Effective marketing requires personalization, education, and segmentation. Efficient marketing also requires marketing automation.

If you want your business to grow, you need to build your audience. As your visitors increase, you need to provide efficient tools for your marketing and sales teams to personalize, segment, and nurture your customer base.  They should be concentrating on communicating with individuals, not performing repetitive, button-pushing tasks.

Automation is a vehicle for all forms of marketing to work more efficiently and effectively. Automated tools can help you personalize and leverage social media, email, and content marketing to drive traffic to your eCommerce site.

Why personalized marketing?

The judicious use of personalization increases the value of your marketing efforts to online shoppers.

• 53% of online shoppers find customized communication valuable.
• 45% of shoppers prefer sites offering personalized recommendations.
• Personalized ads convert at a rate ten times higher than a general interest ad.

Not every online buyer has the same questions or requires the same set of information. Personalized information eliminates the need for buyers to sift through massive amounts of data to answer their particular questions.

Why marketing automation?

Automation allows you to do more with less.

Automated marketing tools let your marketing and sales teams generate, segment, and nurture leads efficiently and with minimal administrative time. Automation also provides different types of tools so you can foster business growth through multiple pathways.

• Email marketing automation increases lead generation
• Captured email addresses can be segmented automatically into narrower target groups
• Multiple landing pages can segment and automate follow-up and provide the specific information each segment requires
• Automation allows more time to create high-quality content that appeals to your targets

By automating simple, repetitive tasks, you free up time that is better spent on your qualified traffic.

Social media marketing and automation

Social media is a very active area; there are millions of users accessing social media every day – usually on their smartphones. Promotional opportunities abound:

• Build a Facebook storefront or create a Facebook page for your business
• Curate an attractive Instagram feed
• Use Twitter to share your blog posts and press releases
• Pin it! with Pinterest
• Place social sharing buttons on each piece of content

Several social media platforms have effective ad programs. Facebook ads let you drive traffic based on location, interests, gender, behavior, and other filters. Hashtags help you promote your posts on Twitter and Instagram. And all social media makes it easy to run contests and promotions for your business and your products.

Each social media platform provides space to engage with your prospects and generate leads. While every post drives traffic back to your website, social media marketing works best if it’s actively managed and consistent.

How automation helps with social media marketing

Many apps have been developed to automate social media posting, engagement, and monitoring. Here is just a sampling of what they can do:

• Schedule social media posts in advance; preload and schedule tweets for the next day or week.
• Monitor the networks for mentions of your brands.
• Keep up with comments on your feeds.
• Synchronize your online profiles or Google Calendar, so you don’t miss important dates.
• Promote your blog posts on multiple social media platforms concurrently.
• Curate and share other people’s content, including industry influencers.

Available applications include Buffer, HootSuite, SocialFlow, and SproutSocial.

If you use WordPress as a blogging or website platform, you can also download applications or plugins to help you share your blog posts to social media automatically.

Email marketing and automation

Email may have been around for a while, but it’s certainly not leaving anytime soon. The Direct Marketing Association states that email has a return on investment of nearly 4,300%.

• Email is the most easily personalized form of online marketing available and is a significant driver of website traffic.
• Email outperforms Facebook and Twitter in sales generation.
• Email provides space for content that may not fit into a social media post.

Targeted email campaigns can leverage your email addresses to send targeted content directly to your prospect’s inbox where 70% of people say they have received and used discounts and offers.

How automation helps email marketing

Not every email should be sent to everyone on your list. However, manually segmenting your list and sending different emails to each is extremely time-consuming… unless you automate the process.

Email automation is particularly helpful for setting up nurturing or drip campaigns. You can automate the task of sending a follow-up email according to the behavior of the recipient on social media, your website, or previous email.

Here are some other ideas:

• Send a welcome email as soon as the visitor signs up for your newsletter or a piece of premium content.
• Share a regular newsletter with links back to landing pages or content on your website.
• Inquire about abandoned shopping carts.
• Follow up on wish list items.
• Auto-respond with a reply matching the prospect’s behavior regarding a previous email.

Performing these actions manually would require hours of administration every week; automation relieves you of the administrative load and lets you get on with marketing your company.

Many customer relationship management solutions either offer an integrated email application or a way to integrate with a third party email solution such as Constant Contact and MailChimp. Either of these solutions will help you begin automating your email marketing and take repetitive tasks off your plate.

Content marketing and automation

Content marketing is the foundation from which your social media and email marketing campaigns spring. Blogs, podcasts, videos, ebooks, and infographics are all examples of content that can be used in your content marketing efforts. But it is by no means an exhaustive list.

Once you have created your content, you need to make it available to attract visitors to your eCommerce site.  

• Maintain an active blog with frequent posts, and share those posts to social media or via email.
• Create premium long-form content, and put it behind a form on a landing page; then send the link via email.
• Add new information to your website, and promote a new product.
• Create press releases that link back to a page on your eCommerce site.

Every piece of content you create can be used to draw traffic. Automation can make content creation and distribution more efficient, from tagging and SEO to social sharing.

How automation helps content marketing

Many content management solutions contain features that remind you to use various SEO techniques to optimize your content for search engines. Web page builders, for example, help devise effective links for your web pages. You can also set your blog to share a new post to all your social media pages automatically upon publication.

All applications of this type are meant to make publishing a consistent process with all the required optimization in place. Automation also ensures content is shared and promoted to the correct audiences. Certain solutions even allow you to create different URLs for the same content so you can easily track and monitor your sources of traffic from that content.

Content creation and publication automation can also integrate with your email solution (like MailChimp) to automatically email new content to subscribers. In turn, automation tracks and monitors opens and click-throughs from links or calls-to-action (CTAs) within the content or emails.

Available applications include HubSpot, a solution that has grown quickly over the past decade, and Salesforce, another ubiquitous CMS solution that continues to build its customer base. ClearVoice, WordPress, and Curata are also popular choices.

E-commerce is a fast-moving train. You don’t have time to mess around with repetitive, mindless tasks like manually publishing content to all your social media storefronts and pages. It would take a small team to run a lead nurturing or drip campaign that way! Marketing performance analytics – the all-important data that you can actually use to increase your sales and conversions – would fall by the wayside.  

Automation can make all of these repetitive activities happen without hands-on management from you. Once you have set up an automated process, it will run without your input until you change it or tell it to stop or change. It doesn’t allow anything to fall through the cracks. Most importantly, all of the work automation does naturally drive more traffic to your store, which means more sales and revenue for you.

Automation saves substantial time, effort, and money that would be much better spent on helping your customers and growing your business. It makes your small business look bigger and your large business even more efficient.

This blog was written by Nicole Letendre. She is the marketing coordinator for Bonafide, a digital marketing agency in Houston, Texas. She loves writing, social media and keeping up with the latest marketing trends.

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