Marketing automation: status quo and advantages

Only 28 percent of the companies in the DACH region use marketing automation systems. This is the result of the current study “Marketing Automation in DACH” by the Institute for Sales and Marketing Automation. Although 42 percent of the companies plan to use the system in the next 24 months, slightly less than 30 percent still see no need for the use of marketing automation. In this article we give you a short overview of the most important advantages of marketing automation.

Marketing automation is the automation of marketing processes through the use of software (e.g. artegic ELAINE). In most cases marketing automation supports digital dialogue marketing, especially email marketing. By means of marketing automation, for example, the dispatch of emails can be triggered by certain events (birthdays, inactivity, entering a store, registering in an online shop, etc.).

Marketing Automation offers you a number of advantages. We have summarized five essential ones.

Advantages of marketing automation

1. Higher revenues: 77 percent of the companies that rely on marketing automation report increasing sales. This is the result of a recent VB Insights study. A complete article (or a complete white paper) could be written about this advantage alone. At this point we will limit ourselves to a few representative examples of sales drivers:
   • Abandoned shopping cart mails: According to SAP, only 25 percent of all online shoppers complete a purchase process once it has been started. Many users fill their shopping cart, but then do not buy the contents. With automated reminder emails to “shopping cart abandoners“, you can still generate some of these otherwise lost sales. A case study of CosmosDirekt, an insurance company, which was able to generate two percent of additional business by means of an automated reactivation of aborters, shows that this does not only work in ecommerce.
   • Cross- and upsells: There is hardly a simpler way to increase sales than to offer the customer additional products to his purchased products, which either complement the product (e.g. a matching belt to a pair of trousers → cross-sell) or improve it and thus make it more expensive (e.g. upgrade a software to the professional version → up-sell). With marketing automation you can automate such cross- and up-sell campaigns. In addition, you can send automated reminders if the customer has not bought for a while. Automated reminders for subsequent purchases of consumer goods are also possible.
   • Discount campaign: A customer has bought for 45€ in your online shop? Increase the shopping cart value by automatically sending a coupon that your customers can redeem for purchases of 50€ or more and make them the appropriate offer directly (see also sross- and up-sells). Use marketing automation not only for such automated discount scales but for any kind of coupon communication.
2. Less complexity: What do marketers like almost as much as increasing sales? Right, falling costs! Marketing automation allows you to automate manual processes in marketing. This not only saves costs but also reduces complexity and enables you to implement measures that could not be handled manually in an economical way. With marketing automation you can automate e.g.
   • dispatch of emails and other messages (no longer triggered manually, but by events)
   • testing and the optimization of communication based on the test results
   • the course of any complex campaign workflow (send message → if the user does not react, send reminder → he buys, send thank you mail → wait two weeks and ask him about his satisfaction …)
   • the collection of tracking data and use of this data to individualise communication
   • the processing of large volumes of content
   • release and feedback processes even in complex organizations
   • …
3. Higher Quality of leads: Sales in B2B require the highest possible lead quality. They need all relevant information about a lead (e.g. telephone number, position, etc.) as well as a certain commitment (e.g. is interested in our product). Automate the so-called lead nurturing. For example, send leads automatically in emails in which further data is requested. Or develop a lead towards a specific commitment by first automatically sending suitable non-commercial content and, if someone is interested, switching to an explicit sales communication (register for a product demo, request a brochure, make an appointment, …). In this way, you automatically increase the quality of a lead until you hand it over to the sales department (also automatically).
4. Stronger customer loyalty: Automate your entire loyalty communication with marketing automation. Automatically communicate the current loyalty status to your customers. Control measures to expand it (“Buy again for gold status”) or to encourage customers to take advantage of its benefits (“Invest your loyalty points now”). Link any measure to any loyalty event (reaching a certain point level, points will expire soon, etc.)
5. Easy to implement: Everything sound good? But how do you start now? Isn’t it all very difficult to implement at first, despite the promised reduction in complexity? No. Technologies such as ELAINE from artegic make it possible to create campaigns of any complexity simply by drag & drop. You can find further information under:  https://www.elaine.io/elaine-realtime-marketing-automation/marketing-automation/

Case Study: CosmosDirekt

See how CosmosDirekt uses marketing automation to reactivate users. Please click on the cover and fill out the form to receive the case study.