Marketing Automation: The Top 5 Trends For 2021

The year 2021 is approaching in great strides. It’s time to take a closer look at marketing automation trends. Marketing automation is gaining importance from year to year: More and more companies are looking for scalable processes to improve the customer experience. There is no getting around marketing automation – and you can be sure of a competitive advantage! That’s why we’ve rounded up the top 5 trends that you should keep an eye on in 2021.

Personalization Meets Data Protection

The future for marketing campaigns lies in personalization, as all marketers agree. But there is still great scepticism about data protection—the commercial use of personal information and online identity for personalization purposes. In addition to the existing laws, private companies are already taking the first steps to protect consumer data. The upcoming Apple iOS 14 iPhone Identifier-for-Advertisers (IDFA) update, for example, will ensure that advertisers have to obtain explicit permission from users to track them.

Other platforms could follow suit – and cause a conflict among marketers. These will increasingly ask the following questions: How can you implement personalized campaigns? How can you obtain and use customer data and gain trust at the same time? Marketing automation can be used to identify personal and contextual data. Almost more critical: Humanity and responsibility have to be conveyed within the communities and customers to create authentic connections to (potential) customers.

Improved Alignment Between Marketing And Sales

If you want to achieve higher earnings, there is no avoiding coordination between marketing and sales – and marketing automation can certainly help. Around 18% of those surveyed stated that alignment between departments was a significant advantage of marketing automation. Ultimately, marketing automation tools help automate workflows and tasks, including a precise assignment of which marketing activities have led to sales.

Hyper-Automation

The entire customer journey can be designed thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Hyper-automation also relies on these advanced technologies. Once marketers have identified workflows and tasks and set up the marketing automation software, AI and ML can gain valuable insights from customer actions and optimize workflows. In this way, past customer behaviour can be analyzed and which digital channels were used. This knowledge can, in turn, be used to deliver content on the right digital track at the right time – engagement and conversions can be significantly improved!

Conversational Marketing

AI can also improve the customer experience through chatbots or conversational marketing. The development of the last few years has shown that chatbots become more and more intelligent over time and promote customer interaction. So it doesn’t get any easier to differentiate between conversations with chatbots and people. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, for example, already enable companies to integrate chatbots for communicating with customers.

Orientation Towards Mobile Devices

The use of mobile devices is increasing continuously, which makes building a mobile-first approach essential for marketers. So that engagement and customer loyalty can be further promoted, the focus will be on using tools such as in-app advertising and push notifications. As a result, marketing automation will play an increasingly important role in analyzing and delivering personalized content on mobile platforms. This allows marketers to collect valuable data about location, mobile platform and possible jump points. Based on this, mobile strategies can then be optimized, and content provided automatically.