Why is marketing automation important in the holiday season?

Nowadays, we hear a lot of marketing terms such as customer-centric methodologies, lead qualification, inbound marketing, account-based marketing, and one that is also often mentioned is Marketing Automation. In case you are not very clear about it at the moment, don't worry! In this blog, we will address it and in conjunction with its importance for the Christmas season, which for nobody is a secret, is coming soon.

Now, we are aware that the Christmas season is coming soon and in our companies, commercial management is always a great challenge.  If your company has planned marketing strategies for this time of year, here we will tell you why it is important that these strategies have marketing automation processes that complement them and thus have successful management in the holiday season. 

• The importance of marketing automation in your marketing team's strategies for the holiday season.

• 3 essential elements that every company's enterprise digital architecture needs to automate its marketing processes.
• Use cases with HubSpot CRM.

The importance of marketing automation in the strategies of your marketing team. 

Nowadays it is essential for any company that its business processes (marketing, sales, and customer service) are automated processes because this frees departments from performing repetitive management processes. Automation processes should always go hand in hand with any business process, thus promoting a progressive digital transformation within your company's enterprise digital architecture. 

3 essential elements that every company's enterprise digital architecture needs to automate its marketing processes. 

There may be many business processes within our company that at the time of reading this blog you wonder whether or not it is automated within the company. These are some 3 essential elements to consider: 

• A CRM: CRMs or (customer relationship management) are technological platforms that were created with the objectives of managing the relationship that companies have with their customers and their business processes depending on the type of CRM that the company uses could vary the scalability of the complexity of the process automation that it can perform.
  
  An important factor here is the fact that if a company wants to automate its processes, this cannot be an achievable marketing objective if all we have are digital channel islands.
  
  Having a presence in digital channels is necessary as a branding concept for any brand, but these channels require a system, defined processes, and a platform that stimulates the management of requests, orders, contacts, and interactions that they generate daily.
  
  From what can be; automated responses in a chat on your website with multiple branches to attend customer contact requests, service management, job offers, workflows that refer to sales the most qualified prospects to buy among others. 
  
  
• Use of Methodologies: No automation process is effective without being supported by methodologies, especially in the case of marketing there are many that a company can make use of and accompany with the design of automation tasks respective to each business area and business process such as Inbound Marketing, Account-Based Marketing, to name a few.
  
  In the case of inbound, these focus on attracting unknown contacts, converting them to prospects by nurturing them with valuable branded content until they become qualified prospects for marketing, then sales, and finally, salespeople can take them when they are at a buying decision stage.
  
  In the case of ABM, this methodology is very useful to define which business accounts are key for the company and the team should focus their commercial efforts towards those accounts they have defined.
• Automation tools: There are many tools within CRM, depending on the platform they are usually known in different ways, these seek to streamline business management processes (marketing, sales, and customer service) and customer experience.
  
  It is important to consider that to generate a Workflow we have to have defined the initial criteria for its operation or what we could consider as a "trigger" before its configuration. This is very important because it helps us to give a guide to the flow of tasks that we want to automate. The following use cases are presented within the HubSpot platform.
  
  The following are some of the best known existing ones: 

Use cases with HubSpot CRM

1. Lead Scoring: Within all companies, there are processes that, although they cannot or are not automated, are responsible for scoring business prospects based on demographic criteria, business rules, and information on the buyer persona of the B2B or B2C prospect.
2. Workflows: Workflows are the most effective and adaptable tool within a CRM. This is because their nature can transmute from a chain of simple and complex automated processes as a flow of assigned tasks from what can be abandoned cart management for companies in the retail industry, to qualification of business opportunities within the CRM generating next steps:
   
   Marketing automation use case for "Abandoned Cart Management".
    
   - Select the type of business process for which the workflow trigger is intended and set it, in this case, an abandoned cart process in eCommerce.
   - Establish that the source of the initial trigger has been from the eCommerce through the eCommerce integration provider app within the CRM and that it is at the known sales flow channel stage, in this case of use from the abandoned cart stage.
   - Notification to the company's owner or business management agent of a contact.
   - A predefined reminder in an estimated period to send the notification to the prospect.
   - Sending email marketing to the customer notifying them that they have left a purchased item pending and thereby incentivizing them to make the respective purchase.

Workflow generated by: Imagineer Customer Experience

These same steps that I have shown you can also be applied in other industries, for example, in the financial and insurance industry, only instead of generating abandoned carts you can manage credit applications.

Use case: Deal Automation Workflow for "qualified leads as sales opportunities (B2B sector) within CRM".

- Select the type of business process the automation trigger is aimed at and set up, in this case, lead scoring, and a qualified lead range as a baseline. This is in addition to progressive dates so that it is not an automated process over the years for your company and defining the lifecycle of the contact.

- Then, you need to add the rule of registering the business within the company's sales flow channel and assigning the business to a sales team deal owner. 

- At the end of the process, ramifications are created depending on whether or not there has been communication of the opportunity contact with your sales team to take the next step with the team or to discard the opportunity.

Process automation is essential for companies that want to update their company's enterprise digital architecture model and for this holiday season here are some tips and essentials that will help your company.