From the perspective of making your marketing efforts more profitable, automation may seem like an effective solution to improve your customer service and reduce your data entry errors.

However, what exactly is automation? It’s an amalgam of techniques that allow tasks to be executed without any human intervention. It’s an innovative way to eliminate repetitive tasks, however, in a B2B context, you must also consider some important dangers of implementing this process.

The main advantage of automation is the improvement of your customer service through data analysis. It allows you to recognize more efficiently the customers with a real sales potential for your organization.

After gathering your contacts in a database, your automation software will allow you to get an overview of your consumers’ behavior on your website.

For example, how long they spent on your page or the links they clicked on. By the way, if you doubt the importance of acquiring marketing data, you can read our article on the subject.

You can also schedule follow-up actions that correspond to observed behaviors in order to better respond to your customers’ needs. For example, send automatic emails that specifically target consumers who have already shown an interest in the brand.

These specific actions greatly promote conversion by stimulating consumer desires in the right place at the right time.  You can also limit your unnecessary marketing efforts towards uninterested or “dormant” prospects by removing them gradually through the automation program’s analysis.

In a B2B context, that is to say “business-to-business”, it is relevant to be able to identify prospects who have a strong interest in your services and products. By sending personalized emails, you can feed the interest of your consumers and  evaluate the ideal moment to contact them and start a business relationship.

To really engage your customers, the most important thing to remember is that you are talking to a human being first.

Before automating your newsletter or welcome email, you must first adopt a relevant and quality content creation strategy. Your inbound marketing strategy, which allows you to subtly showcase your offer, as well as your nurturing strategy, must be developed by content writers with the judgment to convince prospects to do business with you. You need to carefully consider the communications you put forward so that it is truly personalized and not robotized and uninspiring.

Before implementing such a system for your organization, you must realize that it is a huge investment in time and money. You have to evaluate the potential benefits of such an automation program and make sure you have the resources to train your employees so they can fully benefit from all its advantages.

Here are some powerful marketing automation tools to consider for your own B2B strategy.

• Buffer
• HubSpot
• Mailchimp

• Could any of my tasks benefit from automation?
• Could I avoid certain errors by using automation?
• Is the human element at the heart of my customer relationships?