The benefits of marketing automation can be an element of convergence between a company’s financial and marketing needs. In fact, marketing automation enters fully among the essential investments to optimize marketing activities, overall improving the income statement, ROI and CLV . With marketing automation, the meeting point of marketing and financial functions results in a shared strategy to increase customer lifecycle value and optimize the investments made, as well as the productivity of internal resources.
So we are not only talking about optimizing investments in the short term, but also about increasing the value of corporate assets over time. But let’s go in order. What are the benefits of marketing automation?
Resource saving and scalability
This benefit is the one that is typically motivated first. The main result of an investment in automation, for any industry, is to “offload” human resources from repetitive and manual tasks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of man hours devoted to a given task. For the writer, the advantage lies not so much in net savings, but in scalability, understood as the ability to manage multiple campaigns with highly personalized content at the same time. Marketing automation allows for greater efficiency at lower fixed costs because the variations and complexity of each case are handled “natively.” The resources freed from unnecessary manual effort, should be devoted to more strategic activities aimed at data analysis, increased creativity, and overall business growth.
Optimizing the economic relationship with the customer
Being able to track customers at all stages of the lifecycle and across all channels, thanks to automated processes, brings with it the advantage of being able to refine and optimize communication investments on a per-user, per-channel basis. A marketing automation engine must be intelligent enough to be able to define autonomously where to intervene, limiting the dispersion of budgets on ineffective channels or campaigns. Marketing automation makes it easier to attribute revenue to individual marketing investments. Identifying the right time and the right content to stimulate a purchase is one of the main assets of these technologies. This marks the big difference between marketing automation platforms driven by artificial intelligence algorithms and those implemented solely on static workflows.
Avoid investing budgets to buy back the same users
Still following the thread of budget optimization, it is crucial to recognize how marketing automation platforms-in the unique management of the user-have the merit of recognizing the user and managing the relationship not only on the company’s own properties, but also on third-party platforms. In other words, a shared segmentation of audiences between proprietary website, facebook and google – just to give an example – makes it possible not to disperse economic resources in an overlapping of advertising channels. Each interaction is tracked and managed as best as possible, avoiding – simply put – “reacquiring” users that you are already managing (already customers or registered users). The cost of customer acquisition, in fact, is one of the variables that affects a company’s income statement the most, especially when the business is purely online.
Increased margins on segments and products
A hot button for marketing and finance directors is that of margin erosion in favor of higher sales volumes. Often the tactics of acquiring new users or generating more traffic to the site are combined with sharply lowering prices, such that margins are completely eroded on the first purchase, in the hope of recovering in subsequent sales. This marks a factor of great uncertainty and maximum financial exposure for the company, with outcomes that are not always positive (a fact that has already emerged in the world of large retailers, where undercosts created to affect store traffic do not always translate into upselling or cross-selling results). In reality, thanks to “smart” marketing automation platforms, it is possible to target specific benefits only to specific users, segmenting the audience in a very granular way. In particular, it is possible to automatically communicate certain conditions to users with higher-margin shopping carts. At the same time, one can choose to exclude users who are already brand loyal and therefore willing to pay a premium price, to balance budgets on new or first-time users. Having the option to modulate different tactics, for different user segments, allows for informed choices, without adopting an unnecessary flat approach where “everyone gets everything.”
Increased CLV
Marketing automation is not only used to increase the conversion rate of the first purchase but also to optimize Customer Lifetime Value. In particular, it is a fundamental contact nurturing tool and can become a weapon for recovering at-risk users even on offline touch points (physical points of sale and all customer care). Increasing CLV therefore means improving the ratio between budgets spent on acquisition and retention and optimizing the ROI of all annual planning with immediate effects on the company’s income statement and financials.
Marketing automation benefits: conclusions
New digital customer journeys lead purchase decisions to occur in complex ways: most sales occur before a user has completed a transaction in the shopping cart. The decisive stage of a sales journey is played out through multiple contact moments, all of which must be optimally managed to lead to a single conversion result. This is why marketing automation is a long-term asset: by following the customer throughout the lifecycle, it continues to generate value, even years after the first implementations and major investments in internal training and adoption of new technologies. Acting quickly on building a marketing automation process is critical, and this naturally translates into a competitive advantage. Delaying this decision could turn into a cost, should competitors get ahead of the curve, significantly improving their performance and optimizing their marketing budgets.
