In today’s business world marketing automation has become a key requirement. Essentially it has to do with enhancing the effectiveness of critical components of a business such as the clients your sales force is to concentrate on, use of personnel time as well as assignments your marketing teams have to carry out over and over again.
- The marketing automation industry is projected to be valued at $7.63 billion by 2025 according to Grand View Research.
- 78% of high performing marketing personnel state that marketing automation is a key factor in improved profits.
- 84% of top-notch companies used marketing automation software from 2012 to 2015.
- 85% of customer interaction with businesses will be administered without human intervention by 2020 according to Gartner.
How Does Marketing Automation Benefit A Business Overall?
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Reduces your staffing cost:
This is because a single individual supported by marketing automation(1) software can deliver the equivalent work output of a 50-man sales and marketing team. Simply implement a carefully designed automated campaign that pushes out personalized emails daily to thousands of clients and prospects.
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Increased revenue and average deal size:
Behavior-based alerts help to cut down the response time of your leads and speed upconversion. In addition to this implementing a robust strategy of automating the triple processes of persuading a customer to purchase additional or more costly products, selling a different product to an existing customer or following up on potential leads is advantageous. This is because it increases customer lifetime value and boosts sales activity resulting in a better return on investment (ROI).
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Improves accountability of marketing and sales teams:
Marketing automation can reveal to you whether problems arising come from sales or marketing or both.
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Be more effective:
The resources required to develop your business and move it to the next level will always be limited in scope and extent in a very real sense. What marketing automation does is to enable you to maximize the available hours you have to the optimum.
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Less repetition, more creativity:
Marketing automation takes away the drudgery often associated with monotonous tasks. Personnel can then be engaged in working on more creative assignments.
How Does Marketing Automation Benefit the Marketing Team?
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Refines your marketing processes:
Marketing automation makes it possible to improve your marketing. You can create several processes that allow you to pinpoint and develop your leads. The software has the capability to enable you to visualize the process sequence and adapt it where necessary to make it more efficient.
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Targets potential customers across multiple channels:
You can identify and interface with clients on a more personalized level which could be either online or offline through channels like social media handles, SMS, phone calls, email, and postcards.
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Never stop A/B testing your campaigns:
Doing this throughout every phase of the marketing operation will eventually aggregate increments made into improved funnel efficiency.
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Boost customer lifetime value through up-sells and cross-sells:
You can automate the customer profiling process thus determining which ones fall into one of the two categories of either selling up or selling across. This enhances follow up which in turn improves customer lifetime value.
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Takes your marketing activity to an ultra-targeted level:
Today it is now possible to target a huge number of prospects with a huge number of different messages purely on the strength of marketing automation. This creates limitless possibilities whereby marketing campaigns can be conducted on a massive scale.
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Saves time managing your social media campaigns:
Marketing automation software now allows you to control and implement all social media activities related to your business from a single central point. This central point which is the dashboard allows you to publish electronically, adverts, offers, products and services to multiple accounts of leads.
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Schedules posts and campaigns ahead of time:
This can be done via the use of marketing automation software. Its distinct advantage is that it keeps the user very organized by preplanning the release of business-related information on social media handles and marketing-related activity. It also grants you the flexibility to push specific posts to specific segments of your audience.
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Reduces the time it takes to create campaigns:
The beauty of marketing automation software is its graphical user interface (GUI) which makes it extremely user-friendly. You can easily develop your marketing, email and social programs by making use of the drag and drop interface which does away with the need for technical or design skills. This functionality efficiently eliminates the amount of time that would have been dedicated to creating designs for marketing purposes.
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Repurposes existing content to nurture leads:
You can refresh and post previously displayed content in a bid to prompt prospective clients to re-visit your site.
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Better reporting on what’s working and what’s not:
You can tell accurately which marketing campaigns were successful or not and the types of leads that were successfully converted to customers.
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Reward your most loyal customers with a referral program:
Marketing automation software like Infusionsoft enables you to establish referral programs for clients who help promote your product or service brand. It is a win-win situation because the same tool is used to develop and vend your products.
How Does Marketing Automation Benefit Sales?
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Taking the guesswork out of lead scoring:
Standards and guidelines must be created while setting up your marketing automation tool. The objective is to enable automatic lead scoring for incoming leads. These leads are first prioritized and then categorized as either marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or sales qualified leads (SQLs) which are most important and should be the object of focus for the sales unit.
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Prioritize your leads with lead scoring:
This can be done on the basis of prospects most likely to be won over and the capacity of the business transaction. Once you are able to identify them it greatly helps to narrow down the area of concentration.
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Keep your CRM data up to date:
How valuable your CRM database will be is dependent on how current it is. Establishing a connection between your CRM and marketing automation tool enables you to increasingly gain more information about your leads over a period of time while simultaneously confirming their primary details are unchanged.
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Know exactly when to call:
Marketing automation extends the capabilities of your sales force tremendously. This is because the tool allows you to track visits made to your website by leads. This is further enhanced by setting up alerts to help you determine pages they are viewing in real-time. Consequently, a properly placed call can convert the lead when they are most interested in what your business has to offer.
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Reduce lead conversion time:
Your sales process is made more efficient and more effective. Due to this enhancement of the process, the time taken to convert a lead to a customer is cut down appreciably.
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Automatically follow up with leads:
Leads can be constantly monitored and followed through via automation. Consequently, you can easily close a deal and win a sale. This is easily achievable because the human operator factor which has its limitations has been replaced by highly advanced software.
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Never make another cold call:
You are better informed because the tool collates data which gives you comprehensive information about your leads. This includes their challenges, preferences, website pages accessed and when.
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Improved productivity:
The automation of monotonous tasks once carried out by human operators allows for more productive deployment of personnel to other assignments. Since the drudgery associated with mundane tasks has been eliminated employees tend to be more highly motivated when engaged in other official duties.
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Workflow automation:
Processes involving critical marketing assets that cover documentation like conversion pages, calls-to-actions and forms are automated resulting in greater efficiency. Automation completely eliminates human error that often arises in the process of manual implementation of monotonous tasks.
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Relationship marketing:
This can be personalized by employing the use of automation which serves as a platform for business policies like digital footprint analysis, lead qualification and nurturing. It is a commonly known fact in the business world that customers attached to a brand are most likely to repeat sales as well as engage in word of mouth promotion of your products.
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Customer retention:
This is important because a business can only be living and active if it exhibits growth. Growth is attained by the acquisition of new clientele. However, existing customers must be retained as well thus a delicate balance must be struck between both goals. This objective is met by marketing intelligence which involves the collection, collation, and analysis of valuable data on both existing and prospective customer behavior.
Top Marketing Automation Challenges
- Creating quality automation: It is difficult to do this, without proper support from the software vendor to ease the learning curve which impacts on proper deployment of the tool.
- Integrations: It can be difficult setting up integrations between several platforms primarily with lead scoring.
- Creating content: This is a challenge because smaller organizations primarily prefer to engage developers, rather than marketers or copywriters who are the ones to create the content required.
- Engagement: Making absolutely sure your subscribers’ list interacts positively with the content of the emails they will receive. Quality content drives engagement.
- Segmentation: Difficulty in trying to determine which people fall into the right segment as segmentation should be based on the behavior or actions of the customer.
- Data Management: The need for managing your company data with personnel having both the right mindset and the right skillset.
- Optimization: Inability to optimize email for mobile responsiveness as more than half of all email is now read on mobile devices.
- Personalization: How to know the proper tone of voice to use, the length of email to send and the right time to sent a specific email to obtain great results.
- Analytics: Provision of in-depth analysis of all your leads as well as tracking conversions.
- Reporting: Deciding on the scheduling of automation.
- Deliverability: Roughly 20% of sales and marketing emails fail to get to the customer’s inbox. This results in poor engagement rates, more frequent email bounces and being blocked by email service providers.
Conclusion
The advent of the digital era has unveiled limitless possibilities in the corporate world of big business. Marketing automation now makes it possible to measure and automate processes like marketing tasks and workflows. Ultimately the end result obtained by the use of these tools is enhanced operational efficiency and rapid growth in revenue which in effect is overall productivity.
Other Related Sources:
Marketing Automation an Overview
How Marketing Automation Works?
Free Marketing Automation Tools?