The role of marketing automation in building relationship with customers

Marketing automation (MA) has become the key to success in building a relationship with clients. As the company grows, there’s no chance to maintain 1:1 relationship with every customer. Many can say that automation excludes any personalization, but that’s not true – MA helps to reach the right people at the right time, and it is more user-friendly than any other communication method.

According to Nucleus Research [source], it drives a 14,5% increase in sales productivity and reduces marketing overhead by 12,2%. However, it isn’t a piece of cake – there are a few steps every marketer needs to walk through. These steps are a base for building a good MA strategy.

Setting a marketing automation strategy

To implement marketing automation successfully, your company has to know the customer’s profile first. This step is about using collected data to segment the communication – to automate the communication it’s necessary to know when and how often messages should be sent, who should receive them, what kind of messages they should get and which channel is most effective for the particular recipient. It’s essential to keep the data up-to-date, as customers change their contact details, workplace or interests.

The next very big step is creating content. It’s very common that companies start their marketing automation programs with too few materials and quickly run out of the content or forget those messages. In such programs must be adjusted to the customer’s needs and send too many not-so-interesting communicates.

But sooner or later marketing automation is all about software. There are plenty of MA solutions offered on the market, but most of them are quite complicated to use.

59% of companies admit they do not fully use the technology they have available.

[source]

Ascend2 surveyed 239 marketers in Marketing Automation Trends Survey 2016 about the most significant barriers in using MA and the results seem to be quite obvious and easy to exit.

Companies that effectively use a marketing automation system have reported as much as a 451% boost in qualified leads. 

[source]

Measuring marketing automation performance

Almost one third (32%) of marketers surveyed in the Marketing Automation Trends Survey 2016 say that MA is very successful at achieving marketing goals. 59% of them rated it as “somewhat successful”. And what are the most important goals for them?

Measuring the performance of marketing automation, companies usually check conversion rate, revenue generated, leads generated and engagement.

It seems that marketing automation should be – the same as personalization – the next priority for Pharma. It’s an endless source of information about customers and converts into improving business on a daily basis.