Add another skill set to AI and automation’s growing list of capabilities: Instilling utmost confidence.
According to Ascend2’s latest study, The State of Marketing Automation 2024, 28% of marketing professionals consider their marketing automation strategy to be best-in-class in helping to achieve their objectives. (That’s up 3% from last year.) Paired with the 69% who find their strategy to be somewhat successful, these findings, the study says, leave no debate as to whether automation can be successful.
“The only question,” the study says, “is the best strategy to implement to make it even more successful.”
Email marketing remains the top area where marketing automation is utilized, while collecting quality data and creating an overall strategy were the top challenges in using automation. 9% of marketers have fully automated the customer journey, while 59% have partially automated the process.
Looking at the year ahead, the top goal that businesses had for improving their marketing automation was identifying ideal customers and best prospects (47%), followed by improving data quality (40%), decreasing costs (39%), increasing personalization (37%), and creating or optimizing overall strategy (37%).
The importance of identifying customers and prospects increased from 34% and the No. 3 spot last year because, as the study says, “automation and AI have dramatically impacted identifying ideal customers by using automated processes to pinpoint specific demographics and preferences, leading to more targeted messaging and increased conversion rates.”
(Photo Source: Ascend2)
45% of those surveyed said targeting audiences is the most effective AI application, followed by analytics and reporting (39%), email marketing (36%), content creation (34%), and personalization (33%).
“It is clear that marketers plan to lean on AI to improve the effectiveness of marketing automation this year and for years to come,” the study says.
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