What is a Marketing Automation Platform? The Benefits and Limitations

Many businesses are aiming for efficiency by automating routine processes. With modern technology, there’s almost no limit to what you can automate, including marketing. Marketing automation saves you time and allows you to personalize customer interactions at scale.

In short, marketing automation uses software to do repetitive tasks, giving your marketing team the freedom to handle more creative work. At the same time, it gives leads and customers a feeling of customization.

What is a Marketing Automation Platform?

A marketing automation platform is a software tool that works with the rest of your tech stack to automate marketing processes. It uses data from your customer relationship management software and customer data platform to guide the customer journey.

With data about each lead and customer, the marketing automation platform can deliver the right message or offer at the right time. This could include emails, sales offers, educational content or whatever else is most likely to convert and retain the customer.

Benefits of Using A Marketing Automation Platform

The ultimate goal of any marketing team is to generate leads that will, ideally, become customers. The right data and touchpoints keep visitors and leads engaged so they are more likely to convert.

A marketing automation platform helps achieve all of those goals without overwhelming your team. Marketing automation can:

• Streamline workflows - Simplify daily work by letting the marketing automation platform take over sending messages to customers and making offers to leads.
• Deliver the right message at the right time - Because marketing automation tools pull from CRM and CDP data, they can automatically select the message or offer a particular lead most likely needs at this time. Goodbye one-size-fits-all marketing funnels.
• Help nurture and retain customers - Consistent messaging over time can maximize customer lifetime value. Automating this process ensures that long-time customers get just as much attention as new leads.
• Let your team do what they do best - Your marketing teams are creative professionals who know their customers and strive to create positive customer experiences. They shouldn’t have to waste their time manually managing complicated follow-up calendars or guessing at what the customer might want.

Marketing automation platforms take the burden and the guesswork out of marketing so marketing teams can focus on idea generation, offer development, and content creation.

Making the Most of Marketing Automation

Effective marketing automation is based on data. It uses everything you know about leads and customers to tailor messages and deliver compelling offers. But what about your potential leads?

Anonymous visitors make-up a huge portion of website visitors and represent a massive opportunity. These are people who visit your website without filling out a form or logging in to a customer account. They were interested enough to visit your site, but you don’t have the information you need to customize marketing to them. Without an email address, phone number, or other identifying information, you can’t send personalized marketing messages.

One option is to guess, to treat all anonymous visitors as generic top-of-funnel potential leads. This might mean you offer every visitor the same offer. It might be a good offer, but you’re not sure it’s the right one.

The better option is Ignite by Launch Labs. Ignite is an audience identification platform that helps you deanonymize visitors starting the moment they land on your site. Using geolocation and first-party data, Ignite helps you turn anonymous visitors into leads.

Ignite markets to anonymous visitors by providing personalized offers that increase the likelihood of conversion. Once a prospect shares their location, they’re added to your CRM and marketing automation platform. So you can use Ignite to enhance your existing martech stack, including your marketing automation platform. Without Ignite, you’re only actively marketing to a small percentage of prospects. Turn more visitors into leads with Ignite.

See how Ignite by Launch Labs can help you do more with your data and maximize marketing automation. Schedule your free demo today.