Marketing Automation 101: Everything Beginners Should Know

Ever since the bursting of e-commerce, the whole retail industry has changed tremendously. Never has technology been involved in business as much as now. IT innovations play an important role in different tasks, like merchandising, payment or even logistics. One of the most-discussed things recently is marketing automation, an intelligent tool replacing many manual tasks with automated systems.

Every decision in business has to be made with great consideration. Therefore, you should equip yourself with knowledge about a new tool before investing in it. In case you don’t know where to start with, here are the questions you should ask yourself and find answers to.

What is Marketing Automation?

First things first, definition. So, Marketing Automation is a kind of software designed to record consumer data and manage repetitive tasks in marketing. Through collecting and categorizing consumers’ online interactions, it can help users understand insights, giving out the most suitable marketing plans to target audiences. It also sets personalized activities like sending emails, suggesting similar products or automatically responding to FAQs (frequently asked questions)...

The priority rule in Marketing is to segment your customers properly based on their behaviors, and Marketing Automation is THE tool to help you do that. Since your customers are classified into groups like frequent customers, one-time customers or potential customers (so-called leads), you can trigger them by different methods. Qualifying and nurturing leads is also a crucial step in every marketing plan. 

How does Marketing Automation work?

Basically, businesses search for software solutions to integrate marketing automation and their e-commerce site to collect consumers’ interactions like website visits, emails, app usage, activities on social media… and store data in a centralized hub. The tool later analyzes consumers’ behaviors based on some particular criteria to sort them into various groups, so businesses can apply different marketing strategies on each group. Users can set up to do specific actions to these groups automatically.

Moreover, marketing automation is often integrated with CRM (customer relationship management) tools with no limitation on the quantity of contacts. This allows sellers to give out appropriate customer service strategies to build their loyalty and enhance the brand's name.

Which industry can we apply Marketing Automation?

Beside from specific industries like Marketing (of course), any industry can also benefit from Marketing Automation as every business needs to enhance their brands’ names and maximize their effectiveness.

What can you benefit from Marketing Automation?

Many marketing actions are involved when you own Marketing Automation. You can create campaigns to implement an automated workflow to assist with your marketing efforts. Campaigns consist of various external points of contact which will engage your contacts. These engagements can be created to occur on predefined time intervals or in response to specific contact actions.

There are 5 basic types of campaigns:

• Time Driven Campaigns: These campaigns focus on specific timed events which are most usually in the form of emails. These email events can be defined to be triggered after a delay of a predefined number of days or on a specific date in the future.

• Contact Driven Campaigns: These campaigns trigger events based on interactions from the contact. They happen after contact landing on a certain page, opening an email, spending a specified amount of time on a website, or any frequency of other activities. These actions would receive a responding email either immediately or in the future.

• Mixed Campaigns: Marketing automation tools allow you to create campaigns which consist of both time driven items as well as contact driven actions. This powerful mixed campaign means actions will be driven by both specific dates or after specific timeframes as well as actions taken by a contact directly (as mentioned above).

• Campaign Actions: Email actions have been mentioned specifically as a particular use case, however there are many other responses the system can take. Other actions can include automatic assignment to a new segment, assigning a new point value, or an integration into a CRM or other system.

• Campaign Automation: One of the main benefits of this campaign workflow process is the ability to predefine these workflows and have them respond automatically to your contacts and timelines. This automation minimizes the amount of time required for manual contact activity and improves reliability of contact nurturing through consistent contact.

How can you integrate Marketing Automation to your e-commerce site? 

Well, it depends on your businesses’ current situation. It’s a bit easier if you haven’t owned an e-commerce site yet. Normally developers will suggest using a platform supporting marketing automation integration like enonic or Wordpress. If you already have your website, there are some issues you need to clarify before outsourcing to a software development team. 

Firstly, you should know which platform you are using and whether it supports marketing automation or not. If it does, you’re lucky. If it does not, there are 2 options you can choose. You either can change your website source code to integrate the tool or switch into another platform that supports marketing automation. Each way has their pros and cons, which requires your careful consideration. You should ask for advice from your software development outsourcing team to make the right choice.

Combining e-commerce and marketing automation usually requires a team of skillful and experienced software developers to be deliver to businesses. IDS Software is proud to say that we are able to enhance your e-commerce sites with innovative marketing automation tools. Composed of programmers using various languages like Java, Python, PHP… we can satisfy your requirements at the most sensible cost. As we follow the agile methodology, you can also track and send feedback to our process in time.

If you have any inquiry, feel free to contact us.