Last Updated on September 1, 2023 by David
Guest Post by Ben Grant
Both large and small companies widely use marketing automation strategies. With the advent of the new decade, new trends in this direction are developing. In this article, you will learn about new solutions in marketing automation to promote your business. It will help your team to save more time for other important tasks and achieve even better results.
According to Emailmonday research, more than 51% of companies in different industries use marketing automation to promote themselves. According to forecasts, by 2024, this figure will grow by another 7%.
Trend №1: Conversational Marketing
Two or three years ago, companies began using chatbots on a massive scale to process customer requests. But in 2020, the first place goes to direct communication with the target audience. The practice has shown that artificial intelligence can quite cope with this.
The Ubisend group’s research showed that about 35% of consumers regularly use chatbots and would like such technologies to allow them to solve problems or requests through direct communication with robots. Today, technological solutions are based on artificial intelligence, which will soon allow businesses to implement conversational robots to answer customers’ calls and solve their needs.
Trend №2: Personalization of the Client
When you are on a client call, you should always address a client by his/her name. It was proven that such an approach increases customer loyalty by more than 20%. Just imagine if you could know the basic information about each customer even before they introduce themselves. In 2020 it is possible. Modern IT solutions make it possible to identify a website user even at his registration or first visit to the page.
Some technologies allow you to use information from a user’s social networks or personalization profile. Unique commercial offers, promotions, and discounts can be created based on the potential client’s personal information.
Soon, many companies will implement similar IT solutions on websites and social networks. It will allow you to address any client by name immediately. Accordingly, this marketing tool is automated thanks to algorithms built into the website. But already today, such systems of personalization and identification work in full-scale supermarkets — for example, in Amazon Go. In these stores without cash registers, a person enters the premises, and their identity is immediately determined. It is possible through the use of special scanners and sensors.
“The year 2020 marks the beginning of the struggle for customer personalization. Businesses will know more about a consumer than ever before” — Margot Knight, Head of LinksManagement, all-in-one guest blog posting service.
Trend №3: Chatbots Become Even Smarter
Chatbots continue to be actively used on company sites. Today they are a simple set of algorithms with integrated text. But already in the new decade of IT-technologies allow you to create chatbots using behavioral factors and artificial intelligence. That is, the program will analyze the text from the user and give an answer not by ready-made templates, but with independent integration. Even today, you can find such solutions on some sites. But this technology requires improvement and optimization.
Chatbots have great potential in the interaction between clients without involving employees. It saves managers’ time and allows reducing the number of client service staff. Soon WhatsApp will allow creating chatbots with its own API, which will significantly expand online helpers’ capabilities. Chatbots are already starting to be used for marketing research, order processing, user problem solving, feedback, etc. So, the introduction of the new Chat Plugin from Facebook helped the photo retouching studio (you can visit their website to check how it works) to add customers who first visited the mobile version of the site to the remarketing list.
Trend №4: Personalized Mobile Marketing
Advertising for mobile device users is one of the main factors of business growth. As it is known, in the period of 2018–2019, the world companies have spent more money on advertising for mobile devices than for computers. There are more and more users of smartphones and tablets, and this audience needs to be attracted to one or another brand. The new trend concerns personalized mobile marketing.
We all know the traditional types of advertising in mobile devices: SMS-messages, pop-up banners, and push notifications. But it is not so profitable to do it “blindly” anymore. Already now, many IT-companies develop algorithms for determining the behavioral factors of mobile device users. It is necessary to personalize advertising messages. Identification of each mobile device will allow doing the critical mailings, as it works in the targeted advertising.
Have you decided to choose a new notebook through your smartphone? Upon typing your request you will immediately get a text message with a good offer to buy a new model of the notebook of one of the famous brands.
It is how personalized mobile marketing will work. It is no different from the usual targeting or contextual ads but in the format of SMS-links and notifications. Personalization will also allow us to conduct SMS-surveys, which are very important for collecting valuable information from customers.
In 2020, Google has released an algorithm that significantly increases the role of the mobile version of sites for indexing and relevance of pages. It will force entrepreneurs to pay more attention to the quality of mobile versions of the sites. Accordingly, algorithms for collecting general information about users for further personalization of advertising will be implemented in parallel.
Already today there are tools for the personalized sending of SMS messages, messenger notifications, and push notifications. Thanks to WebEngage, users receive commercial offers, where they are addressed by their names. Advertisers are aware of the interests of each potential client, thanks to previously collected data. Soon there will be other tools for personalized mobile marketing.
Trend №5: Tracking Customers’ Path on the Site to Understand the Reason for the Purchase Refusal
No matter how well the site’s advertising is set up, only less than 10% of users make a purchase. What about the rest 90%? What is it that prevents them from the following step? Today there is no unified way to determine why users refuse to buy in online stores and leave the site with nothing. But modern marketing trends aim to keep the user longer on the platform. New research by Bain & Company confirms that only 5% more visitors can be kept on the site to double the revenue.
Implemented in Digital Marketing tools and algorithms will determine why users refuse offers to buy a product or service. Solutions to these problems allow you to reduce the percentage of refusals of visitors from the interaction. Also, to increase sales, personalization will be introduced to prolong the time that potential customers spend on the site and attract them with unique commercial offers.
Trend №6: Automation of Marketing in Social Networks
Automation of marketing in social networks is very important, as the younger generation of users spend more and more time in messengers, social networks, and entertainment applications. Companies want to know more information about the target audience to personalize advertising and automate the launch of targeted and contextual advertising.
Increasingly, brands are resorting to short video advertising. You have probably already noticed that stories on Instagram and Facebook, as well as short TikTok videos, are becoming more and more popular. New trends in social media marketing automation aim to define user needs and adjust the actual advertising format for the user. Now you can spend several days to launch targeted ads, filling in hundreds of items and parameters in detail.
Trend №7: Active Development of Single Customer View
In its first year as a bookstore, Amazon used a unique product recommendation system for users at that time. The algorithm based on users’ book evaluations offered several most relevant recommendations. Now such a system seems too primitive since customer identification technologies have advanced considerably.
In 2020 Single Customer View comes out in the first place in marketing. It sums up everything that was written earlier in this article. SCV technology has made significant progress over the years 2018–2019. Now the algorithms allow almost immediately to determine the interests of the user, his average purchase receipt and show behavioral factors. These data can not only be obtained by implementing the algorithms, but also visualize them in a convenient format. Information about Single Customer View allows you to increase the loyalty of work with each customer, determine his interests, offer the best delivery time, make a personalized discount, and much more.
Now you know more about the top automation trends in marketing; keep on studying these tools and use them to promote your business.
About Re:amaze
Re:amaze is a modern helpdesk and customer messaging platform designed to help eCommerce businesses boost customer happiness and revenue. Re:amaze allows all customer-oriented teams to work together in a shared inbox through email, social, SMS, voice, and live chat. Re:amaze also comes packaged with automated messaging and chatbots so eCommerce brands can succeed at the front lines of conversational commerce.
About Ben
Ben Grant is a contributing writer and a reviewer for GearYoda. He finished his study last year but is already a true expert when it comes to presenting a text in a creative and understandable manner. Ben is thirsty for knowledge and is always on the lookout for tips to share with his readers.