Marketing au­toma­tion is the au­toma­tion of manual processes and work steps within marketing campaigns using marketing au­toma­tion software.

What is marketing au­toma­tion?

Marketing au­toma­tion is the software-supported man­age­ment of customer-related business processes. Steps which were pre­vi­ous­ly done in­di­vid­u­al­ly within marketing campaigns run au­to­mat­i­cal­ly. This is made possible by so-called marketing au­toma­tion tools. These act as an interface between customer databases, CRM systems and the various com­mu­ni­ca­tion channels of a company. The au­toma­tion of marketing measures is data-supported and aims at need-based com­mu­ni­ca­tion in which each customer is in­di­vid­u­al­ly addressed at the right time via the ap­pro­pri­ate channel.

How does marketing au­toma­tion work?

With marketing au­toma­tion tools, you only need to define the workflows in com­mu­ni­ca­tion campaigns once. These strate­gies are then im­ple­ment­ed without manual in­ter­ven­tion, evaluated for ef­fi­cien­cy and adjusted on the basis of newly acquired data.

Marketing au­toma­tion goes beyond just au­tomat­ing standard processes. In online marketing in par­tic­u­lar, web tracking provides you with tools which have an immense data basis that can be evaluated using data analysis, and used to optimize com­mu­ni­ca­tion processes in customer re­la­tion­ship man­age­ment and to per­son­al­ize content and offers - for example within the framework of automated price op­ti­miza­tion (dynamic pricing).

What can marketing au­toma­tion do?

In practice, marketing au­toma­tion is used, for example, in the context of automated sales funnels and as the tech­no­log­i­cal basis for software-supported lead man­age­ment. The following goals are in the fore­ground:

  • Gen­er­a­tion of qualified in­ter­est­ed parties (lead gen­er­a­tion)
  • Further de­vel­op­ment from in­ter­est­ed parties to buyers (lead nurturing)
  • Further de­vel­op­ment from existing customers to regular customers (up- and cross-selling)
Summary

Marketing au­toma­tion tools offer customers and in­ter­est­ed parties au­to­mat­i­cal­ly selected marketing tools based on user profiles (usually in the form of content) in order to further develop them according to their in­di­vid­ual re­quire­ments. The target is the buying customer or the repeat buying existing customer.

This is how you’ll benefit from marketing au­toma­tion

Marketing au­toma­tion aims to make sales processes such as lead gen­er­a­tion or lead nurturing both more efficient and cost-effective through automated processes. Marketing au­toma­tion tools combine user data from various sources (CRM, web analysis, customer service, etc.), structure them, create user profiles, evaluate users based on their ac­tiv­i­ties - so-called lead scoring - and then enable an in­di­vid­ual approach.

If a user lands on your website for the first time, the software au­to­mat­i­cal­ly clas­si­fies them as a new customer and plays out your chosen marketing tools for lead gen­er­a­tion - for example a white paper as a free download, new customer discount, or a call-to-action to register for the newslet­ter.

If the eval­u­a­tion of the click behavior shows that the customer is in­ter­est­ed in certain product groups, they will be offered cor­re­spond­ing offers or per­son­al­ized prices on their next visit. All this is done au­to­mat­i­cal­ly on the basis of a database managed by the marketing au­toma­tion software, which is con­tin­u­ous­ly updated according to user behavior.

Marketing au­toma­tion also au­to­mat­i­cal­ly records and evaluates the ef­fec­tive­ness of the marketing in­stru­ments used at any given time. The knowledge gained in this way is available to you for planning future marketing measures and the strategic ori­en­ta­tion of your company.

Fact

Marketing au­toma­tion software offers a degree of per­son­al­iza­tion of ad­ver­tis­ing measures, which would only be possible with a manual selection of marketing in­stru­ments for customer ac­qui­si­tion and de­vel­op­ment with a con­sid­er­able personnel ex­pen­di­ture.

An overview of marketing au­toma­tion software

Marketing au­toma­tion tools are usually closely linked to CRM systems or provide cor­re­spond­ing functions. In addition, in­for­ma­tion from com­mu­ni­ca­tion channels is evaluated and prepared for per­son­al­iz­ing marketing features.

Common features of this kind of ap­pli­ca­tion are:

  • CRM Syn­chro­niza­tion and CRM In­te­gra­tion
  • Web analytics
  • Workflow and process man­age­ment
  • Lead man­age­ment (es­pe­cial­ly lead nurturing and lead scoring)
  • Funnel man­age­ment
  • Inbound marketing
  • Content man­age­ment
  • Social pub­lish­ing
  • Mon­i­tor­ing
  • E-mail marketing

Here are some of the best known marketing au­toma­tion tools on the market:

  • HubSpot
  • keap (formerly In­fu­sion­soft)
  • Act-On
  • Marketo
  • Oracle Eloqua
  • Adobe Marketing Cloud
  • IBM Watson Marketing (formerly Silverpop)
  • Net Results
  • iContact (formerly Outmarket)
  • Hatchbuck
  • Sim­ply­cast
  • aprimo
  • eTrigue
  • SalesTalk
  • Sales­fu­sion
  • Sales­force Pardot

Pros and cons of marketing au­toma­tion

In the following we have compared the ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of a con­ver­sion to automated marketing processes.

Pros Cons
Routine tasks can be made more efficient through au­toma­tion. The purchase of marketing au­toma­tion tools involves ad­di­tion­al costs.
Marketing au­toma­tion makes it possible to measure and evaluate the success of marketing campaigns. Before sales processes can be automated, cor­re­spond­ing au­toma­tisms must be defined manually. This requires the necessary know-how.
Marketing au­toma­tion tools make highly per­son­al­ized com­mu­ni­ca­tion possible with potential customers, provided there is suf­fi­cient data available. Marketing au­toma­tion tools only work ef­fi­cient­ly if they are in­te­grat­ed into all systems relevant to customer com­mu­ni­ca­tion and can access a suf­fi­cient­ly large database.
By the con­tin­u­ous success mea­sure­ment, marketing au­toma­tion creates a good eval­u­a­tion basis for the op­ti­miza­tion of marketing campaigns. When using marketing au­toma­tion tools, there is a risk that personal contact with the customer will be lost.
Marketing au­toma­tion enables a lead man­age­ment in your order of magnitude, which could not be mastered manually anymore. If errors occur in the database, there is a danger that these will run through all the processes based on it and thus falsify entire marketing campaigns.
Marketing au­toma­tion offers marketers a good overview of the number and stage of all leads in the sales process and thus ensures trans­paren­cy and planning security.  
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