Much has been made of the drive towards automation in business. While these innovations come as no surprise to developers and IT professionals, it has taken quite some time for the concept of true automation to find its way into the casual workplace.

The key to understanding the field of marketing automation is to define the basic terms first. Marketing is one of the most misunderstood terms in all of business. At its core, the process of marketing is putting a product in front of people who are the most likely to buy it. This is why detergent is sold during soap operas and trucks are sold during football games.

Automation, on the other hand, is at least ostensibly a term most people claim to understand. Having a machine do the heavy lifting without human involvement is the key method by which human labor can be multiplied. The most obvious example is the construction industry where machines literally do the heavy lifting. It would take a long time to build a 40-story building if the workers had to rely on shovels and wheelbarrows. Either that or it would take ten times as many workers.

So how can marketing and automation be combined?

Automated Communications

The most obvious and practical channel for a customer pitch that can be automated is e-mail. There is no more effective marketing method at the moment, so having a mailing list and regularly communicating with its audience is often at the top of most businesses' priority lists. Most companies retain an email marketing agency for this purpose.

Delivery of a mailing list can be automated, and so can responses to questions from customers. What appears in a mailing list varies from time to time, but with sufficient lead time even that material can be prepared ahead of time and rotated into a regular publication schedule at need.

Segmented Targeting

The complete record of a company's customer list usually comprises interest in numerous product types and marketing programs. When that list can be broken down into smaller lists based on category, it produces "segmentation." Through the use of testing and response rates, even segmentation can be automated.

Email marketing is becoming a larger and larger business as these solutions become more resilient and less expensive. But even if segmentation works, how can a business know they are putting their product in front of an audience most likely to buy it?

Testing

Computers love to do two things: count and make lists. Fortunately for the marketing business, those are the two things that need to be done the most often. One of the key methods for determining if customers want to see a message and then want to buy the product being offered is to test two different pitches for the same product or pitch two different products to the same audience.

The one that performs best becomes the new baseline and then another comparison can be made. Computers can perform these operations on their own if they are set up properly. Ultimately they can be designed to present the top-selling product using its top-selling pitch. Every successful e-commerce company is built on this principle.

But even if you are able to determine the best pitch and you can communicate that information to your audience, how do you know what product to sell in the first place?

Data Mining

Once a marketplace has been measured for a long enough period of time, the "noise" in the data will start to dissipate and leave behind the true measure of what product sells, how fast it sells and what message made it sell. That information is golden to any future product designer or marketing business because they don't have to spend the time or the money guessing what will work. It's right in front of them. In fact, the top-selling product probably has a little flag next to it identifying it as such. Search engines have already automated this process.

Knowing the Competition

With this information, a marketing company can determine with specificity what sells and at what price. A computer can do so in a fraction of a second and further, can do so on a regular basis. The moment one product falls out of favor and a new product takes its place, an automated solution can measure and store all the necessary data and apply it to its own algorithms.

This level of automation will produce a mathematically proven model that can not only be communicated to customers, but tested relentlessly until it is fully optimized. Granted, this level of sophistication is rare, even among the best marketing programs, but at the same time the reward for getting it right is virtually unlimited profits.

Automation is poised to become more and more popular, and promises to put incredible power in the hands of even the smallest business. The results will be the same as all successful markets: higher quality and lower prices.