Marketing automation never ceases to amaze us. It only becomes more enhanced and sophisticated with every new year.
Consequently, more and more people are starting to use marketing automation processes to drive business growth and increase efficiency. According to a study by Invesp, marketing automation can boost sales productivity by 14.5%.
Have fear of missing out? No need for that. In this article, you will learn about some of the marketing automation trends that will dominate in 2019.
1. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Are Here to Stay
Even though AI for marketing is still relatively young, businesses are gradually starting to realize that there is no way around it if they want to remain competitive. Judging by the most recent trends, 2019 will be one of the crucial years for marketing AI development.
If you are just starting an online business, you need to know that the main three benefits of using artificial intelligence this year will be more advanced targeting, better transparency, and a better understanding of AI application.
Targeting
AI has been used in audience segmentation and ad targeting with great success, and it seems that these strategies will only continue to grow and improve.
One example of this is advanced television, where AI can help marketers improve one-to-one targeting accuracy on the data-driven channel. What’s more, it can help with scale delivering, and we all know how painful this is for marketers when it comes to advanced TV.
In addition, AI will come in handy across programmatic radio and direct mail, improving education, development, as well as adoption in the martech field.
Transparency
It is obvious that more and more technology companies are beginning to drive transparency initiatives. Also, an increasing number of brands and agencies are demanding more insight. This paves the way for the emergence of more transparent AI.
This trend can be implemented through increased transparency in the data insights shared by technology and data providers. At the moment, it is only natural for martech providers to open up the visibility of their databases and technology through insights gained from client data, audience, and artificial intelligence in order to help marketers manage data more effectively.
Application
Machines are becoming smarter and smarter, which means that companies that want to use them need to have a better understanding of various types of AI and their application.
It will no longer be acceptable that marketers don’t understand regressions, neural networks, and decision trees. Learning these methodologies and how they align with business requirements like compliance, transparency, timing, and other, will make or break companies in 2019.
2. Personalized Content
Marketing to everyone is slowly beginning to die out, and personalized marketing is entering the stage. Marketing automation helps you connect with your ideal customer through personalized content.
As customers are no longer amazed by reading their first name in emails, the time has come for something more advanced. Instead of an up-to-date customer database with a range of attributes, hyper-personalization means using real-time and discernible data to communicate with your audience in a more personal manner.
A 2018 survey by Evergage revealed that as much as 98% of marketers agree that personalization helps to improve customer relationships. While marketing automation already helps you to give your leads a personalized experience, in 2019 you should focus on the type of communication your customers want to engage in.
Here are a few practical tips to give relevant experiences to your audience:
- Combine social listening, user attributes, on-site behavior, and past purchase data to create an accurate customer persona.
- Use personalized content across your channels to increase customer retention. This improves your customer loyalty and reinforces your position in the industry.
- Finally, by knowing your customers’ user preferences and buying habits, you enter the land of hyper-personalization and predictive recommendation, leaving segmentation and personalization far behind.
3. Welcome, Chatbots
Chatbots can be quite useful when it comes to personalizing brand messaging, performing outreach, as well as delivering support to your prospects and customers.
In 2019, businesses will be using chatbots for a number of tasks, including lead generation, data collection, and even sales.
Advanced lead generation
With chatbots, you can generate leads using a new approach:
- First, you use data collection software as you would normally do to identify your target audience demographic.
- Next, instead of directing them to a sales-driven landing page, improve their experience with a helpful chatbot.
This will help you get some healthy, high-quality leads, and gain excellent traction.
Better data collection
The first step here is to use the information from your chatbot conversations to improve chatbots. Identify common keywords and phrases in chatbot conversations, and then customize your chatbot’s triggers and responses to make it more human-like and intuitive.
Moreover, as you go through this data, you may come across useful information about your target audience. Then, you can improve the customer’s experience and gain a draw useful conclusions about your marketing efforts.
Increased sales
Chatbots can help businesses engage customers who leave their websites without making a purchase. Simply use a chatbot to follow up with a special offer or discount email to get your client back on your website and make that purchase.
Therefore, you should not refrain from using chatbots in the future. In addition, if you find integrating and managing chatbots too complicated, try using these WordPress customer support plugins to make things easier for you and your team.
4. Email Marketing Automation
Growing an email list was one of the most difficult goals in marketing. But with WordPress lead generation plugins, getting new subscribers is not as difficult as it used to be.
However, there are some other aspects of email marketing that frustrate marketers nowadays. Still, there’s some good news – you can use automation to improve them.
Improve personalization
There is no need to cherry-pick every hot lead or categorize them by brand when software can do that for you. Email automation and autoresponder can easily figure out the right time for your messages, but make sure you keep the human touch.
Focus on CRO
If you think you’re doing fine when it comes to conversion, monitor competitors’ email and see how they perform. If you are lagging behind, you can increase the conversion rate by optimizing interactivity, introducing more advanced CRO tools, as well as optimizing virtual reality and augmented reality.
Automate pruning and categorization
Lastly, you can use automation tools to automate email list pruning. Depending on campaign scope, email marketing software can categorize contacts or move them into more general buckets with great accuracy. That means that you can get higher-quality and better-segmented leads, thus increasing your conversions and sales.
Final Thoughts – Keep It Human
Marketing automation is taking over and there is really nothing we can do about it. Still, even though you have to use automated processes to speed up and improve your marketing behind the curtains, you shouldn’t make it too obvious.
The thing with us humans is that we want things to get better and faster, but first and foremost, we need a personal touch.
Go ahead and use technology to improve your business, engage your audience, and save both time and money. However, personal communication spiced with emotional intelligence goes a long way, so make sure you never neglect it.