What is Marketing Automation and Why Most Businesses in Singapore Need It

The digital landscape changes fast. If you are in touch with what your competitors are doing online, you will notice that some of your competitors are picking up new digital marketing strategies every now and then. One of them would most likely be marketing automation. Marketing automation is the bread and butter of any modern marketing. Applying marketing automation to your business would definitely make a positive impact to your business’s marketing efficiency. Marketing automation can produce up to 451% increase in qualified leads, and improve sales productivity by up to 14.5%. Despite the many benefits of adopting marketing automation, many businesses in Singapore are still not onboard with it. In this article, we’ll cover how marketing automation can be relevant for different types of business, the benefits of marketing automation, the key to marketing automation success, and factors to consider when implementing it.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation has been in the market since 2005. There are many different definitions of marketing automation, but marketing automation we’re discussing here refers to using software to help automate marketing tasks. These tasks are generally related to engaging with your customers or prospects, social media, email. Marketing automation software helps you do these tasks at scale, hence, it’s becoming more important for digital marketers.

Benefits of marketing automation

#1 Scale

If you’re a business seeking to efficiently engage with all your customers at scale, marketing automation is for you. It’s applicable to all businesses, regardless of whether you’re a B2B, B2C, small brick and mortar business, or an eCommerce shop. Have you ever experienced the pain of copying and pasting a text message template to each customer, replacing the (name) text with your customer’s name? Marketing automation software allows you to do such things within a few clicks.

#2 Personalized messages

Whether you’re creating email content, social media content, digital marketing ads, or any follow-up messages, it’s important that content is personalised and speaks to your customers, because personalised and highly relevant content generates huge ROI. Some statistics report a 20% increase in sales due to personalised content. Personalised email marketing campaigns have a 26% higher open-rate than generic email content. Some digital marketing campaigns even have 700% increase in ROI from segmented campaigns.

#3 Segmentation

Not all leads are the same. Some leads are easier to close, some leads need more nurturing before you can close the sale. That’s the idea of segmenting your customer database. You can set various permutations so that your leads can see content that triggers their interest in your service/product.

#4 Holistic view of your customers

Marketing automation software allows you to see the full picture of how your customers from each marketing channel are engaging with you. Whether it’s Google ads, social media marketing, events, email marketing etc, you will benefit from seeing the full picture of how customers are engaging with you at various marketing touch points.

#5 Productivity and reliability

Using marketing automation to conduct repetitive tasks can help reduce human error from our operations. A client recently mentioned their difficulty to follow up with their leads that are coming through Facebook. Being a popular business, they receive hundreds of leads a month. They decided on a new hire as a solution for the workload, however, little did they know that marketing automation was the easy answer. The new hire did not manage to follow up at the rate and service quality that they expected. Marketing automation software is able to keep up with any number of leads and follow through with consistent quality without testing your colleagues’ capacity. Just set the algorithm structure that you wish and the machine will manage your leads for you.

#6 End-to-end customer lifecycle management

Marketing automation allows you to manage the whole customer journey with ease. Difficult to imagine? Customer journey structure in marketing would look something like this:

• Awareness: Creating ads and running marketing campaigns to build your business image and create leads
• Interest: When a customer contact you through your online ads, or through your telemarketing/sales team
• Desire: Your customer does more research through educational search and maybe have a go at your ‘trial’ package
• Action: Actual purchase
• Advocacy: Retention and loyalty building

If you find that your business is missing out on a few key components, it’s time you look into marketing automation, or consult with any Singapore digital marketing agency for professional advice.  

Defining your Processes

Before kickstarting your marketing automation process, you need to know what are the processes in each part of the marketing funnel.

How do you handle enquiries?

Commonly asked questions include: “What’s your price?” “Why should I choose you over your competitors?” It’s important to have a standardised answer for consistent brand image at every customer touchpoint. These answers will then appear in your automated marketing replies on Facebook messenger, Instagram enquiries and so on.

How do you follow up with these leads?

Do you get customers to come down for a free trial, or a discounted first-time trial? Or do you share with them certain series of content depending on what they are interested in, how they behave, and how they respond to your content? If it’s the former, you may only need to send out a single automated email once the customer signs up. However, if it’s the latter, you will want to consider setting up a series of automated emails to nurture a conversion. Come up with a nurturing process for the common consumer journey before implanting it into your marketing automation system.

How do you keep in contact with new clients?

If your lead has turned into an actual paying client, congratulations! That’s not the end of the marketing funnel though. Good businesses understand that it’s crucial to cultivate customer relationship as it can help to:

• Build brand loyalty
• Increase sales
• Promote a strong referral base

A good marketing automation system can do that. For example, after a customer has made a specific purchase, you can send a personalised Thank You email followed by newsletters on related products. In fact, a survey by Marketo revealed that 78% of respondents will only pay attention to promotions sent out by brands that they’ve interacted with before. To get a strong referral base, you can consider giving each customer a referral link so they get rewarded when their friends sign up.  

Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Software

There are many good marketing automation software out there, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Marketo, Eloqua and etc. It can be overwhelming to find the best one for your business. The criteria to decide on the best marketing automation software for you should depend on three things:

• Your business’s goals and objectives
• Your company structure
• How easily can this software integrate into other parts of your business, such as:
  • CRM system
  • Website analytics
  • Online booking/payment platform
  • Email marketing software
  • Telemarketing tools

A crucial question here would be whether the marketing automation API integrates well with other existing tools?

The Key to Success with Marketing Automation

The next question you may ask is, “What is the best marketing automation software out there?” Many companies use marketing automation but see no significant improvement in terms of sales or customer retention. Tip: That is the wrong question to ask. Having the right software will not give you success. The key lies in the marketing strategy. But not just a marketing strategy: You need to have the right end-to-end marketing strategy to see success. Most companies’ marketing strategy only involve getting the customers to the door. After that, the process of following up and retaining them does not exist.

Conclusion

Implementing the right marketing automation isn’t easy. Moreover, if you are running different campaigns, such as SEM, SEO or social media marketing, you’ll need to ensure your marketing automation accounts for all these touchpoints. Hiring a digital marketing agency will help to streamline the process. As the top digital marketing agency in Singapore, Heroes of Digital has helped many clients set up their marketing automation process to develop a more efficient marketing campaign. Get your free digital marketing consultation today and kickstart your marketing automation process!