If you are obsessed with streamlining tasks especially where digital marketing is concerned then automation is your friend and we have good news for you, more and more software based tasks are becoming automated to save users time on simple decision making or general processing.
The most simplest and common example and form of automation would be when you as a user clicks on “apply to all” rather than just apply when you are making a decision on a group of files. That right there where you don’t have to repetitively click ok and the computer makes the changes for you is automation.
Automation has however become much more advanced than then “apply to all” example that we have just given you. In our everyday tasks we use automation and take it for granted as it is now the norm. Another example would be email software that we use (Pardot and Mailchimp) has the ability to apply automation to send email replies to a portion of our list depending on a pre defined decision that we / or the user set in advance of sending our initial email out.
So say that we send an email campaign out for a client suggesting that they fill out a form to register their interest for a new car. Well before we send this initial email out giving the end user the opportunity to engage with our content, we have actually prepared two emails with the second being a follow up that is triggered to an engagement response. This is where the beauty of automation comes into play because as soon as the user clicks on register your interest and submits their response the automation within the newsletter program will bookmark the customers contact details, copy the users details to a new email list most likely named “registered interest in x product” of which only we the sender can see and then start a countdown timer of which we have set in the campaign settings, to eventually send out the second email to the user. This second email could be sent 48 hours after the users engagement in the initial email and have a further call to action within it – say “thank you for registering your interest you can now place a deposit on product x by clicking here”.
You can now see just how powerful automation could be when used in many different environments and industries. You can see how major vehicle brands such as Porsche, Bentley and Jaguar Landrover use it to their advantage when releasing new cars. We find that this style of automation works great for brand where users are fully engaged and actively seeking engagement. Automation is often a very successful marketing technique for building lead generation and so is the perfect tool for marcomms and sales and marketing integration.