Social automation is the fill-in-the-blanks solution to common customer concerns. Simply put, social automation is software that contacts potential customers based on their actions on your website. Messages can be specified based on the visitor's purchases, what they have done in the past, demographics, etc. Using communication relevant to the individual customer can push inactive users into active users, ultimately increasing sales and revenue.
Let's use email marketing as an example. Email automation has been one of the rising stars of marketing in the digital age. As soon as a customer gives an email address, creates an account, log on to the company website, he is quote-unquote "being watched". The software tracks what he buys, when he buys it, and how long it has been since he has visited the site. This benefits two parties:
The Customer:
He can expect to start receiving emails almost immediately with welcome messages; discount offers, abandoned-cart reminders, and so forth, all specialized to fit his attention. This minimizes the chance that the customer will become inactive.
The Business:
Email automation is convenient because the software can store different email lists of customers who require different approaches, and allow a company to communicate with a much larger base than it would be able to were emails to be handled manually. Furthermore, there is automation software that can analyze who receives, who opens, and who reads those email marketing messages.
Social automation can make the Business-to-Consumer relationship both more efficient and more useful to the consumer. And it is gradually expanding outside the sphere of email: as platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn grow in popularity, social media automation is becoming increasingly popular as well.
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