Marketing automation platforms have been widely used by companies around the world as a means to support marketing campaigns, increase sales productivity, and even manage customer service. However, according to a recent infographic by Invesp, 27% of organizations say they still consider themselves “new” to marketing automation and need to get on board.
The point here is that it’s not just a matter of operationalizing marketing initiatives, but of trying to improve their efficiency for a greater ROI (with HubSpot estimating a massive 3,600% return on email marketing alone). But marketing automation also offers several other benefits from marketing and sales alignment to accurate reporting. If we have to point out the most enjoyable part about marketing automation, it will probably be the fact that all your omnichannel expectations can finally take flight - with timely, highly-personalized content delivery, based on where they are in the customer journey. It’s about having a human-centric mindset, rather than a sales target mentality.
In this article, we explain the less obvious evidence of why marketing automation should be a major factor of your strategic marketing plan.
You can read everything that companies are “supposed” to do, and set up theoretically perfect email marketing campaigns, but still get poor results. Why? Because context is everything, and your marketing efforts need to match your smart goals and growth stage.
A marketing automation platform will allow you to monitor your potential customer’s behavior at every section of your website. From knowing the specific links your prospects clicked on, which pages they visited after clicking and the resourceful content they viewed to which assets they downloaded. Content is king, but so is context.
If you’re looking for a place to create drip email marketing campaigns and track their success, marketing automation software is the resource you need to master their performance. Say goodbye to hard times converting leads into sales prospects.
The beauty of using such software is that you can set it to send specific emails to customers as you continue engaging with them or as they complete specific actions in their path to a sales-ready stage.
Most email service providers don’t allow you to go the extra mile and say one email influences the buying decision if the customer opens it but took two weeks to purchase.
Luckly, marketing automation is different as it allows digital marketers to keep track of the entire buyer’s journey from the very first interaction. How? Through marketing attribution reports that give credit to all interactions that created contacts, deals, and revenue and then match it to key conversion points in the lead conversion journey.
Briefly, instead of guessing what generated the purchase, you can accurately map the entire journey.
How is your sales team identifying and prioritizing the most qualified leads? Are you using any sales software for your business growth? How do you know the worthiness of your prospects? Lead scoring is the shared methodology you need for ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness.
Either by assigning values to each criteria or by using machine learning to parse through thousands of data points to predict behavior, lead scoring is one of the most promising features of marketing automation.
Besides it speaks to better alignment between marketing and sales teams, it also automates the lead qualification process, meaning no time is wasted and your sales reps can reach out to ideal prospects in due course.
Time to get real. The human in the automation exists. While you can send out a newsletter to your entire database who have in the past provided their email addresses, the results may be minimal. Why? Because the message sent may be irrelevant to some of them. But with marketing automation we can segment the recipients and allow prospects to receive different emails based on their past interactions with your brand.
Marketing automation is now the name of the game across many industries. With increased efficiencies, better ROI, and an enhanced customer experience on offer – just for starters – we made this article for embracing marketing automation now.
Today's demands ask marketers for a clear picture of the customer journey through the sales funnel. And for scalable processes to improve conversion rates based on data management and advanced personalization.