketing Automation are many and it is interesting to consider them both on the marketing side and also on the “automation” side.

In particular, Marketing Automation allows you to:

• automate repetitive tasks and save time that can be dedicated to analyzing data and strategic activity
• scale technical marketing operations. For example, you could collect dozens of testimonials every day on social networks or on trustpilot thanks to an automatic post-purchase email sequence.
• do A/B tests and collect data. Some Marketing Automation tools allow you to personalize the message and do tests to optimize performance.

In addition to these advantages, it is very useful for optimizing marketing performance.

Marketing automation helps you improve the user experience and increase the final conversion rate.

In particular, it allows you to:

1. Personalize your communication

In marketing, it is essential to show the right message to the right target audience.

Not all people's wants and needs are the same. For this reason, marketing automation can help you segment your potential customers and personalize the message based on their interests.

As John Lewis does, for example, in newsletters with updates and inspirational content for their purchases, segmented according to the personal interests of the subscribers.

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Or like Southside Cycling, which allows you to choose and customize the content you want to read:

2. Stimulate sales and/or bring customers back to buying.

Not all customers buy in the first instance, but they spend time on an information phase before deciding.

With marketing automation, it is possible to “resume” some users who have interrupted their purchase process to bring them back to the checkout.

For example, this email from Ryanair, which was sent 1 hour after the online order was not placed and allows you to return to the checkout with a click.

If you have an e-commerce, you could provide personalized email sequences based on the phase of the customer journey.

For example:

• An email sequence to recover all abandoned carts and transform them into sales.
• A post-purchase email sequence to collect testimonials and propose upsell products.
• A win-back email sequence to bring back customers who haven't bought back lately

Until now, examples of email marketing strategies have always been mentioned, a channel that is very simple to use and just as performing.

This logic can be used both for Remarketing advertising campaigns on Social Networks and on Google, but also with SMS campaigns or directly by telephone with the sales team.

3. Get deeper customer insights to improve communication.

Marketing Automation processes are not only useful for increasing sales, but also for collecting data and better understanding customers and their purchasing wishes, with a view to optimizing communication.

This information is useful for further segmenting your audience and reaching, with subsequent campaigns, a larger audience similar to current customers.

As our customer Fillies and Boots (the first e-commerce in Italy that makes custom-made boots) did, preparing surveys aimed at the various phases of the customer journey:

The information collected thanks to the questionnaires, together with the activation of advertising campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and Google, has made it possible to acquire new customers online.

Thanks to effective communication addressed directly to those who had not yet found a satisfactory solution to their problem, it was possible to establish a relationship of trust between people and the brand.

Post-purchase surveys are not only useful to learn more about the demographic information of your customers but also to identify:

• any friction and obstacles they faced during the ordering phase (removing any technical problems or bugs can considerably increase the conversion rate of your store)
• What other brands have they evaluated during their buying process
• their decision-making process and what made them buy
• their satisfaction rate and any advice for the development of additional products.

Marketing automation is a useful tool for creating a relationship with your audience to make your business “client centric” as Amazon teaches.

Before seeing in concrete terms how to set up a marketing automation strategy, it is important to make two brief clarifications and insights.

Marketing Automation is often mistaken for the use of a CRM.

CRM is an essential tool for marketing automation, but it's not the only one. You could adopt additional tools on the site, social networks and in the various campaigns.

For example, a remarketing advertising campaign on your site visitors is always an automated activity that can communicate a personalized message to very target potential customers.

Marketing automation can be used for post-purchase marketing activities, not just for lead generation.

If you have an e-commerce you could create automated post-purchase processes that:

• Increase brand loyalty with a loyalty program
• Stimulate word of mouth with a referral program
• Bring back to the purchase the customers who have not purchased in the last period

and much more.. The fields of applications are almost endless.

In the end, Marketing Automation is nothing more than the automation of some well-optimized marketing processes!

We have reached the final phase of the article and the time has come to see how to set up a marketing automation strategy.

How to do the marketing automation strategy. The strategic steps:

1. Define your marketing objective.

What is your marketing objective?

Am I interested in doing Lead Generation, educating leads with a 'nurturing phase', converting leads into customers or bringing customers back to buying?

These objectives are different from each other and require different operational activities.

It is important to think first to define a goal and then evaluate the best tactics to achieve it.

Start with WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE because HOW TO DO IT is a next strategic step.

Once the objective is clear, even how to achieve it becomes easier to define and prioritize.

2. Analyze Current Metrics. How is it going?

After defining the objective, it is important to analyze the metrics to understand the current situation.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are essential both to define when a goal is achieved, but also to align the entire team.

In business, there are different metrics that depend on the previously chosen objective. Usually the most used are:

3. What to do? Tactical plan and experimentation framework

Now that you have defined the objective and the metric to monitor and improve, all that remains is to decide how to achieve it.

It is usually very effective to brainstorm ideas with all the tactics that are considered useful to achieve the goal.

Initially, it is useful to let your creativity run free and write down all your ideas, without giving too much weight to the actual impact of each one, since you can prioritize them later.

There are different experimentation frameworks to understand which tactics to start with, based on their impact on the metric to be achieved.

For example, you could use the ICE Framework, which is very simple and useful for prioritizing ideas and making them operational.

This framework considers 3 parameters:

• I = Impact (impact of the activity: how much can it impact on the goal I want to achieve?)
• C = Confidence (how hopeful and sure do I feel that it will work?)
• E = Ease (ease of implementation: is it easy to implement?)

You could also add two additional parameters: implementation time and cost, if you also want to give importance to execution speed and budget.

Once the evaluation parameters have been defined to prioritize ideas, all you have to do is assign a score from 1 to 10 to each idea.

Arrived at the final result (which is the multiplication of the 3 parameters, for each idea) and start with the activities that have a higher result.

You can see an example in this table:

4. How to do it concretely? Software and Technical Tricks

Once the objective has been defined, the metrics to consider and chosen which activities to undertake, all you have to do is choose the tool to achieve everything.

If you have defined the previous points in detail, it will be easier to achieve the strategic objective because you will have all the information you need to proceed to implement the more technical part.

It is important to follow the strategic process in this order because, if you start from the specific functionality of a software, you risk not exploiting the full potential of marketing automation, but using only some features present in the tool.

If you don't have a dedicated software yet, I recommend that you evaluate the tool based on:

• Target Client of the Software - for example if you are an e-commerce it is much better to use a software dedicated to e-commerce such as Klaviyo rather than Salesforce, which is focused on B2B

• Integrations with other platforms - the more you can connect data and integrations, the easier it will be to collect information and make the various platforms better communicate to get an overview
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• The presence and experience in the market - for example, CRM is one of the most important software and is very difficult to change over time. You should choose software that has been on the market for several years and has a well-defined development roadmap, so as not to have bad surprises.