On the surface, the concept of marketing automation seems simple enough. It’s a software that helps marketers to eliminate mundane and repetitive aspects of their jobs, that they need to carry out in order to engage their target audience. This can involve anything from email marketing, delivering tailored content, and conversion rate optimisations. But although it has been proved to streamline the work of both sales and marketing teams, often, it means dealing with even more customer segments and even larger volumes of data, that could cause headaches, if not a bottleneck during the entire acquisition stage.

According to research conducted by the marketing company – BlueVenn, 40 % of marketers have to manage more than 20 data sources for every customer. This means that, automation is designed to streamline the acquisition funnel,  therefore marketers need to pick their tools carefully, if they want to avoid sinking in  “data swamps”.

A popular solution, is multi – channel marketing automation platforms, that allow for compiling all user data in one place for creating consistent personalised campaigns across all marketing channels. But before we start giving you even more solutions, let’s clarify what are the pros ( and cons) of using automation in your workplace.

• Boost the revenue – Marketing automation is a smart tool that allows marketers not only to target the right audience but do it at the moment when they are the closest to converting. It works wonders for e-commerce stores that can use it for bringing users back to the website with relevant ad displays, or nudge them with products they have “abandoned” in the past. With new automated tools, marketers can now create powerful “abandoned cart campaigns” that will help to retain the attention of the more easily-distracted leads that visit their websites.
• Real time action – It allows marketers to create targeted emails that will be sent if triggered by a specific date, event or activity.  It’s a perfect solution for large – volume email campaigns. But here again, marketers will benefit the most from being able to react in real – time. Emails can now be schedule to be sent to the leads within an hour of them visiting the website, thus increasing the chances for conversion.
• More customized content – Marketing automation gives marketers a chance to increase audience engagement with more customized content, thanks to the granularity of data from customers profiles’ and their purchasing behaviour on the website. Large volumes of valuable data can increase marketers confidence about their audience, allowing them to reach their prospects with more meaningful and personalized content.
• Non direct human interaction doesn’t mean no human interaction – Although marketing automation means that majority of the tedious processes can be executed without the direct human interaction, it doesn’t mean that marketers won’t have to oversee their campaigns. To maintain authenticity, emails, or in fact, any content sent to customers will still need to be personalised (e.g with merge tags), so it doesn’t sound like it’s been written by a robot.
• Less work, but only with the right tools – More data to process, gives rise to more segments, that in turn, of course, will lead to more work.If the software, marketers are using is not sophisticated enough to spot segments and tweak the content itself, it will need to be done manually. In theory, automation might sound like less work, but the key to the success is not to use a huge number of tools but to use the right ones with more centralised applications.