WARNING: The following article may cast a spell upon those who read it and ignore our specific instructions on avoiding being ghosted for eternity.
At ManyChat, we’re big fans of marketing automation. Automation tools can assist you in every stage of the buyer’s funnel — from chat communication to content marketing and social media engagement — and can provide a greater chance of reaching your marketing goals.
While automation may have been a nice-to-have tool years ago, it’s become integral in successful campaigns of various types. We’ve evolved our automation tools to meet the needs of global businesses who use short message service (aka SMS), live chat, and social media to reach their customers.
What happens when you ignore automation? We wouldn’t dare anyone to find out. Here’s a glimpse at a future without marketing automation — reader beware.
Increased risk of human error
We all have good intentions when completing tasks, but humans make mistakes. Automation significantly reduces the risk of human error and increases accuracy. Without it, you could be looking at marketing campaigns with typos, broken links, or a missed step in the workflow. Leaving some processes up to automation leads to greater efficiency and frees up humans for other tasks.
Engagement efforts are hocus pocus
Automation can increase your engagement efforts across various platforms. Spark engagement in your campaigns with things like:
- Personalization (such as name or a specific discount) in email marketing leads to higher open rates and better click-through rates (CTR).
- Sending SMS with specific order numbers and shipping information with a contact link for additional assistance.
- Automatically responding to Instagram Story mentions for greater engagement.
- Sending custom abandon cart emails with items left behind, related products, and a discount code to recover potentially lost sales.
The website gets ghosted
The personalization automation can offer (such as in emails or SMS mentioned above) helps drive traffic to your website or online store. Content marketing efforts that include automation are often more consistent (like publishing on specific platforms at certain times), which helps push traffic where you want it.
Reporting is pure wizardry
Can you imagine looking at every single piece of data separately and then putting it into a report? It would be a nightmare! Automation makes reporting manageable and, don’t forget, there’s less chance for human error.
RIP to CTA buttons
When you use Instagram DM Automation by ManyChat, there’s an opportunity to provide your page viewers with a dynamic experience. You can create up to three call-to-action (CTA) buttons on your Instagram profile to:
- Send more website traffic to your website or eCommerce store.
- Create product catalogs with images that link to various experiences.
- Build image galleries that link to additional information.
Zombie-like lead generation
At ManyChat, we use Flow Builder to manage the actions you want customers to take as they interact with your brand online. You can create, manage, and track how they’re moving throughout your funnel. By the time they reach your sales team, you’ll already have the relevant information needed to make a seamless conversion.
Vampire social media tactics (time & energy suck)
Are you still manually publishing posts on social media? Are you still answering the same questions repeatedly via live chat or DM? Manual efforts such as these can be a time and energy suck, and it is not an efficient use of your hours, especially when automation can do it for you (and do it better). Not only can automation software reply immediately without human assistance, but it drops the customer right into your workflow without you lifting a finger.
Workflows become all tricks, no treats
Speaking of workflows, automation can boost how you get things done, but also their efficacy. Without automation, your workflows may fall flat, and your efforts will go to waste. Use workflow automation to:
- Create automated bot sequences within Messenger.
- Automate all of your lead generation processes.
- Send automatic follow-up messaging.
Scarecrow-style customer service
The last thing you want to do is scare away any customers. When you use automation, customers will be delighted to get responses to their questions immediately. Plus, since all of their data is collected and shared with you, they won’t have to keep explaining themselves if they move channels during the conversation.
Grim chance of ROI
Depending on the type of automation you choose to implement, you’ll see benefits in your return on investment (ROI). Here are a few questions to ask yourself to measure your ROI when using automation:
- How much time do you save per task?
- How much money is left in the budget from speeding up tasks?
- What additional tasks can you complete now that automation is in place?
- Are you or your team members able to focus on other parts of the business?
- Is there a higher level of productivity among your staff?
- Are you bringing in more revenue?
Frightening customer experience
Automation lends itself to creating a personalized customer experience because you can build detailed audience segments. The more you understand who your customer is and what they need, the better you can serve them; and that’s precisely what automation does.
Scalability is too scary
No matter the current size of your business today, you likely have dreams of it expanding in some way. But how will you create that unique customer experience, publish content on all social media platforms, be available on live chat, and provide impeccable customer service to grow? Automation. When you ignore automation, you only have so many hours in the day and can only do so much. With automation, the opportunities are endless.
Omnichannel marketing becomes a fantasy
Customers want an omnichannel experience because it’s personalized every step of the way, and the communication is consistent no matter where the touchpoint is. It’s impossible to create a flawless omnichannel marketing campaign without using automation. Use automation via chatbots, social media, SMS, and email marketing to complete customers’ omnichannel experience.
As you can see, a world without automation isn’t ideal. Automation is the tool that will save time, generate leads and sales, and create a better customer experience for a lifetime of business.
Break the spell and try automation with ManyChat today!
