Top 6 Benefits of Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Marketing automation is helping businesses scale all around the world. A report on global marketing automation market size, by India & U.S. based market research and consulting company Grand View Research, values marketing automation at $8.42 Billion by 2027.  

What these numbers mean is that businesses can easily pump up their profits by implementing automation in their marketing strategy. But, there still seems to be a gap between how big these numbers are and what they convey to people who will soon be feeling their impact — whether they embrace this overhaul or not.  

We’re talking about small business owners (SBOs). As more and more big businesses discover and follow marketing automation for a fact, SBOs are still looking at it as a costly leap. 
So the question soon becomes:  

• Is marketing automation still a far cry for businesses being managed by small teams? And, 
• Does it take anything special, either financially or infrastructure-wise, to implement marketing automation in your daily marketing activities? 

We’ll be covering the benefits of marketing automation for SBOs in detail.  

But before we come to that, let’s first have a look at some other important questions that often come into the minds of SBOs regarding marketing automation, which are: 

• What exactly does a marketing automation tool do? 
• Who needs marketing automation? 
• How do you select a marketing automation tool?
• How do you select a marketing automation tool? 

What Exactly Does a Marketing Automation Tool Do? 

Let’s break this term down and take each of the two alone to understand marketing automation better. “Automation”, for any sector, means: assigning machines/software to do a person’s job for sake of efficiency.

Now, when we use software (as we are talking about the internet) to perform tasks related to “digital” marketing, that’s what we call marketing automation.

The major reason why we use such software is to increase efficiency by setting up processes that take care of activities that are repetitive and prone to errors. 
Some examples of such kinds of activities are: 

• sending emails to your landing page visitors —but with the right email techniques — that have signed up for your newsletters/offer alerts at fixed intervals to maximize the email response rate— called email automation  
• scheduling a bulk of your social media posts, so that they are posted on your various social media handles even when you’re not in your office — called social media automation  
• tracking your visitors’ action on your website/landing page for showing behavior-centric pop-ups that show relevant offers — called user journey automation  
• deploying programs (chatbots) on your website that engage your visitor as soon as they land on your website with relevant offers or answering FAQs — called chatbot automation.  
• segmenting user data — such as name, age, demographic, price quotes, contact info — and storing them inside accessible digital spaces from where they can easily be accessed by sales and marketing teams — called CRM automation. 

Who Needs Marketing Automation? 

Anyone who has a website, landing page, or social media presence — no matter how big or small — can benefit from marketing automation software. You don’t even need a website or a landing page to start reaping the benefits.

So, let’s say, all you have is a Facebook page for your local restaurant and you understand the wonders it can do to your business. You socialize with people who follow your page and acknowledge both praise and criticism equally well. 

Now, for responding to both positive and negative comments on your Facebook page you can set up Facebook’s “Automatic Response” feature, which is a type of social media automation.   
The other thing you use Facebook for is to collect emails, along with other forms of contact details in your DM or comments, insert these details your email automation software, and automate your entire email campaign to send offers, coupon codes, events updates, etc., to your present and potential diners on the fly.

What does this tell us? That no matter the size of your office, team, turnover, audience, or even targets, marketing automation is the street that a small eyewear shop to emerging start-ups could take for better lead generation and nurturing. 

How Do You Select a Marketing Automation Tool? 

Your budget and your business goals. That’s it. As internet marketing technology improves with time and the rise of AI, the differences between good marketing automation tools are starting to dissolve. Almost all the leading tools in this domain, such as DotcomPal, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, etc., are close competitors today; even though they all started years apart.

The reason? Because of heavy competition and thereby less margin for error. Business owners today understand the value of both time and money, and that’s why spending ten more dollars on a different solution isn’t much of a trouble as compared to the business loss they suffer if their chosen solution shows any technical glitch.

So, it all comes down to how much money a good automation tool intends to charge you for the same service. Some automation platforms, such as DotcomPal — also known for its All-in-one kind of business solution capabilities, let you use their services for free for as long as you want.

On the other hand, some, like MailChimp — popular mostly for its email automation, charge you based on how long your email list is. 

So, before you pick any of the top marketing automation tools, ask yourself these five questions: 

• How many website visitors do I have? 
• How long is my email list? 
• How much can I afford to spend on automation? 
• What marketing processes do I need to automate in my customer’s journey? 
• Do I need to automate all processes or is there a particular one that I could benefit from? 

Top Marketing Automation Benefits for Your Business 

Glad you made it to this point because this is where the real fun starts. All the marketing jargon, stats, facts, and lingos can’t hold a reader for too long unless the benefits are as big and interesting.

So, what benefits does automation has to your marketing automation?  
Let’s see have a look. 

1. Generate More Qualified Leads

Adding people to your potential buyer list is “good”, but what’s better is to add those who are “really interested” in your business or product.

CRM automation tools serve your sales team with separate “hot” and “cold” lead lists. Such lists are based on user/visitor behavior and their past purchasing history. With such data, you can easily decide what kinds of emails/offers/ should be sent to which buyers, and it proves to be helpful when to comes to upsell, down-sell, and cross-sell. 

2. Nurture Leads More Effectively

Lead nurturing is a tedious task, but at the same time, it’s a very important stage of your funnel which you can’t overlook. Once you have added prospects to your list, you need to keep nurturing them until they become your customer.

Marketing automation benefits by doing this task in a more effective way while consuming only a portion of the manual nurturing process. You can use technologies like segmentation, automated drip campaigns, personalization, etc., to get it done easily and perfectly. 

3. Save Your Precious Time

Imagine that you have to speak to every visitor on your website, write their contact info, add them to your email list manually, segment them based on their purchasing behavior by yourself, and then set countdown timers to the day and time when you should send them emails. Seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it? 

What once took hours, now takes minutes to be done with the help of marketing automation tools. One of the great benefits of using marketing automation is that it simplifies the tough marketing tasks and eliminates the boring manual processes you have to go through repeatedly. 

Now, this improves the productivity and engagement of your employees so that they can focus on more important and creative tasks. 

4. Reduce Cost of Marketing

Without a marketing automation tool, you need at least one guy for chat support, one for scheduling and publishing content on social media, and a few others to look through the piles of customer data to make any sense out of it.

This would mean at least a small marketing team, as well as working space for the same. Now, unless you’re someone who’s running a multi-million setup to earn big bucks, it’s too much money. And that’s where marketing automation benefits turn the frown upside down. 

As per a report by Gartner, companies that use automated solutions for their marketing can save more than 15% of their marketing budgets. Also, automation can help you get 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% less cost. 

5. Track & Analyse Campaigns

Tracking and analyzing the performance of your campaigns are the most useful benefits of marketing automation. With the help of measurable data, you get to know what can be improved within your marketing efforts.

Using real-time leads and conversion data, you not only determine your campaign’s performance but also forecast upcoming campaign performance and accordingly plan your strategies. 

6. Boost Customer Lifetime Value

For the continued growth of a company, there should be a balance between customer acquisition and customer retention. The big benefit of marketing automation is: while it helps in retaining the existing customer, it also increases the lifetime value of that customer.

With marketing automation, you can create an automated series (like email drip campaigns) to suggest them related products, reminding them of upgrades, sending them offers, requesting their feedback, etc. This helps you increase customer engagement, which boosts the lifetime value of a customer. 

Final Words 
There are so many benefits of marketing automation and they only increase with the better and deeper implementation of good tools and the insights that they provide. 

If used combined with the practical goals and an analytical thought process, automation can provide your business with numerous benefits. 

We hope this article has given you a well understanding of how you might be able to use automation in your marketing strategy. Don’t forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments below. 

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