The introduction of marketing automation software many years ago was welcomed with open arms by many online businesses. It was a relief to have such software that can help in automating the many repetitive tasks inherent in almost all online businesses. Aside from automating the many tasks to conduct an effective marketing campaign, it was also seen as an effective program that can help in reaching as many target customers as possible. For most part, the software was and still being used for email marketing campaigns by many companies.
Combined with Industrial IoT services, marketing automation tools may become a universal panacea. But if you do not know how to use them in order to make your business work better, some problems may arise.
The Ideal Result of Automation
With automation, sending of emails to target customers and even those who signed up to receive emails from your business can be done automatically without doing it on a manual basis. It could be done daily and even several times a day since all you have to do is to set-up the system and it will do the work. After many years however and with so many complaints coming from unsatisfied netizens who felt victimized by unwanted emails flooding their folders, the need to improve how tasks are being automated entered the picture.
The Problem with Marketing Automation
But the need to make improvements in the software actually happened only when big providers like Yahoo, Google, and other email service providers introduced filtering systems that can help the user block spammy messages from all sources. This crippled to a lot of extent the usefulness of automation software so developers needed to improve user experience to make them penetrate and the content be actually read by recipients.
Even if the message can manage to enter the inbox of an email recipient, there is still no guarantee that it will be opened and read so the problem is still there. Many netizens have just grown tired of receiving emails from marketing and sales companies so they ignore the emails altogether and just delete them out of the inbox folder. Suddenly, there is a mad scramble for developers to improve the system so as to make it more responsive to the demands of the recipients.
So-called internet marketing experts have many industry terms to describe the usefulness of marketing automation tools like lead nurture, lead management, Integrated marketing, and such other nice to hear words that mean nothing to ordinary readers and also do not produce the promised results nowadays because of the wall that was designed by other specialists to prevent the software from invading the privacy of internet users.
How Marketing Automation Technology is Fighting to Stay Alive
The problems have been identified and the developers are hot on the task trying to produce a software that can meet the demands of the times. The main focus now is to make the software work effectively with new systems to reach as many target market as possible. After all, businesses would not give the software a second look if it could not help them generate additional sales in the end. It’s all about making money in the end and developers of automation software are also into this same mode so they have to come up with the ideal program that can merit a second look from online businesses.
Another focus and being offered already by some companies is the intelligent use of software that can identify the potential needs of the target customer. It could be by means of interaction with the customer where the program records all the transactions and then identifies from there the potential needs of the customer that can be served by the business. It is a form of product or service recommendation engine. This makes the communication more targeted and not like before where the program just sends an email to customer in an arbitrary manner. Other means of improving and getting the needed results are also being applied and made to work side by side with the automation software.
Where the Future of Marketing automation leads
Undoubtedly, the need for this type of software will stay. It is a valuable tool that every online business must have in order to stay competitive. It is an invaluable tool for small online businesses for their B2B and more importantly B2C campaigns and an indispensable part of strategy by online entrepreneurs who want to cash in and make money with their ideas. Many big businesses use this kind of program intensively and they have already made themselves a force to reckon with in their fields.
The catch however is it is still the same program with hyped improvements. Basically it is the same dog with a different collar that many vendors are touting to be the best solution. The revolutionary kind of marketing automation software is still nowhere in sight and may take a few more years to finally roll out.
