According to Salesforce, “Marketing automation is a technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.” It helps to execute, manage, and automate marketing processes. When tedious, repetitive tasks are automated, marketers shift their focus on complex issues and increase personalization and a stronger ROI for businesses. While enhancing efficiency and productivity, marketing automation also delivers the right message to the right customer at the right time. Overcoming the repetitive tasks, marketers collect generate more qualified leads while reducing the time spent doing so.

Here’s how marketers design a marketing campaign to leave repetitive tasks behind and concentrate on generating stronger ROI.

#1. The Marketing Automation Software

To create your marketing automation campaign, you will need to have software that can collect your prospect’s information, contact and re-contact them, and automate your marketing tasks. The software must have the following tools in its arsenal.

• Pop-up Manager
• Landing page Manager
• Web banners Manager
• Automated email Manager
• Email Manager
• CRM
• A/B test function
• Data Visualization /Dashboard Management
• Reporting and Forecasting

There are software that can have all the above features or can be standalone software, for example, CRM can be its own separate software. The choice depends on your budget and objectives., having all-in-one marketing automation software can also save you money and time from not collecting information from isolated sources.

#2. Converting Visitors into Leads

Whenever a visitor comes to your website have a pop-up featuring subscription newsletters, free-ebook download on sign up, discount on the first service, registration for the latest webinars, etc. Next, set up banners and landing pages to further increase your chances of converting visitors into leads. The landing page will play an important role, as it will convince a user to share information in exchange for something. You will need a pop-up, landing page, and banner builder to accomplish this task.

#3. Converting Leads into Customers

With prospects’ information collected, set out automated emails, newsletters, offers, discounts, insights, content — all personalized to convert them into your customers. Keep an eye out for automated emails and top-notch personalization. You will need an automated email builder and CRM features for this task.

#4. Analyzing and Optimizing

With your marketing strategy in place with customer/prospects information, track the metric in real-time and tweak your conversion tools to improve your results. Monitor conversion rate and the overall performance. For example, maintaining and understanding records of sessions, conversion rate, leads, email opening rate, click rate, conversion rate, among many others will help you in optimizing your marketing automation campaign. You can use the A/B test function, a dashboard, and detailed reports and KPIs to accomplish this task.

In conclusion, have a decent all-in-one marketing automation software, encourage your visitors to exchange data for some freebies, engage those prospects with discounts/offers & personalized content to convert them into customers, and overall keep eyes on rates and optimize your campaign on the way.