Top 5 Marketing Automation Trends in 2021 [And Beyond]

As a marketer, it’s very important for you to stay at the top of the competition, and keep abreast of the latest marketing automation trends.

We’ve done the research, and put together a comprehensive list of the 5 best marketing automation trends for 2021.

All you have to do is to read this list and think about how you can leverage these trends into your 2021 marketing strategy.

The sooner you adopt these trends according to your marketing strategy, the more advantage you’ll have on your competitors.

Top 5 Marketing Automation Trends

1. Giving customers an omnichannel experience

For those who aren’t aware of what “omnichannel” means, it refers to integrating your customer’s shopping experience across multiple channels and devices.

Say you have a prospect who wants to buy new software. This person might…

Do a Google search and arrive at your website.
Head over to your Facebook page to look at your recent updates.
Email you or send you a message on live chat, enquiring about your software’s functionality.

Regardless of which channel your prospect uses, or what device they’re using, the goal is to provide them with a seamless, consistent experience across all devices and channels.

Omnichannel marketing has always been crucial, but it will become even more important to businesses moving forward.

2. Automated email campaigns will become more interactive

Automated email campaigns have already become every marketer’s bread and butter.

Pretty much every business understands the importance of email marketing and is utilizing automated email campaigns to nurture their leads.

So, what’s the next frontier when it comes to email marketing?

In 2021, we foresee that digital marketers will focus on fine-tuning their automated email campaigns and making them more engaging and interactive.

3. Predictive lead scoring

When it comes to lead scoring, many B2B companies are still relying on manual lead scoring (i.e. calling up leads and asking them qualifying questions).

But, in 2021, we predict that businesses will increasingly shift to using predictive lead scoring to streamline the process.

Manual lead scoring is an outdated method, and it’s a waste of time.

Instead of getting your sales reps to painstakingly call every lead and ask them a standard set of questions, you can simply use new technology to get the job done.

If you’re currently using the best marketing automation software, there’s a high chance that your software already comes with a predictive lead scoring feature built-in.

Predictive lead scoring takes into account various factors (such as demographics and personal information, behavioral data, and social information) to assign a score to each lead that enters your system.

This score tells you how high quality your lead is (and how likely they are to convert into a paying customer). This way, your sales reps can focus their efforts on serving hotter leads, instead of wasting all their time talking to cold leads who may or may not convert.

4. ChatBots will proliferate the web

Back in 2018, we saw many companies jump on the chatbots bandwagon.

Facebook chatbots, in particular, were a huge hit. These are easy to set up (no coding required!) and can help businesses in all industries take care of their customer service needs.

Moving ahead, we predict that chatbots will become even more popular and that even more companies will use chatbots to complement their marketing automation efforts.

Michael Peggs, the founder of Marccx Media, agrees, saying that chatbots are a key component of marketing automation and that companies should use these bots to “intelligently automate (their) customer service”.

5. Marketers will use chatbots to close more deals

On the same topic of chatbots: on top of our prediction that chatbots will grow more in popularity, we’re also predicting a shift to more sophisticated chatbots.

In 2018, chatbots were still a new concept, and most companies that did experiment with chatbots built bots that were pretty basic and straightforward.

These bots are able to provide information to users and/or answer basic questions, but that’s about it.

Now, as businesses are becoming more familiar (and comfortable!) with chatbots, they’ll start moving towards building more sophisticated bots that utilize the power of AI to recommend products and close deals.

If you’re wondering how this translates to real life, in retail, many companies are already using chatbots to provide information and recommend products to their customers.

H&M, for example, uses a bot to help customers build the perfect outfit:

It’s not hard to imagine how B2B businesses might make use of this technology.

For instance, say you own an SEO keyword research tool, and you’ve built a chatbot to help you generate more leads.

If your chatbot identifies that they’re speaking to a first-time user, it might serve up common FAQs to let your user learn more about your tool.

If it seems that it’s engaging a returning user, on the other hand, it could offer an extended trial or a product demo in order to move this user further down the funnel.

5 Ways to Boost Sales Through Marketing Automation

It has become a widely recognized fact that the automation of marketing and sales processes increases the efficiency of business efforts.

According to a Marketing Automation Report by the B2B Technology Marketing Community, 53% of B2B marketers are actively using marketing automation today, and another 17% are currently evaluating adopting it into their current strategies. The top 3 benefits marketers are looking to receive from marketing automation are more and better leads, improved marketing productivity, and improved conversion rates.

The right eCommerce platform and correct business practices can turn your brand into a sales juggernaut. We see more and more customers taking the quick dip into the pool of online shopping and services rather than spending time at the malls/retail stores. Smart software and orchestrating sending out relative content will not only help to build a great sales funnel but also lead to ultimate sales conversion.

Key components of marketing automation to driving more sales:

1. Providing your marketing team with the right tools

With the right tools, your team will be able to spend more time effectively qualifying and guiding leads through the sales funnel vs. manually obtaining, tracking, and passing along leads.

2. Leveraging personal relationships

It’s important for your marketing and sales to lead the process to enable your team to nurture personal relationships. Make sure your system can account for personal referrals, allow for customization to host information you know about your main contacts and allow for you to personalize messages that are being delivered.

3. Identifying the right amount, and type, of follow up throughout the sales cycle

Not everyone is ready to buy right away. Identify the different stages your buyers go through when determining when to buy, and use that to segment future leads and assign the appropriate type of outreach and message for the audience.

4. Shortening the sales cycle

Through automated nurture and scoring programs marketing can deliver more high quality leads to the sales team at a quicker pace.

5. Segmenting your Customers

Do you keep track of all the customers that visit your website/online store? Identifying and leveraging your customers is another important thing to do while you work on marketing automation for eCommerce. Remember your business model depends on your target audience. Now, there are several ways to do this based on Demographic factors, Purchase History, Psychographic factors, and Dividing them into Benefit Groups. All of this helps you in personalizing the experience for customers by providing them with more relevant services on one hand and devise clear strategies for the growth of your online business on the other.

Marketing Automation Best Practices for eCommerce

Customer retention is the most important thing in today’s digital economy, with over 50% of consumers suggesting that they would interact with a company again after only one positive experience. At the same time, you also need to be fostering new leads, segmenting those same leads, and personalizing the experience to engage with potential (and existing) customers across every channel.

5 Best Practices for eCommerce Marketing Automation

1. Segment Your Customers

According to MailChimp segmentation makes a detailed picture of how segmenting your customers can lead to better results.

Using marketing automation, you can segment customers in order to have them convert at the right time. By doing so, you can create better marketing campaigns, understand your customers, and plan accordingly.

2. Personalize Your Site

Customers love browsing websites that have stored information about them and display products that are relevant to them. According to Invesp, 53% of online shoppers find customization to be super valuable and influential in their buying decisions.

3. Improve Customer Satisfaction

Marketing automation typically revolves around gathering new leads and convert them. But we cannot discount the efficiency of automation in nurturing current customers and building relationships with them.

Marketing Automation can help build better relationships with customers. Whether it is assisting them with their order inquiries, customer service issues, or anything else – it can help build a fuller, better, and much better omnichannel experience.

4. Social Media and Chatbots

Another great aspect of marketing automation is the use of chatbots to improve customer experience. Build a chatbot to answer customer queries, regularly engage with customers, and send out weekly updates.

According to Drift, 34% of users use a chatbot in order to get access to a “human” representative. This means that chatbots go beyond simple inquiries, and actually nurture the path to converting a lead.

5. Gain Feedback

One of the benefits of using marketing automation is that it can help you get valuable feedback from your consumers. This is one of the most beneficial things you can do to consistently improve your eCommerce business.

Use Marketing Automation to Build Customer Relationships

Businesses never fared well with the ‘build it, and they will come…’ attitude. They have to reach out to the customers who would be willing to pay them for their offerings. Finding such an audience falls in the ‘to-do’ list of marketing departments. The larger their budget, the better the reach. Though, marketing was never an easy undertaking. A blend of psychology, creativity, risk & the art-of-communication, marketing has always been a decisive factor in the making or breaking of any business.

Marketing= Acquisition + Retention = ‘Another War’

With new businesses mushrooming in the arena, acquiring that precious customer demands a cutting-edge strategy. Even if you manage to acquire some, retaining them is another cut-throat sport. The digital world has opened up a plethora of options for the customers to choose whom to buy from. The power to accept or reject a brand lies with them, not us. And, there is always another competitor ready to steal your ‘acquisition opportunity’ away!

But…Wait for it…

Marketing automation is here to save the day! If customers have the power to choose, businesses have the power to improvise. Marketing automation tools give an unparalleled edge to enterprises, especially eCommerce players. Automating repetitive but key operations like omnichannel communication, email campaigns, push notifications & overall Customer Experience (CX) is the crux here. If this automation can grow ‘intelligent’ over time, then the enterprise doesn’t even need to bother about the marketing intelligence as well.

Why Should You Care?

In a world where 33% of the existing customers would consider changing the brand at a single instance of poor customer service, this proposition of marketing automation sounds promising. Customer Experience is one single metric that can make a substantial difference in how much a business can grow. In fact, companies that are confident in their CX metrics easily charge a 16% premium on their offerings. Needless to say, marketing automation for eCommerce can make a huge difference in the bottom line.

Marketing Automation Powering Customer Relations…

Or more precisely, Customer Experience. But, how does automation manage to create a win-win scenario for the businesses and the customers? Here is how;

Touch of Personalization

Businesses that treat their prospects like any other number are headed towards self-destruction. Your customers love PERSONALIZATION! There is a solid reason behind this. Personalization builds rapport and rapport forges trust. Even if the only touchpoints between a customer and a business is their smartphone, personalization can be a deciding factor for that sales conversion. Marketing automation allows you to scale personalized content & offers for all your customers without any hick-up.

Enhance Retention

As pointed earlier, great customer experience is what your prospects crave for. Omnichannel Marketing Automation allows a brand to build consistent messaging around its offers. This enables customers to keep their trust vested and stick to a brand as long as it matches their experience standards. And, did you know, just a 5% increase in customer retention rate can boost your profitability by up to 75% (Bain & Co.)!! Also, cross-selling and upselling becomes a breeze.

Obviously, there are other benefits of marketing automation tools like enhanced effectiveness, reduced turnaround time for operations & scalability.

Why don’t you test the waters yourself and build a rock-solid brand with an intelligent marketing automation tool? Give Wizgo ago, today!

7 Ways to Boost Sales Through Marketing Automation

It has become a widely recognized fact that the automation of marketing and sales processes increases the efficiency of business efforts.

Key components of marketing automation to driving more sales:

1. Providing your marketing team with the right tools

With the right tools, your team will be able to spend more time effectively qualifying and guiding leads through the sales funnel vs. manually obtaining, tracking, and passing along leads.

2. Leveraging personal relationships

3. Identifying the right amount, and type, of follow up throughout the sales cycle

4. Shortening the sales cycle

Through automated nurture and scoring programs marketing can deliver more high quality leads to the sales team at a quicker pace.

5. Focusing on delivering more high-quality leads (vs. high quantity) to sales

Allow sales and marketing to identify key characteristics for high-quality prospects. In addition, look to lead sources that send prospects through at a further point in the sales funnel, such as referrals. Referrals are often higher quality leads because they have been influenced upfront by a trusted source.

6. Integrating cross-sell and upsell strategies to maximize the value of each customer

Revenue opportunities exist after the initial sale and should be part of your overall marketing automation strategy. Utilize dashboards that track customer profiles and activity and implement cross-sell and upsell strategies.

The Auction platform provides marketing and sales tools focused on capitalizing on the highest quality segment of leads—referrals. The platform can stand alone, or integrate with existing marketing automation and/or CRM systems you have in place. It works to expand your direct sales force through building a community of internal and external referrers, incents their activity, and implements cross-sell and upsell strategies appropriate for your audience.

7. Segmenting your Customers

5 Marketing Automation Examples Every Business Should Try

Marketing automation is your company’s best friend.

Actions that fall into the marketing automation category can help you streamline essential tasks and optimize the overall efficiency of your marketing campaign. From emails to exclusive content, marketing automation can help you manage your campaign and maximize your results.

Given the myriad of benefits offered by this handy strategy, it’s no wonder so many companies use marketing automation to maximize their organization’s performance. It’s not uncommon for business leaders to question the value of marketing automation.

Best Marketing Automation Examples

1. Welcome emails

So, you’ve just earned yourself a new client — congratulations! Don’t let your joy over your recent acquisition overshadow your need to keep this new customer loyal. Fortunately, with marketing automation tactics, you can welcome every new client who joins your business.

Sending a welcome email is more than a great way to create a positive first impression. On average, welcome emails can help you generate 320 percent more revenue than compared to a promotional email.

They’re also more likely to lead to clicks and opens too.

It takes a well-crafted and strategically outlined message to reap these benefits.

2. Win-back programs

You can’t keep 100 percent of your clients dedicated to your services — but you can improve your existing client retention with marketing automation. Win-back programs are the perfect way to reconnect with your clients and reignite interest in your brand or services.

Dropbox, a company that offers cloud storage services, provides an excellent marketing automation example when it comes to re-establishing contact with past clients or at-risk customers.

3. Downloadable gated content

Gated content is useful for a handful of reasons.

Not only do you get to generate new leads but you also get to provide users with helpful information. That’s why downloadable gated content is a proven strategy for lead generation, as well as another example of marketing automation.

4. Lead magnets

For companies today, getting leads can take a lot of time and energy.

In marketing, your magnets are how you go about earning your leads. Magnets typically consist of any measures that help you gain a user’s information. These measures can include video series, exclusive podcasts, and even contests.

However, it’s a time-consuming process.

Fortunately, lead magnets are easy to automate.

5. Abandoned shopping cart emails

Surveys show that roughly 54 percent of consumers regain interest in a company after receiving a reminder email. So, don’t get discouraged by abandoned shopping carts just yet. You can use marketing automation to motivate those shoppers to check out.

If you operate an eCommerce business, for example, and have found that you deal with consumers leaving items unpurchased in their virtual shopping carts, you can start sending out an automated abandoned shopping cart email to improve your targeting efforts.

Use Marketing Automation Across The Customer Lifecycle

For me, marketing automation is one of the most exciting recent MarTech developments, because it gives so many opportunities to help businesses deliver more relevant communications to their audience.

The key is to understand that you can use marketing automation across the entire customer lifecycle. It’s not a solution that’s just suitable for the top, middle or the bottom of your conversion funnel.

Marketers often forget that, but just as you can use marketing automation to build awareness and generate leads, you can also use it to boost revenue from your existing customers.

This visual shows the many different options from prospect to customer.

Ways To Use Marketing Automation Across The Customer Lifecycle

1) Lookalike targeting for prospecting

Marketing automation works best when you already have site visitors and email subscribers to communicate with.

With Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter you can find audiences similar to your existing contacts and customers.

This way, you can grow your awareness among people that are likely to benefit from your offer, and you can drive more quality visits to your site.

2) Automated prompts with content to encourage interaction

When you attract new audiences to your site through inbound marketing techniques like blogging, Google Ads, or social media, encouraging your audience to interact and stay on the site is a challenge.

Many blogs have bounce rates of more than 70%, but through adding relevant content and signposts we can reduce this and encourage more interaction.

Here we can use automation to recommend further interaction based on the content they may be reading – like on a blog, for example:

Next or related articles based on what they’re currently reading
Prompts to sign up for email updates when a user scrolls through to a certain part of the page
Prompts to read a related guide or report when a user interacts with the page for a given amount of time
Prompts to offer a webinar or free consultation when a user is about to leave your page

Here’s an example of how Smart Insights is promoting its RACE system on their blog.

3) Landing pages to profile your audience

Once you have attracted site visitors with your content or other offers, you need to create a landing page to profile your audience and add them to your list.

Of course, how you craft the headline, copy, images and individual fields form page will make a huge difference to the sign-up conversions. This is where another form of automation, AB testing of different versions, will come in handy.

Here’s a simple landing page you could use to offer an ebook or another digital product.

4) Welcome sequence

The next step in the lifecycle is often a huge missed opportunity! When someone is added to your list as a new subscriber, your first email to them can be seen as the most important email you send to a prospect or customer.

Here you’ll have the highest levels of attention and, if you get it right, you should be getting open rates of even up to 80% and click-through rates around 20% according to this data from the GetResponse Email Benchmarks report.

But don’t stop with a single email! By crafting multiple, well-branded emails in a welcome sequence rather than the simple autoresponse, you can tell the story of what your brand can offer subscribers and give different options to engage the audience.

The data you below supports this idea, as longer email series still manages to generate higher engagement rates than what you’d normally see with a simple newsletter.

5) Dynamic content for personalization

When you’re working on your welcome sequence, dynamic content, which is another marketing automation technique, can come to your aid.

We know that if you mention someone by name or another personal attribute it will engage them more. For example, here Wedding Wire makes use of a witty form of personalization in a subject line:

This example is in the subject line, but the technique can be used in the body of an email, too. For example, in the Smart Insights Welcome sequence, we call out to different roles like ‘marketing managers’ or ‘digital marketing managers’ with relevant planning advice for them.

How to Choose a Marketing Automation Tool in 2020

If you’re new to marketing automation, choosing the best marketing automation tools for your eCommerce could be an overwhelming and intimidating process. Long gone are the days when your decision was limited to the top ten leading tools out there.

To help you navigate this extremely crowded landscape and design your marketing strategy, we put together this practical guide on selecting the right marketing automation software for your online business.

The Importance of Implementing an Effective Marketing Automation Strategy

Some of the benefits of a well-implemented marketing automation strategy for your business include:

Reduced customer acquisition and staffing costs.
Better return on investment (ROI) — increase in revenue and average order size.
Time savings
Improved targeting of messaging.
Increase in qualified leads generated by the marketing campaigns.

Example Uses of Automation in Digital Marketing Campaigns

There is a myriad of ways that marketing automation enables you to be more effective and produce a higher ROI on your efforts.

Use cross-channel messages to target potential customers. Some people are more likely to engage with your brand on social media versus email. Marketing automation tools allow you to have an effective customer communication across different channels.
Run precise A/B test experiments. With marketing automation tools, you can easily measure which campaign yields the best result and double down on it.
Boost your email marketing engagement by sending follow-up emails to unengaged subscribers.
Increase customer lifetime value through up-sells and cross-sells with relevant products personalized for each recipient.
Revive old leads with re-engagement campaigns.
Streamline your sales processes and align marketing and sales team more effectively with the use of all-in-one marketing automation systems that provide you with access to marketing tools and CRM features.
Schedule social media posts and campaigns ahead of time

How to Select the Right Marketing Automation Tool

Marketing automation is so ubiquitous today that you’re probably using at least one marketing automation tool already without calling it like that. With so many tools available, it might be hard to decide what exactly do you need.

To help you with that process, we’ve put ten easy tips.

1. Start with your business model

Your business model and processes are greatly going to impact your marketing automation needs. Do you run a B2C or B2B business? Is your business software as a service (SaaS), a mobile app, eCommerce, marketplace, or a service? What does your selling process look like — do you rely on a product-led, self-serve onboarding or you have a traditional high-touch sales model?

There isn’t a single perfect solution that caters to all types of businesses. By understanding your business model, your acquisition processes, and your customer persona, you can make more knowledgeable decisions when selecting your marketing automation toolset.

2. Identify the stage of your business that needs the most attention

Based on the business model and maturity of your company, you may experience challenges at different stages of your marketing funnel. Do you have difficulties attracting traffic to your website? Do you manage to convert that traffic to qualified leads and those leads to customers? What is your average customer lifetime value, and for how long do you retain your customers?

If you struggle with attracting eyeballs to your product or service, you might need to look into a search engine optimization (SEO) platform like Ahrefs or MOZ to help you increase your organic traffic. Maybe you’d want to boost your social media presence and engage better your loyal audience by scheduling regular posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and CoSchedule.

To convert that website traffic to leads, you could A/b test different landing pages and forms with a robust landing page builder tool like Leadpages or Unbounce.

3. All-in-one Vs. best-of-breed marketing automation platforms

Marketing automation platforms come in two general forms: all-in-one suites or best-of-breed tools.

Which one you decide to go with depends on your personal preference, your marketing needs, and your budget.

Best-of-breed tools focus on providing the most robust and sophisticated solutions to a single feature or set of features. For example, Mailchimp helps you with email marketing automation, Buffer with social media, and Ahrefs with improving your search rankings.

There’s a third category of marketing automation products that help you orchestrate and automate tasks between other tools: Zapier, Autopilot, and Encharge.io are a few of them.

4. Consider your budget

Last but not least, you need to consider your monthly budget allowance for marketing automation software. Using the right set of tools is crucial, but what makes a good tool great is the marketer using it. That’s why you need to carefully decide how much you want to spend on these products.

Big platforms like HubSpot, Eloqua, and Market tend to get extremely expensive if you use their full set of features. Fortunately, most of them offer their suite as separate products, so you can subscribe only to the features that you need.

Best-in-class software products like Buffer, Leadpages, SEMrush, etc. are usually most cost-effective, but you might need to use a few of them to cover all of your marketing needs.

5 Ways to Boost Sales Through Marketing Automation

Key components of marketing automation to driving more sales:

1. Identifying the right amount, and type, of follow up throughout the sales cycle

2. Shortening the sales cycle

Through automated nurture and scoring programs marketing can deliver more high quality leads to the sales team at a quicker pace.

3. Focusing on delivering more high-quality leads (vs. high quantity) to sales

4. Integrating cross-sell and upsell strategies to maximize the value of each customer

5. Segmenting your Customers

Top 5 Best Alternatives of ManyChat

ManyChat is an instant messaging platform for businesses that allows them to do their marketing tasks in a more advanced way to grow business. It is an advanced facility that enables enterprises to meet their chat standards with clients up-to-the-mark that permits good customer relationships. ManyChat connects to your Facebook messenger to enhance the marketing dimension and engage many customers with automatic messages at any-time and anywhere.

Best ManyChat Alternatives

1. Api.ai

Api.ai for Facebook Messenger is intelligent software for creating Facebook chatbots. This software has a lot of features you don’t need to perform any programming. A drop and drag interface is available through which you can create a virtual customer support agent without any effort. A variety of texts are already saved in this software, but in case you want to add something new to your chatbots, you can add them easily by using the relevant feature.

2. Botsify

Botsify is a software used for creating Facebook messenger chatbots. The significant advantage of this software is that you don’t require to learn to code. With this user-friendly platform, you can design chatbots easily and add lots of advanced functionalities that make it better than others. All chatbots and features on this solution are developed by an expert team and provide customer services on Facebook messenger only.

3. Chatfuel

Chatfuel for messenger is a chatbot solution provider that offers various features. It comes as the alternatives to Botsify and provides all the key services and features that allow you easily share the content stored in a bot in the conversation. The solution is known as the world’s leading chatbot platform designed to increase sales, reduce costs, and automate support on Facebook.

4. MobileMonkey

MobileMonkey provides an automated Messenger chatbot service that can be used to respond directly to visitors on your Facebook business page via Facebook Messenger. It provides a free plan and features that allow you to communicate with engaged potential customers on created posts such as Facebook ads and help to build relationships and generate leads through interactive funnels.

5. Exponea Messenger

Exponea is a high-rated marketing solution used for fast delivery and direct execution. It is a cloud-based software and comes up with the most comfortable interface. Artificial intelligence is also introduced in this solution that enhances your campaigns. Multiple brands and companies are using this to automate a variety of tasks and to improve marketing.