Marketing automation: What, why and how?

Managing contacts, creating marketing efforts, managing social networks, analyzing performance and more; there are many tasks to accomplish in order to achieve business success. Over the years, many platforms have been created to facilitate these challenges. However, using one platform for social media, one for creative and another for sales can quickly become very overwhelming. In order to limit the installation of multiple integrations, new platforms offering all the necessary integrations for the development of its customers have emerged. This is the case with HubSpot, a platform where contacts, conversations, sales, marketing and reports are all in one place. Many advantages come from this centralization, today you will learn more about automations, their advantages and best practices.

What does automation mean?

Automation is a very broad term. According to the dictionnary, an automation is the fact of automating the execution of a task, a series of operations, etc. For our CRM automations, the best way to illustrate this is to think about sending a thank you email when someone fills out a form. The automation is triggered by a specific event (in this case, submitting the form) that leads to a defined action (sending the email). Since there are already many tasks to do in a day, imagine having to set aside time for new tasks as the day progresses...

What is it for?

Organizing your personal and professional life is a challenge. Life goes by quickly and the things to do keep piling up. But once you're organized, the benefits are many. According to a recent article published by Select Health, being organized significantly improves a person's performance and well-being. Task automation supports organization by decreasing workload and allowing professionals to maintain a long-term focus without having to waste time repeating the same small tasks over and over again.

In addition, automations are very beneficial in the workplace, as they allow for the transfer of information from one department to another. Another key to success in business is good communication. Indeed, in order for a contact to go from potential customer to customer, and to promoter, a transfer of information must be done between marketing, sales and customer service. Calls, emails, post it and others, the information does not always get to the right person and great opportunities can fall between two chairs.

Process automation allows for a smooth transfer of information by creating tasks and sending automated emails to internal people instantly. No more running around trying to figure out who did what, all the information is sent to the right person and people can focus on doing their job.

What can be automated?

After reading these last lines, you have certainly adopted automation but I can already hear you say: "Do you have examples of processes to automate? I certainly do! Here are a few.

First of all, if you take the time to do a blog post on an interesting topic, share it! These articles add a lot of value to your business as well as your website. So you don't want to limit yourself to your LinkedIn followers or others. Using automation in a CRM like HubSpot allows you to send an email to your subscribers in your CRM to inform them of this new article. This way, you will generate traffic to your website while cultivating your potential customer by offering them quality content. The beauty of it all? You can focus on writing your article without worrying about the rest.

Plus, if you know your contacts' birthdays, you can use automations to send them an email on that special day. Whether you offer free delivery, a coupon or simply a nice happy birthday message, your contact will surely appreciate it. In fact, according to a study conducted by the marketing firm Experian, birthday emails generate 179% more clicks than regular promotional emails while generating a transaction rate 481% higher than the latter. You know the birthday dates of everyone in your family, congratulations. Don't waste your time learning your customers': AUTOMATE!

Finally, you can use automations to follow up with multiple people without having to click send once. Do you hold regular events? Want to re-engage lost customers after a while? Follow up after delivery of a product or service? Don't waste your time trying to remember everything or creating tasks to do in a few months. Thanks to automations, you will be able to anticipate these deadlines and send your emails at the right time without having to think about them. Automations are very useful to perform a good after-sales service.

The sales process of the Inbound methodology is circular. So those few automated emails can make the difference between a one-time sale and a repeat customer that will continue to generate revenue for your business in the long run. This is not to be overlooked!

What do I take away from this?