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The Ultimate Marketing Automation Trends for 2022

By Shrishti Jain
January 23, 2022

To survive in this new tech era, your business requires automation. From chatbots to big data, the marketing landscape is becoming more diverse and crowded every year. Automation has proven itself to be a powerful resource in the marketer’s toolbox, but in the future, it won’t be enough to have the tool itself; you’ll need to implement the best practices and optimise your use of the full power of your marketing tech stack. Here are the top Marketing Automation trends to keep up with the constantly evolving consumer behaviour in 2022 and beyond -

Customer Retention will be Critical

Brands will push harder to understand the journey of unidentified users who haven’t transacted on their site. Tracking their paths from becoming an unknown to a known user will deliver real value in terms of growth. Brands will also be focussing more on ‘Experience Economy’ as consumers today trust the reviews and recommendations of their acquaintances much more than the brand’s own advertising. A personalised customer experience will be the major differentiator, and brands will compete to deliver maximum value to their users at scale constantly. A study shows that retaining existing customers and motivating them to buy again is five times cheaper than attracting new customers. This is because existing customers already trust the brand, which helps double the revenue. Companies will prioritise making ‘brand evangelists’ of their customers to communicate with their immediate circle. This will help with quicker conversions and higher retention rates.

A Mobile-first Approach

Mobile marketing will be a major growth driving aspect for brands as it has become the user’s primary gadget for communication with the online world. So, marketers will create elaborate mobile engagement strategies. In addition, providing seamless customer experience and engagement on mobiles will be a priority for brands looking to drive growth. This can be achieved by leveraging machine learning to deliver hyper-personalisation. Mobile phone users are expected to rise to 4.3 billion by 2023. Hence, marketers will devise mobile-first strategies like in-app ads, push notifications, etc., to hike customer engagement, retention, and experience. Moreover, this approach will eventually give birth to new channels to generate revenue (E.g. offering freemium and premium services) as mobile apps offer several monetisation strategies for different app verticals.

Optimise Content for Funnelling

With the power of marketing automation, brands will migrate from a static to a more dynamic, behavioural approach in creating customer segments to accommodate a user’s changing needs and preferences in real-time. Through user segmentation, brands will focus more on email triggers based on customer interaction data like visiting a critical feature page or clicking on emails. This will enhance customer experience and spike the Net Promoter Scores (NPS). According to a report, targeting people with content relevant to their position in the buying cycle can yield 72% higher conversions, so marketers must take time to create content that speaks directly to the reader. Additionally, businesses will generate leads by offering low-cost and high-value products to potential customers. This will create opportunities to produce a positive emotional response and encourage subsequent purchases.

Embracing Conversational Marketing

Encouraging customers to ask questions is the first step towards a successful conversational marketing strategy. Brands that invest in this approach will be better positioned to increase loyalty and reduce churn immediately. Conversational marketing via apps is expected to increase business by a whopping 25%. Hence, brands will use this to drive higher engagement, deliver tailored experiences, and increase satisfaction. Furthermore, automated chatbots will encourage seamless interactions. Therefore, businesses will up their design game to initiate better conversations, answer FAQs, and quickly handle small concerns. Natural language processing (NLP) will gain more popularity as it helps create conversational responses and focuses on technology that comprehends the way humans speak to deliver the best experiences.

Emergence of AI & ML

Large-scale content automation is now attainable thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Brands will be investing in ML to design stronger marketing campaigns and be at the top of their game. By analysing data in real-time, AI models can predict the results of campaigns for different audiences and adjust bidding strategies to maximise ROI. Also, studies reveal that 51% of marketers will implement AI automation in the upcoming years. This will help increase efficiency, see possible improvements, and act on data accordingly. AI-assisted platforms will proliferate, and ML technologies will be used to study customer behaviour and online activity to better understand speech along with language patterns to create hyper-personalised user personas.

Final Thoughts

As every other segment of today’s marketing world continues to evolve, businesses must also adjust to keep afloat. Customer experience will not be returning to its pre-pandemic state anymore. So, to improve hybrid customer journeys, it’s important to find the perfect balance between digital and human interactions. These marketing automation trends for 2022 can help inspire your strategy moving forward as you integrate and test different methods for using marketing automation to connect with, engage, and delight your customers in new ways. As a result, you’ll gain the power to manage leads and enhance demand generation with greater impact. Related Article : Marketing Automation Trends To Pay Attention To