Marketing Automation in 2023: What Will It Look Like?

Intro

Putting marketing actions on autopilot is a challenging feat. However, marketers and businesses think it can benefit their businesses and streamline their efforts. This claim is evident by the market size of the marketing automation business:

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Marketing automation trends can drive revenue to businesses, despite their initial size or business model. The reason is simple: Automating basic tasks like sending out the right type of email at the right time can save marketers time and resources.

Moreover, marketing automation can help marketers focus on more complex tasks and create efficient teams. Not to mention that scaling your efforts is one of the core ways to grow your business.

However, as with anything related to technology, marketing automation is a rapidly growing industry with emerging trends, some of which will stick beyond 2023.

Better Conversion Through Personalization

Personalization is more than a trend in 2023. Still, the constantly evolving marketing automation field always brings it to the forefront of marketing tactics.

Nowadays, marketers can create landing pages and subscription forms as lead-gen machines and attract the right user by personalizing the page’s content to the liking of their leads. A lead who will come across a landing page that mentions exactly what they were looking for will be much more likely to sign up.

This leads marketers to use email automation software with personalization capabilities. And this type of software will be all the rage in 2023 and beyond.

It allows marketers to understand the type of content and marketing message their target audience interacts with down to a tee. After that, marketers can utilize that data to create highly targeted automated email marketing messages that will correspond to the prospect’s needs on a one-on-one level.

Email marketing messages are among the tactics most benefitted from personalization, as they can create a unanimous experience that steadily leads to nurturing and conversion.

Let's assume a user checks Valentine's offers on your website. Marketing automation would be the way to go to create the perfect Valentine's day subject lines. Each customer is unique, and some things could fall into the cracks even if you segment correctly.

Automated personalization uses machine learning and AI to create content that correlates to a user's behavior. Customizing that content on every level - your email subject line, your copy, even the product suggestions you could make - will create a result akin to talking one-on-one with the prospect.

User Data: Quality vs. Quantity

In the coming years, businesses will experience what poor data quality can do to their conversion rate firsthand. As a matter of fact, there was a huge impact on conversion rates because of poor data quality during the pandemic, according to a report from Experian:

Qualitative data will help users make informed decisions when it comes to using automation tools and promoting the right thing to the right audience. Demographics, psychographics, and behavioral data will help you create tailor-made experiences on your website and email marketing campaigns.

Using data users give up willingly will help you streamline your efforts and create campaigns that will automatically track and trace interested leads and issue reports that will help you make data-driven decisions.

These actions will, in turn, result in higher conversion rates, a higher bottom line, and a smoother experience for the leads being nurtured and lead further down the sales funnel.

Lead Capture Automation

Lead generation is not an easy feat, as businesses constantly look for ways to streamline their lead-gen efforts and drive better results through conversion and quality leads.

Lead capture automation will be on the rise in 2023, involving software and technology that automatically capture and qualify leads based on specific criteria such as - but not limited to:

• Demographics
• Psychographics
• User behavior

The core benefit of lead capture automation is that it can save marketers and brands a lot of time and resources since it can automate tasks. Rather than going after leads and qualifying them manually, marketers can use lead capture software to qualify leads.

Using automation for these tasks doesn’t only save time and resources, though. Apart from being time-consuming, lead capture and scoring can be an error-prone task. Using automation eliminates the possibility of human error and helps automatic lead qualification.

This will ensure that leads won’t fall through the cracks and will be prioritized as needed, according to campaign and business objectives.

Lead capture automation can also improve the accuracy and efficiency of data. Using automation tools to capture data, marketers and brands can ensure that their information is accurate and they’re pursuing the right leads. This will, eventually, improve overall efficiency and the brand’s bottom line over time. For example, if you are in a fitness business and want to capture maximum leads, an automation system like gym lead management software is needed for that.

Of course, this is possible by basing the tool’s use on specific criteria, as mentioned above.

Expert Chatbot Use

Chatbots, as with personalization, are not new in marketing automation. But again, it's a practice that has taken over, especially with the extended use of AI in marketing and customer support.

Being conversational with your marketing efforts is something that all brands should go for. Canned responses are different from what users look for nowadays, and they don't show the face of a brand that cares.

On the other hand, marketers and brands have already realized that chatbots need to be trained through AI and machine learning. This allows the tool to create a conversation rather than an informational monologue.

One of the undoubted marketing trends of 2023 is creating chatbots that can "talk" with the customers just like a customer support agent would. The benefit of that type of automation is two-fold:

• Chatbots can gather all data that will be beneficial for your marketing efforts
• Chatbots can operate round the clock

Of course, the most significant benefit of chatbot automation is that agents can implement their skills to resolve more complex issues. This leaves chatbots to deal with simpler tasks, like locating a package.

Omnichannel Marketing on the Rise

A seamless marketing experience is the key to leading users further down the funnel. Omnichannel marketing allows users to express their interest in a product on channel X and obtain it from channel Y without friction.

Omnichannel automation gathers data and unifies them to create that kind of experience. Take the leading cosmetics retailer, Sephora. They managed to drive customer traffic and sales through marketing automation.

Using email marketing, the brand attracted the right leads to its website. Relevant content kept these leads interested.

The brand's multi-functional app with the now-famous Sephora Virtual Artist allowed users to try on products from their homes with AR technology.

Finally, the stores allow in-store pick-up, which could lead users to the brand's physical locations, resulting in cross-selling opportunities.

Take a leaf out of Sephora's book and use automation to gather multi-purpose data to create a solid omnichannel experience. You could start by finding the right correlations between marketing and sales data and then invest in an automation platform and a CRM system.

Social Media Automation

Social media requires an abundance of content. However, much like email marketers, social media managers have various tasks to complete, and posting on social channels is one that can be automated.

Businesses use social media to acquire valuable leads with a little more generic content than email marketing but still as personalized as possible. Making a landing page public on Facebook or posting a survey on LinkedIn can go a long way. But besides attracting leads, social media can help your brand establish its presence as an authority in your niche.

Social media automation tools can gather all data you need in one place and help you streamline all of the information to create any digital content you'd like. From a business contract in the form of T&Cs that will be optimized for the users to understand to an engaging poll or survey on social media, automation tools can help you understand social cues and data.

Social media automation tools also allow social media managers to streamline their posts on various platforms. Additionally, such tools can track and trace how social media interactions benefit your brand's objectives.

That way, social media managers can plan and execute more campaigns in less time and schedule posts in a day and time that is just right for their audience.

The Takeaway

Marketing automation isn't everything when it comes to a solid marketing plan. Mobile-first thinking with content clusters and easy-to-load websites and emails is just as valuable.

Creating targeted email marketing campaigns, automating social media marketing processes, and using SEO to your advantage are also things marketers shouldn’t take for granted.

Marketing automation can bring about fantastic results, provided marketers use the right tactics at the right time and for the right purpose.

The main focus of marketing automation is to boost performance, simplify processes for marketing professionals, and, of course, bring in more revenue. Finding a proper tool that allows marketers to streamline their efforts takes a lot of testing, trial, and error. However, the results will help you stand out in the long run.