What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the ability to manage all marketing processes and campaigns through multiple channels, automatically. With marketing automation, businesses can target their prospects and customers with automated messages based on sets of instructions. These instructions are tailored to the businesses needs and can be set in templates by your managers. Marketing automation can be used to automate marketing campaigns and sales activities in order to increase revenue and maximize efficiency. When automation is used effectively, lead generation and nurturing are effectively maintained and employees can work on higher-need tasks. 

What does marketing automation do?
Marketing automation streamlines the most time-consuming of jobs by automating lead generation through digital campaign creation and deployment. Good automation will have the proper audience identified, design the correct content, and set automatic triggers based on a customer's digital behavior. A properly exacuted marketing strategy will save your business time and resources, while driving revenue and ROI so you can focus on the success of your business.

How does marketing automation work?
Customer data is collected over time through different interaction. These include emails, website visits and clicks, as well as manually entered data from meetings or conferences. The variation of data collection resources will create a 360 degree view your customers. Effectively executed marketing automation ill take the collected data and do all the heavy lifting by segmenting  to determine the proper audiences, quickly and at scale. You can then tailor messages to each customer automatically based on their profile. This process will ensure relevant and personalized interactions. 

What does marketing automation mean for your customer's experience?
A customer's journey with you company is equivalent to that of the quality of their interactions. If your company utilizes marketing automation, you can ensure that every interaction is relevent. Use dynamic content in your email messages that personalizes far beyond sticking a customer’s first name in the subject line. Most importantly, recommend the right products on your website for each individual user — automatically.

What are the best practices for marketing automation?
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when designing your marketing automation strategy:
1. Define your goals. Use real numbers to justify the investment in a marketing automation platform.
2. Collaborate. Your marketing automation strategy will effect many different teams in your company. Understand their needs.
3. Create visualizations. Relay the big picture of your objectives to your the comapny.
4. Prepare for segmentation. Consider all of your customer data and how you would like to engage.
5. Prepare your content. Build your content to be relayed to customers by writing relavent and engaging messages. Design these to reach customers at all stages of a sale. 
6. Analyze as you go. Figure out what works for your business and what doesn't work. Adjust accordingly.


Is marketing automation easy to use?
Yes! A successful marketing automation platform is all about ease of use. All aspects of a marketing strategy are maintained and controlled in one place. Campaigns are created with a single click. Automation creates ease in managing every type marketing task, from basic email sends to complex campaign management and data analysis.