Marketing automation statistics and 2021 trends every business should know

Whether it’s your company’s website, Facebook page, or the humble email, there are just so many digital channels out there today. All of them are a powerful force for marketing what your business has to offer. However, marketing tasks like looking up customer information and categorising leads can be repetitive and time-consuming. Enter marketing automation, which is already helping countless businesses to reduce time and costs while converting more customers.

In this article, we share what marketing automation really is, key statistics that will give you an idea of its place in businesses today, and 10 key marketing automation trends you need to know about in this digital transformation age.

Marketing automation refers to marketing software that can automate your marketing efforts. Such marketing activities can include automated marketing messages and campaigns.

In the context of B2C marketing, messages are targeted at specific individuals. This kind of marketing automation needs to be more personalised and data-driven for greater impact to individuals along their customer journey.

As we make our way through 2021, here are some eye-opening marketing automation statistics you should know about:

• 75% of companies today are using at least one type of marketing automation tool
• By 2023, global spending in automation is estimated to reach $25 billion
• The marketing automation software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.2% between 2020 and 2025, with Asia Pacific being the fastest growing market.
• Marketing automation has been reported to increase business productivity by 20%
• 76% of marketers saw a positive ROI for marketing automation within the first year, with 44% seeing an ROI within only six months
• Marketing automation has been reported to increase sales productivity by 14.5% and reduce marketing overheads by 12.2%

As the earlier statistics have indicated, spending on marketing automation is projected to increase in 2021 and the subsequent years.

In 2019, the marketing automation software market was valued at $6.08 billion. This number is expected to grow to $16.87 billion in 2025, translating to a 19.2% CAGR from 2020 to 2025.

In general, spending on marketing services will increase due to greater recognition of the role marketing plays in driving more sales and retaining customers.

Marketing automation software is now an essential tool for marketers to earn more leads, nurture them along the customer journey, and derive powerful insights on overall marketing performance.

At the same time, it allows businesses to reduce cost, be more efficient, provide a better customer experience, and convert more leads.

As implied by the name, mobile marketing automation refers to marketing software that’s specifically for marketing interactions on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

With global mobile data traffic expected to increase almost sevenfold between 2017 and 2022, it’s crucial to leverage mobile marketing automation to reach out to on-the-go audiences.

Through customer interactions with the chatbot on the messaging apps, you’ll be able to gather valuable information on your audiences such as their interests and preferences. These data can be used to fuel mobile marketing automation to generate more personalised promotion alerts, coupons, as well as surveys. It also has the capability to include geolocation data, where mobile users are sent relevant messages such as product promotions and store locations when they are in a targeted location.

As mentioned earlier, the core benefit of marketing automation is that it helps to automate marketing tasks for businesses. However, this doesn’t mean that personalisation will be sacrificed.

With the help of advanced AI and machine learning technology already prevalent today, marketing automation in the form of AI chatbots can send optimised and personalised messages depending on audience type.

For example, an AI chatbot is capable of discovering and cataloguing content on your website. Such chatbots can then deliver relevant information to site visitors based on their interactions and site behaviour.

What’s more, through machine learning, the chatbot can learn how to better engage with future users based on past interactions. That means that the marketing automation solution performs better and better over time for constantly improving results.

14% of the total marketing budget today is channeled to personalisation. 44% of this amount is spent on technology to achieve this goal.

These figures aren’t surprising given that one-to-one customer engagement has always been an essential marketing goal. After all, businesses stand to gain by delivering personalised experiences to their customers.

The good news is that with marketing automation tools, marketers can send more personalised content through improved customer profiling.

Marketing automation software can synthesise and analyse customer data across multiple touchpoints like on-site behaviour, past purchases, and bot interactions to provide essential customer insights to marketers.

For example, product discounts can be sent to people who have visited a certain product page more than six times over the last month.

Personalisation can also be as simple as terminating automated marketing emails to users who have not opened them for an extended period.

The best part is that all these personalisations for your audience can happen automatically and at a very grand scale.

CLV is an indicator of how valuable a customer is to a business over an unlimited timespan.

Having knowledge of CLVs can help you craft strategies to acquire new customers and retain existing ones while maintaining a profit. Some key metrics that help determine CLV include purchase frequency, order values, and churn rate.

Through marketing automation tools, marketers can acquire and analyse such data more efficiently. This can enable them to build more accurate customer profiles, allowing them to accurately predict and categorise customers with low, medium, and high CLVs.

Businesses can then prioritise these CLV segments accordingly, creating personalised marketing campaigns across different online channels.

In order to deliver personalised experiences to your customers effectively, you need to understand them at a more granular level. This means having a comprehensive customer information from all touch points throughout the customer journey. However, some businesses today may operate in silos to a certain degree, resulting in a limited understanding of customers. For example, the sales team may not be sharing important customer information to the marketing team.

Marketing automation software can overcome this by collating and centralising all customer data such as website behaviour, chatbot interactions, and purchase history to create 360-degree views of individual customers.

Marketing teams can then deliver content to customers that’s more timely and relevant to achieve better engagement rates.

We’ve looked at trends such as personalisation, 360-degree customer views, and predictive CLV. The reality is that all of these things can’t be accomplished without acquiring data and processing them.

According to a 2019 survey, implementing a data and analytics strategy was ranked as the third most important factor to success.

Whatever your marketing strategy is, data collection and analysis should play an essential role, and marketing automation can make this a whole lot easier.

Marketing automation tools aren’t only capable of collecting data. Using advanced algorithms, they’re also able to make sense of these large volumes of information.

With chatbots engaging customers on the website and social, it frees up your marketing team and social media team to focus on other activities that can’t be automated, such as planning campaigns and optimizing your marketing strategy.

For example, Chatbots can help to qualify leads by prompting a series of pre-qualifying questions, take their contact information and routes them to the right place.

For some cases in the automotive industry, test-drive with sales will be booked via your Facebook Messenger chatbot, but more often the conversation is taking place during a customer discovery-phase. This means they’ll need to be followed up later on by messaging to help the customer in making the purchase decision. That’s where you need marketing automation! Within solutions like AiChat’s Conversational Marketing Suite, you’ll build lead nurturing sequence to convert your visitors into a paying customer.

Check out this article to know all about chatbots, their business benefits, and real-world applications.

It’s not easy determining what leads you should channel more effort to.

With the help of marketing automation tools, leads can be automatically scored to identify warm ones based on information like user interest and behaviour.

For example, a marketing automation tool in the form of a marketing chatbot can assign lead scores to users based on specific user behaviors.

A user could be automatically assigned a certain lead score if he or she has subscribed to updates, and be given an even higher score if he or she has left behind contact details. That way, sales teams can prioritise and convert leads more effectively.

In January 2020, 3.8 billion people across the globe were using social media. This was almost a 10% increase from 2019. Not surprisingly, more and more brands are increasing their presence on social media to take advantage of this.

With that said, simply setting up social media accounts for your brand isn’t enough. You need to be timely and responsive too. Thankfully, marketing automation tools for social media can come in handy.

For example, implementing a Facebook Messenger chatbot can allow businesses to respond to user queries round the clock as well as promote its products.

Some of these chatbot solutions are even integrated with Facebook Ads Manager, letting you retarget customers with the right advertising messages based on their profile.

In fact, AiChat’s Conversational Marketing Suite is capable of this and much more—from pushing out personalised content to churning out incisive marketing analytics.

If you’re looking for a marketing automation solution to future-proof your marketing in 2021 and beyond, be sure to learn more about our Conversational Marketing Suite here.

Alternatively, you can speak with us directly so we can learn more about your business and share how we can take it to the next level.