Marketing automation - Power with responsibility

Spanning across customer segmentation, loyalty programs, and pricing, a lot of processes involved in marketing are now getting automated. Tracking online customer behavior and merging data sources is aiding marketers to target consumers at granular levels. The surge in machine learning-based algorithms now permits targeting individuals who can get customized product offers and advertisements in real-time. Automation of email campaigns assists marketers to create work processes and garnering leads. SEO marketing has also witnessed automation.

The rise in Marketing Automation

Marketing automation platforms assist the marketing folks to automate repetitive processes with greater flexibility in personalization while consistently scoring high on key performance indicators, as well as raking in more leads and revenues. 

Automation allows marketers to create unique campaigns that lead to more engaged audiences who stay motivated as they travel across the buyer journey. The ecosystem is the overall beneficiary as customers get enhanced buying experiences as brands drive more engagement. 

Driving advantage of automation

Marketing teams can reap the additional benefits of powerful marketing automation solutions.

Campaigns that are more effective and efficient: Successful campaigns are highly targeted, ensuring that the right message is delivered to the right audience at the right time. Organizations can now identify website visitors and turn unknown prospects into known leads. One can segment the leads on multiple parameters such as behaviors, demographics, etc. to craft personalized lead cultivating campaigns. 

Organizations can now more track and identify website visitors and even turn a few unknown prospects into known leads. Once these customer buckets have been identified, the teams can segment the leads on multiple parameters such as behaviors, demographics, etc. to craft personalized and automated lead cultivating campaigns. 

Conserve Resources and Be More Creative: Marketing automation tools help users save time, and possibly money with more informed decision making. Businesses are also empowered to channelize their efforts in producing more relevant, creative, and compelling content and outreach campaigns. 

Repeatable processes facilitate re-using marketing collateral saving manhours and costs. This frees up some budgets to make a bigger noise in the market and increase in ROI.

Driving better customer experiences

The new-age consumer demands customized purchase and buying experiences. This leads to less obvious sales tactics that can be deployed by the marketing teams and more thought leadership to convince consumers. The end goals of all marketing campaigns may culminate in sales, but there are other objectives that are key, and these include creating better engagement.

The responsible side of automation

Maximization of Profit: Must brands avoid the temptation of profits at the consumer’s cost? Can marketing automation create a state of guilt?

It’s understood that businesses maximize profit at the maximum point to what a potential consumer is willing to pay. Today, ML-based prediction algorithms can decipher fairly accurate estimates of a consumer's willingness to pay. 

Businesses like Uber supposedly incorporate machine learning to set prices based on demand, time, and routes. Ride histories of customers can personalize prices even further. Such situations can lead to businesses seeking advantage by making consumers pay prices as close willingness to pay or even marginally higher. 

Losing out on autonomy: While being autonomous in choices, autonomy requires privacy. A lack of privacy can make consumers predictable. Algorithms to predict buying behavior more easily. Research indicates that consumers choose less preferred options to re-establish their sense of autonomy if it's known that algorithms can predict their behavior. Businesses can frame them such that they don’t threaten consumers’ perceived autonomy.

Unfair compensation for personal data: A consumer often undermines personal data while bartering it for goods or services as opposed to selling it for money. Consumers “supposedly pay” for free social media services with their personal data. Leading platforms use such data to make advertising profits. Such actions contribute to the extraordinary valuations of giant tech companies. 

Businesses stand a lot to gain from automation with benefits that are enticing for marketing teams. The planning and all the inputs that go into marketing initiatives can determine how big the success using marketing automation. A global artificial intelligence software market predicted to reach nearly 125 billion U.S. dollars by 2025 could mean fascinating times ahead with marketing automation.

The author, Dhara Shah is Chief Marketing Officer at Allied Digital Services.