How Can Marketing Teams Collaborate Seamlessly using Automation

The success of a business relies largely on effective collaboration and communication. Marketing is indeed one of the most challenging areas in a business where collaboration is extremely crucial and equally hard to achieve. In trying to enable effective collaboration, businesses often have to compromise on productivity and speed. Marketing teams need more time to focus on result-result oriented activities. But without the right tools and support, collaborative marketing projects can take much longer than they should. They end up in a lot of back and forth, lengthy approval processes, and thus, slower outcomes. This is where marketing automation can help create better employee experience. Automating some of the rule-based tasks and taking the help of collaboration software in certain areas can have a huge positive impact on overall productivity.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation refers to the use of marketing software to automate some of the repetitive, rule-based tasks. These software applications can often be integrated with other enterprise software like your CRM, ERP, or Customer Data Platform (CDP) for a seamless experience. Automation in marketing can be achieved in many areas including customer conversations, lead capture and sales prospecting, marketing content creation, email marketing, social media marketing, and more. The purpose of marketing automation primarily is to save time, increase productivity and enable smoother cross-functional collaboration between product, sales, and marketing teams.

Putting together a marketing automation strategy

If you are planning to implement marketing automation, it is always best to have a well-thought-out strategy before you start executing the changes. A good marketing automation strategy should take care of the following few points. 

Automation goals

With any kind of transformation, it is important to be clear about your objectives for implementing the change. There can be different goals for marketing automation in a business. You may be looking to cut down costs, save time, minimize human intervention or increase productivity. Depending on what your goals are, you will need to decide which automation tools are the best fit for you. For instance, if your goal is to cut down costs there is no point in purchasing an expensive tool even if it improves productivity many folds. 

Your goals help you set your priorities before diving into execution.

Existing system assessment

The next thing to note is what your existing tools stack consists of. The automation tools that you will be adopting should be able to integrate with your existing tools. Bringing in new tools that don't support your older software applications will mean you have to spend days migrating tons of data from the old platforms to the new ones. Instead, you should go for tools that have open APIs or have inbuilt integrations with most of your existing tools for the marketing automation effort to be truly productive.

Performance metrics

Lastly, when you are implementing a change it is important to have a system of measuring your success too. Choosing the right metrics in this regard is crucial. The metrics you choose will have to align with your goals. For instance, if your marketing automation goal is to reduce costs, your relevant metric has to be the increase in profits that you see after implementing the change. If your goal is to generate more leads then the number of cold outreach calls/emails sent using your automation software or the number of qualified leads captured can be a metric. The right metrics can help you track your progress and monitor the success of your marketing automation efforts. 

Marketing automation tools that can streamline collaboration and workflow 

Now the most important part in improving team collaboration using marketing automation is picking the right automation software. There are a plethora of options for you to choose from, but the tools that you pick have to help you achieve the goals you have in mind. There are different tools for the different areas that you wish to automate. But there are some common areas where most businesses can benefit from marketing automation. These include analytics, content marketing, social media scheduling, email marketing, SMS marketing and advertising, to name a few. 

We have listed five awesome automation and collaboration tools for each of these areas that every marketing team can include in their tool stack.

1. ProtonAutoML - Automated Machine Learning Tool

ProtonAutoML is a data science automation tool that can be very relevant and useful to marketing teams. In marketing, you often rely on customer insights and analytics to build your strategies and generate new leads. An automated machine learning tool like ProtonAutoML can help you draw valuable insights and AI-driven recommendations with just a click. It can also help with predictions about which prospects are likely to respond, which customers may churn, and so on. The AI- and ML-powered tool also helps with forecasting future marketing trends as well as with customer segmentation. Automating these activities, without any expertise in data science and analytics, can be a huge advantage for marketing and sales teams.

2. Narrato - Content Creation, Collaboration and Workflow Management Tool

Content plays a central role in marketing and Narrato is just the tool you need to streamline and simplify your content creation process. Narrato is a content creation and collaboration platform that will bring your entire content process and team to one place. It helps you create quality marketing content, using the powerful editor that offers content optimization suggestions and also has an AI writing assistant. The AI writing assistant can automate parts of your content creation efforts and help you create content faster. You can create custom templates and apply them to tasks to structure the content. You can also create and save style guides to brief your writers.

Collaboration features on the platform, such as in-line comments on content and messaging, allow your marketing and content teams to easily share feedback. The WordPress integration on Narrato allows you to directly publish content to your blog or website. And for sharing finished content tasks with stakeholders, you can use publicly shareable links. Narrato also simplifies content project management for marketing teams. You can track your projects on the content calendar and workflow boards. You can even save your content under Projects and Folders on the platform. 

There are custom roles and access for team members and other stakeholders. There is also a freelancer management and payments module on the platform. New features are being added every other week, making Narrato a promising addition to your marketing tool stack. Apart from marketing teams, Narrato is also a great tool for creating and collaborating on content for web design services, sales, and a host of other agencies/enterprises.

3. Mailmodo

Mailmodo is an ESP like no other. With this tool, businesses can create and send interactive emails that let users take action right inside their emails. 

For example, users can fill out forms, book meetings on Calendly, and complete checkout all inside their emails. Without the need to click on a link and open another tab more people are inclined to complete a step, leading to up to 3x conversions than traditional static emails. 

Simply put, you can provide the experience of a web browser within an email and curate better marketing strategies. 

Mailmodo’s interactive emails are powered by AMP for email technology. Interactive forms, NPS surveys, calendars, and abandoned carts, are some of the interactive elements you can include in your email using AMP. 

While few ESPs support sending AMP emails, Mailmodo is the only ESP that also lets you create AMP emails on their platform with a user-friendly no-code interface. You can customize one of their 100+ email templates or create a template from scratch using a drag-and-drop editor. 

Besides this, Mailmodo has all the features of a regular ESP like email automation, creating user journeys, contact management, email analytics, and more. 

Pricing 

Mailmodo has a free plan that lets you send 10,000 emails every month for as long as you want, making it a great choice for small businesses and start-ups.  

Besides, they have paid plans depending on the number of emails sent, starting from 49$ per month for 50,000 emails. For other plan details, check out their pricing page. 

Benefits of using Mailmodo

• No code, drag-and-drop editor to create AMP email templates that also automatically creates an HTML fallback 

• Customizable templates library of over 100 templates according to different use-cases

• Affordable pricing that doesn’t depend on the number of contacts, so you don’t break your bank while scaling 

• GDPR compliant and also ensures deliverability

• All-time available customer support

4. Sprout Social- Social Media Scheduling Tool

A strong social media marketing strategy is just as important as good copywriting for your business. Sprout Social is one of the most popular marketing automation tools, particularly when it comes to social media marketing. The platform lets you plan and organize all your social media content. You can schedule your posts for various social channels and automatically publish content at Optimal Send Times recommended by the tool to maximize engagement.

Social Sprout also brings all your social conversations to one place allowing you to respond immediately, whether it is a customer relations conversation or you're using live chat for sales on social channels. You can monitor all your keywords and mentions on the platform as well. There are analytics tools too, that create automated insights and reports helping you optimize your social media marketing strategy. You also have access to an interactive calendar, an asset management library, and a host of collaboration features.

Social Sprout can be a great tool to fine-tune your social media strategy and take some of the major load off your shoulders.

5. MailChimp - Email Automation Tool

Though MailChimp is primarily known as one of the most loved email automation tools for marketers, it has grown to include more than just email automation. It has evolved into a full-fledged marketing automation platform. But leaving their other features aside, as an email automation tool, MailChimp has established itself as an industry leader. It offers some amazing features like Send Time Optimization which automatically sends your emails at the best times to draw more engagement. The tool also sends trigger-based emails, that are sent whenever a prospect takes a certain action or makes a purchase on your site. There are also behavior-based automation, customer-data-based automation (emails sent out on birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), and more. 

You can also create pre-built journeys in your email marketing campaign that include welcome series emails, abandoned cart emails, product recommendations, first purchase, and the likes. In other words, MailChimp can be your go-to email automation tool without a second thought. 

6. Trapica - AI-powered Social Media Ads Targeting Tool

Trapica is an AI-powered tool for creating targeted ad campaigns on social media. The tool helps analyze audience data on interests, intent, and behavior using Artificial Intelligence for better segmentation. The platform also helps you automate your ad campaigns. It automates activities like audience targeting, ad bidding, creative processes, and scaling to yield better results with your social media ad campaigns. Trapica also helps you analyze and monitor your ads across multiple social channels to show you how your campaigns are performing, as well as identify opportunities and predict future trends.

Summing up

Marketing teams will always have to rely on collaboration and teamwork. It can never be a one-man show. But collaboration has its own challenges, particularly in the hybrid and remote work settings that we are gradually shifting to. In such a scenario, marketing automation and collaboration tools continue to be of huge importance to businesses. Not only do they save you time and effort but also result in a more engaged and satisfied workforce. When your team can collaborate seamlessly, getting repetitive and mundane tasks out of the way, they will surely deliver better outcomes for the business.