Top 7 Marketing Automation Strategies to Implement in 2024

If you have a business and it's exponentially expanding, you will definitely want to scale your systems in order to offer impeccable experience to your customers. But, what about retention and engagement? How will you deal with marketing campaigns and personalization?

The above questions haunt a lot of budding entrepreneurs and established enterprises alike. Gone are the days when customers were happy with your services. Customers in the 21st generation are touched by customer engagement, personalization, and impeccable services. This is where marketing automation comes into play.

What is Marketing Automation?

In layman’s language, marketing automation is the process achieved by software tools to tackle common challenges faced by businesses like lead generation and keeping customers engaged. With marketing automation, businesses can target potential customers through personalized emails, newsletters, via social media posts or texts. Messages, emails and posts are scheduled and posted automatically according to defined workflows through these automated marketing tools.

Furthermore, marketing automation software also allows businesses to track and analyze customer interactions, providing a complete view of the customer journey. This data can be used to improve customer service and provide more personalized recommendations. By leveraging marketing automation, businesses can improve their overall efficiency and reach their target audience more effectively.

Why You Need Marketing Automation

According to research published by Nucleus Research, marketing automation accounts for a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in overall marketing finances. From the above stats, It is clear that automation nurtures businesses by increasing their marketing ROI and overall growth. There are more than one ways automation helps your business. Let’s have a look at a few of them!

Generating better leads

For the growth of any business, lead generation is extremely important. Marketing automation gives you the flexibility to automate repetitive mundane tasks. This offers you more time to focus on strategy and nourishment of marketing leads.

On top of that, infusion marketing automation can provide you with statistical data about potential customer behavior. By leveraging behavioral tracking methods, marketing teams can understand their prospects’ interest and where they stand in their purchasing cycle.

Personalization

Personalization is the key to getting engagement and nurturing leads. According to a survey conducted by Market cloud account engagement, 77% of buyers prefer unique personalized content during each stage of their buyer journey. Marketing automation tools work wonders by providing prospective leads with the right content and the right time.

A very well-known electronics enterprise - Dell leveraged personalization to its fullest potential. After noticing a heavy traffic volume to their online stores, Dell conducted a behavioral analysis to understand the underlying reasons for not getting sales as expected. Using the research, they created new ads based on customers’ web histories, product views and retargeted them. The campaign resulted in a 70% increase in click-through rate and 300% higher conversion rates.

Mends Communication Barrier Between Sales and Marketing Team

For decades, the integration between sales and marketing teams in any organization has always been rocky. Outdated processes and separate goals are the two prime reasons for this communication barrier. However, with the advent of modern technologies, especially marketing automation in play, it can mend the tension between the two departments.

As both departments will be working on the same software, the data and knowledge are meant to be shared between the departments. All these will result in better lead quality, increased revenue and automation of mundane marketing/sales tasks to focus on more pressing matters at hand.

How to Define Your Marketing Automation Strategy

When it comes to defining your marketing automation strategy, there are a few key steps you'll want to follow to ensure success:

1. Start by Identifying Your Target Audience

Who are you trying to reach with your marketing efforts? What are their pain points and goals? Understanding your target audience will help you create messages and campaigns that resonate with them.

2. Define Your Goals and Objectives

What do you hope to achieve with your marketing automation efforts? This could include increasing website traffic, boosting lead generation, or improving customer engagement.

3. Identify Tools and Platforms That Support Your Strategy

There are a variety of marketing automation tools available, from email marketing platforms to social media management tools. Research which ones will best support your goals and objectives.

4. Create a Content Plan

Develop a plan for creating and distributing valuable, relevant content that will help you attract and engage your target audience.

5. Analyze Data and Adjust Strategy Accordingly

Keep track of the performance of your campaigns and use data to make informed future decisions. This will help you continually improve your marketing automation efforts over time.

6. Test and Optimize Your Campaigns

Continuously test the different elements of your campaigns such as subject lines, call to action, and personalization to optimize and improve their performance.

7. Integrate Campaigns With Your Sales Process

Marketing automation is not just a one-way street. Make sure your campaigns are well integrated with your sales process to maximize conversion rates.

By following these steps, you'll be well on your way to developing a marketing automation strategy that helps you achieve your business goals and connect with your target audience.

Top 7 Marketing Automation Strategies to Implement in 2024

1. Leverage Automation to Set up Email Marketing Automation

It is a well-known fact that communication is the key to effective marketing. Keeping that in mind, leveraging automation to send personalized emails to your existing and prospective customers is one of the core marketing automation strategies that one can implement.

By using email automation software like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, etc., you can take advantage of your customer’s information like - demographics, age, and behavioral pattern to reach out to them with more personalized and relevant messages.

Real-life Example: We all have heard about the FinTech company PayPal. What many of you may not know is that PayPal has successfully implemented an email automation strategy to get what they want. Instead of sending boring lengthy emails, PayPal’s emails are crisp, relatable and short enough to grab the attention of their audience. Instead of pitching their product, PayPal showed everyday problems and how it can solve those.

2. Tap into Social Media Automation

Do you know that the average American spends about 5.4 hours on their phone? Most of which is spent on social media. As part of the marketing automation strategies to implement, we need to consider grabbing the opportunity and focusing marketing efforts on social media.

Around 47% of businesses use some form of marketing automation to manage their social media. By leveraging social media automation platforms like HootSuite, Xara, etc., one can optimize the social interactions that brands build with their customers. You can leverage essential features like automating social media posts, republishing popular articles, etc.

Real-life Example

British Museum uses HootSuite to monitor which items of content seeded on social media are receiving high engagement from their followers. This allows them to automate future posts and tailor future content pieces to be as relevant and compelling as possible. This insight continues to help the British Museum’s social media marketing team and maximize their time and effort.

3. Focus More on Lead Generation

Lead generation automation refers to the use of technology to automate the process of identifying and nurturing potential customers. This can include tactics such as using marketing software to track website visitor behavior, sending automated email campaigns, and using social media to connect with potential leads.

By automating these processes, businesses can save time and resources while also increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of their lead generation efforts.

Companies like WotNot specializes in lead generation automation where a chatbot initiates a conversation with a visitor, asks them qualifying questions, and generates lead by capturing their name, email, and other contact details.

Their platform comes with several features and integrations with popular CRM systems that help you in lead scoring and nurturing.

Additionally, WotNot's team of experts can help businesses with strategy development, lead generation campaigns and analytics.

Real-life Example: DM Immigration, Middle East’s largest legal consultant, was reeling from the pandemic and wanted to focus on lead generation. So, they used WotNot’s chatbot on more than seven of their websites to automate lead generation.

Here, the bot would initiate the conversation with the visitor and smartly collect essential lead information required by the sales team, such as name, email, phone, service needed, etc.

This move did wonders for them as they were able to achieve the following milestones in quick time.

• 60K+ Leads Generated

• $35K+ Costs Saved 

• $16M+ Attributed Pipeline 

• 28K+ Hours Saved

4. Integrate Everything in One Place

Integrations as a marketing automation strategy refers to the use of different software and tools to improve the effectiveness of a company's marketing efforts. By connecting different marketing technologies, such as CRM, email marketing, and social media, businesses can create a seamless workflow that automatically updates and communicates with customers.

This allows companies to save time and resources while gaining a more complete understanding of their customers' needs and preferences.

Zapier is a popular tool that helps businesses with integrated marketing automation by allowing them to connect various software and tools without needing any coding experience. With Zapier, businesses can easily set up "Zaps" that automate repetitive tasks, such as adding new email subscribers to a CRM or sending a follow-up email after form submission.

Real-life example: Mailchimp uses Zapier to integrate with various other apps and services. By using Zapier, Mailchimp's users can automate different tasks such as adding a new contact to a mailing list when a customer makes a purchase on an e-commerce store, sending abandoned cart emails when a customer leaves an item in their shopping cart, and adding a new customer's information to their CRM when they sign up for a newsletter.

5. Learn How to Leverage Content Marketing Automation

Content marketing automation is a strategy that uses technology to streamline the creation, distribution, and promotion of high-quality content.

By automating certain tasks and processes, you can save time and resources while still reaching and engaging your target audience. One tool that can help with content marketing automation is Copy.ai.

Using Copy.ai for your content marketing automation efforts, you can reduce the time and resources required to create high-quality content, leaving you with more time to focus on other aspects of your business. Additionally, you can achieve consistency in tone and messaging, which will help you establish your brand and connect with your target audience.

Real-life example: Digital marketing agency called "GrowthHackers" uses Copy.ai for its  natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to generate compelling and converting copy for their clients' websites, landing pages, and ad copies, which helped them to save time and resources while still creating high-quality content that resonates with the target audience of their clients. 

6. Try to Optimize Your Omnichannel Approach

Omnichannel marketing automation is a strategy that uses technology to coordinate and streamline marketing efforts across multiple channels and touchpoints, such as email, SMS, push notifications, and social media. The goal of omnichannel marketing automation is to provide a seamless, consistent experience for customers across all channels and improve overall customer engagement.

Chatbots are used for delivering an omnichannel experience to their customers. WotNot is one of the popular yet affordable chatbot builders. WotNot allows businesses to communicate with customers on various channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media and messaging apps.

By using WotNot, businesses can automate customer support, lead generation, and provide personalized recommendations. This can be done by integrating the chatbot with other systems such as CRM, e-commerce and email marketing platforms, which allows for a holistic approach and provides a consistent experience across all channels.

WotNot allows businesses to track and analyze customer interactions with its dashboard analytics. This data can be used to improve customer service and provide more personalized recommendations. This allows businesses to create highly targeted and personalized campaigns across multiple channels, resulting in better engagement, conversion and retention.

Real-life Example: "The Gadget Store" is an e-commerce store that leverages omnichannel marketing automation. They use Omnisend to coordinate and streamline their marketing efforts across multiple channels such as email, SMS, and push notifications. This allows them to provide a consistent and personalized experience for their customers and improve their overall engagement, conversion, and retention.

7. CRM Automation

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) automation is a marketing automation strategy that uses technology to streamline and automate the process of managing customer interactions and data. The goal of CRM automation is to improve customer engagement, retention, and loyalty by providing a personalized and seamless experience across all touchpoints.

HubSpot is a CRM platform that allows businesses to centralize and manage customer data, such as contact information, purchase history, and communication history. This data can then be used to create personalized, targeted marketing campaigns across multiple channels, such as email and social media.

For example, if a customer has a history of purchasing a certain product, the business can send them a personalized email with a special offer on that product.

Real-life Example: One company that leverages CRM automation is "The Car Dealership", a dealership that sells new and used vehicles. They use a CRM platform to automate their sales processes, such as lead generation, customer segmentation and follow-ups. This allows them to provide a personalized experience for their customers, improve customer engagement and retention, and increase overall sales efficiency.

Conclusion

Marketing automation has become a critical tool for businesses of all sizes and industries. Implementing the right marketing automation strategies in 2024 can help you increase productivity, improve customer engagement, and drive sales.

Whether it is defining your target audience and goals, using a CRM automation platform like HubSpot or Omnichannel marketing automation tool like Omnisend, or using a chatbot built using WotNot for automating lead generation, there are many different strategies you can use to make the most of your marketing automation efforts in the coming year.

By staying up to date on the latest technologies and trends, and continually analyzing your data and adjusting your strategy accordingly, you can position your business for success in 2024 and beyond.