Marketing automation system helps automate, streamline and measure marketing tasks. It helps eCommerce companies to enhance operational efficiency and increase revenue. Marketing automation takes customer data points and creates personalized marketing messages across different channels.
Read more: What is Marketing Automation?
Here we focus on the key features and benefits of marketing automation systems for B2B eCommerce enterprises.
Nurture your prospects
Drip Marketing campaigns can be used to nurture your prospects. The entire campaign can be automated with preset triggers and defined user segments. The advantage is that it gives prospects the right information at the right time leading to more conversions.
The first email sent to the potential prospect could be the latest white paper. If the email is opened, the second email would carry a video and the subsequent email can schedule a product demo or personal call. If the first email sent is not opened by the prospect, the second email could be an e-book and then the third email could be a video overview. In case the prospect doesn’t open two consecutive emails, its considered as the end of drip. This standardizes the way prospects are engaged across the organization. Keep updating the resources used, to constantly improve the relevancy.
Automate lead scoring
Marketing automation system can assign scores to each lead based on preset criteria around pre-purchasing behaviors of the website visitor such as the number of pages visited, time spent on pages and email open rate.
Based on the pre-purchasing behavior, the scores are assigned for each lead (refer image). Score range can be used to define the appropriate follow-up action.
Manage lead lifecycle and reassign leads for sales follow-up
The marketing automation system can integrate with CRM systems on various levels including lead management. Tasks like updating the lead status as per lead score, lead routing or territory assignment rules can be performed using the marketing automation tool itself.
The marketing automation system can improve the quality of customer data as it removes duplicates to ensure an up-to-date list for the sales team to work with. The system can reassign leads when there is no follow up after a preset time interval. It can pass on the cold leads to marketing team who could warm up and re-engage.
Landing pages
Marketing automation system has themes and ready-made templates to design landing pages. Forms, images, and CTAs can be dragged and dropped while content can be customized based on each visitor’s source. In short, landing pages can be created without much technical help of design or development teams and can be launched within a short notice.
Marketing automation tool can also send auto-responses to those prospects who have filled forms in the landing page. Performance of landing pages can also be measured and real-time reports generated can help set up A/B testing to observe which yields best conversion rates.
Marketing ROI analysis
Marketing automation also plays a role in ROI analysis and forecasting. Marketers and business analysts use marketing automation tools to generate custom reports, analyze and continuously fine-tune their marketing strategy to achieve better ROI.
Accuracy in marketing forecasting involves conversion percentage, average leads and flow of leads in different stages of lead lifecycle and other such factors. The data required for forecasting can be obtained from the marketing automation system itself.
Marketing automation aids in closed-loop reporting to calculate the factors that drive the greatest ROI for your eCommerce. Rather than solely relying on the top-of-the-funnel lead generation, closed-loop reporting guides inbound marketers to focus on sources that bring the highest quality leads and improves the chances for conversion.
Conclusion
Marketing automation software can play a vital role in maturing your marketing processes and leading to a state where the Marketing department produces valuable leads for the Sales teams to pursue and close. If you are looking for sophisticated marketing automation, Adobe’s Marketo should be part of your evaluation. Ziffity’s Digital Marketing experts can help you understand the benefits of the platform and the methodology to have it implemented.
