Still, you might still be left with some questions and asking what exactly marketing automation is really all about.
In layman’s terms, marketing automation refers to platforms and technologies which allow businesses to create, deploy, and automate online marketing campaigns and activities in an effort to increase revenue and maximize efficiency.
Conceptually, marketing automation allows marketers to more efficiently market on multiple online channels while automating repetitive tasks. In its most simple form it is the technology that simplifies the most time consuming tasks and processes of modern marketing and sales programs. It’s all about simplifying and automating a business tool that quickly grew very complex.
Marketing automation is looked at as a segment of customer relationship management (CRM). It focuses on the definition, segmentation, scheduling and tracking of marketing campaigns and customer segmentation of consumer data, often putting marketing and sales efforts on the same page. The technology allows for efficient collaboration between marketing and sales campaigns at the hub of the lead qualification process and buying cycle.
Marketing automation is used to create a target population and measure the efficiency of allocated resources, as well as to inform potential customers of business products and services. By displaying data both graphically and statistically, it provides marketers with information and key performance metrics to measure which campaigns are most effective. It allows for key consumer data such as customer behavior, retention, transactions history, product views, email open rates, ROI reporting, and much more.
By collecting and utilizing such consumer data, marketing automation platforms allow for a more complete and comprehensive profile and segmentation of valuable data on a large scale, and thus the ability to make smarter and strategic marketing and sales decisions.
In an ideal scenario, marketing automation provides data and solutions to convert prospects to customers and turn customers into long-term satisfied customers, generating significant sources of revenue and return on investment.