For brands especially in ecommerce and retail sector, the festive season has always been huge. The season is peak time for retailing and brands announce a lot of offers on their product offerings. In order to constantly stay engaged with consumers, brands have adopted marketing automation to streamline processes more effectively.
The tool helps brands to manage action points of the communication workflow well in advance to avoid any ambiguity in messaging especially during heavy traffic inflow during the festive season.
Marketing automation helps brands to send out communications on time and real-time for its consumers.
Let’s consider one of the leading ecommerce portals announcing a sale on a specific set of products, for example, considering the company has identified different days to promote products in categories such as mobile, electronics, fashion, etc. on each of the days.
In this scenario, the company has a lot of communication to be shared with its customers for a particular set of dates. Thus, due to the validity of offer being only for specific time period, it is important that vital information reaches the consumers on time and also through their preferred channel. This situation can be ideally addressed with the means of marketing automation that helps to pre-plan the communication workflow. The tool tracks a consumer’s historical data points and identifies the preferred channel of communication such as email, push notification, social media ads, mobile app, etc. and then engages with the consumer with information.
Another major benefit of marketing automation is that it helps identify the preferred time that the consumer engages with brands in terms of going through the information shared by the brand thus increasing the higher possibility of sales.
Marketing automation also helps in increasing customer traction during the festive season. That is, by this tool, brands can engage with its consumers in real-time. For example, if an individual is scanning products related to fashion on a particular webpage there is a possibility that that person will move out of the page without making a purchase or even in some cases select the product on the website and exit without purchasing. In this case, marketing automation can help brands to engage and retain customers through its various tools, one feature being push notification.
Another example to validate the point is, for example if a customer has purchased a mobile on a particular website, there is a chance that consumers will buy mobile accessories too in future. Through marketing automation, brands can reach to those customers again with offers and information about mobile accessories thereby increasing the tracking to its website.
The marketing automation tool can also be utilised by brands even in physical stores. That is, if a customer is on the premises of retail brand store and connected to WiFi, marketing automation identifies it and sends information and offers real-time while the customer is at that particular store.
Marketing automation has also emerged to be cost effective tool for brands. That is, it is indeed an expensive proposition for a brand to get through all channels of communication such as e-mails, mobile, push notifications, web ads etc. Marketing automation helps optimize the cost by identifying relevant channels preferred by the consumers and sending information through only those mediums thereby generating higher ROI for the brand.
Email marketing has emerged as one of the key tools in digital marketing which brands are still seen to be adopting. Throughout the buying journey, brands and marketers are looking at improving customer experience. This can be achieved when content is relevant, the channel of communication is correct, and communication is sent timely. Hence, it is viable to say that marketing automation is need of the hour for such scenario.
