5 Marketing Automation Trends for 2024 Every Marketer Should Follow

The past two years have been a whirlwind for companies as the pandemic fundamentally changed their perspective on marketing.

Marketing automation also enjoyed its share of growth because the demand increased for automated workflows, retaining and engaging with customers all over the world to reduce time and minimize errors.

This article will cover some of the top marketing automation trends you can use.

Spoilers: It is all about nurturing customers, adding value to their experience, and establishing deep connections.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and tools designed to manage marketing efforts, multichannel activities, and automate repetitive tasks. 

With marketing automation, marketing teams can streamline their campaigns, such as email marketing, social media marketing, and ad campaigns, to provide a better customer experience at every stage of their journey. Automating your marketing tasks increases not only efficiency but also provides a more personalized experience for your existing customers or potential leads.

The primary benefits of marketing automation are not limited to efficiency or personalized content. You can create and track personalized workflows using marketing automation tools as well. These workflows collect data across various channels and enable you to deliver the right content at the right time to the right leads, which allows you to nurture their needs and showcase your product's value.

Keeping your customers engaged with personalized workflows leads to loyal and happy customers who recommend your service to their friends, family, and colleagues.

Different types of marketing automation

There are various opportunities when it comes to marketing automation and you can implement them into your business process. In this section, we will go over 5 different types of marketing automation you can consider:

1. Social Media Marketing Automation
2. CRM Automation
3. Email Marketing Automation
4. Mobile Marketing Automation
5. Sales and Workflow Automation

1- Social Media Marketing Automation

Social media marketing automation is a type of digital marketing automation that uses social media platforms to boost customer engagement. Social media has become one of the most influential channels for businesses to raise brand awareness, reach potential customers, and enhance the overall user experience. It pushes brands to be innovative with their "non-promotional" promotions.

Social media plays a crucial role for businesses as they can connect with their audience on a personal level. You can plan, schedule, and measure the performance of your social media profiles using social media marketing automation tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and SproutSocial.

2- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Automation

Customer relationship management automation, also known as CRM automation, is a great way to manage your customer relationships effectively. With CRM, you can automate tasks like adding new contacts, sending follow-up emails to your customers, and storing their personal information such as name, job title, email, purchase history, and interaction details. 

Automating CRM enables you to establish deep customer relationships, nurture leads through the sales funnel, grow your revenue, and improve customer loyalty.

3- Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing still provides the best ROI for businesses. By the end of 2023, email marketing revenue was estimated to reach 11 billion dollars. Therefore, companies focus on improving their email marketing strategies. Email automation and personalizing email content are important to increase growth.

Email marketing automation improves the quality of your email campaigns by using the customers' interactions and history with your brand. You can also send email sequences to new customers to build trust or to existing customers to re-engage with them. At this stage, email personalization allows you to match their needs, making you more likely to keep your customers over time.

Integrating email marketing software into your business reduces the time and money you spend on each campaign so that you can focus your energy on other areas of your business.

4- Mobile Marketing Automation

One of the most valuable marketing automation types is mobile marketing automation. Mobile phones are no longer a luxury; they are part of our lives and as mobile usage continues to grow, businesses start to adopt mobile-friendly strategies. Mobile marketing automation helps companies gather information about mobile users, analyze their behavioral patterns and provide them with relevant content, targeting them using SMS campaigns, push notifications, and in-app messages.

Considering that more than 50% of internet traffic comes from mobile users, effective mobile marketing automation can scale customer engagement and keep your brand top of mind.

Automate your future campaigns and create happy users with your brand!

5- Sales and Workflow Automation

Sales and workflow automation helps manage and improve everyday productivity. From creating daily content to sending emails to qualified leads, sales and workflow automation saves you time from start to finish. 

You can map the customer journey, retarget content based on customer needs, predict ROI, and analyze customer behaviors using sales and workflow marketing automation technology. Also, streamlining this process helps increase sales.

What Is the Future of Marketing Automation?

Many predict that the future of marketing automation will experience the dominance of AI from ads to newsletters. Personalized content will be more prominent as users get picky about the content they consume and interact with. They want to be in charge of how they want to be contacted; thus, segmentation will also be more important.

With the rise of social media channels like TikTok, visual content will have a vital role in your digital marketing strategy. Businesses must integrate clean infographics and relatable visuals into their content marketing campaigns to resonate with qualified leads.

As more and more companies switch to marketing automation, user-generated content will also continue to grow across various marketing channels. As a marketer or business owner, you should continue creating your own content, but you should also encourage your customers to generate content around your product or service as well. Leveraging such content can be used as social proof in an authentic way to achieve your business goals.

How many companies are using marketing automation in 2023?

According to a study by Emailmonday, 56% of companies were using marketing automation on average in 2022 with 96% of marketers have already implemented a marketing automation platform for their companies.

The marketing automation software market is expected to reach 6.4 billion dollars in capitalization by 2024.

5 Trends in Marketing Automation

1- Machine Learning & AI-assisted Platforms

In 2023, we witnessed a growing interest in machine learning and AI-assisted platforms and they will continue to be the rich lode of marketing automation in the upcoming years.

With big (and successful) companies like Spotify and Netflix integrating AI-based recommendation engines to monitor user behaviors, content creation will also shift from manual segmentation to machine-predicted analytics. Machine learning and AI redefine customer journeys by repurposing brand messages using behavioral analytics, tracking competitors, and creating blog articles or video topics.

Key marketing tasks will run on these automated systems, and 41% of marketers have already reported an increase in their revenue thanks to AI, according to Statista.

2- Chatbots

Whether manual or AI-fueled, the customer-centric approach will stay. That is why chatbots will become one of the top tools for marketing and customer service. Unlike human agents, chatbots can respond to multiple requests simultaneously.

Technological advancements like natural language processing help create natural and conversational communications with your customers. Chatbots also reduce the cost of customer service costs while increasing customer engagement. And according to Fortune Business Insights, the chatbot market would reach $77 million in 2022.

3- Prioritizing Mobile

It is undeniable that we are in the golden age of mobile. The way we consume data has significantly changed. Every question gets answered with a few clicks, just as every person can opt to ignore your marketing efforts with a few clicks. So it has become essential to plan an elaborate mobile-first strategy to boost customer engagement, using tools like push notifications, mobile wallet, and in-app notifications effectively.

In the future, expecting an upward trend for automating mobile marketing strategies would be an understatement. As the favored medium for advertisement and communication, creating consistent and mobile-first approach for automation will increase customer satisfaction and business growth.

4- Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing refers to the customers' practice of interacting with brands across multiple channels, such as websites, social media, email, videos, and more. It plays a critical role in automation trends as it focuses on delivering what customers want.

Marketers are no longer restricted to traditional forms of marketing like TV or newspapers. With the internet taking over the marketing scene, there are endless possibilities to engage with customers. However, this also brings the challenge of providing efficient and responsive marketing solutions as well as ensuring a consistent experience.

Thanks to marketing automation, omnichannel marketing meets consumer demands across various channels without losing the context of their conversations and it helps businesses retarget their content.

5- Personalized Content

Personalized content has been one of the top marketing trends over the past few years and it is still a rising star. Personalization enables businesses to attract new customers and retain the existing ones. Combined with marketing automation efforts, you can create a unique and personalized experience that corresponds to the needs, requirements, and problems of your customers.

Consumers expect relatable content they can connect with from brands and favor those who create such content. Therefore, marketers can use social listening, past consumer behavior, and user attributes to create a complete consumer profile and tailor their recommendations according to available data.

Final Words

As this year unfolds, it becomes more crucial to join (or improve) your marketing automation system. Whether you are using all-in-one software or starting small, it is important to follow the automation trends that will scale up your business and satisfy your customers.

Don't forget to collect data, segment your customers, and analyze results as you go.