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So, Why the Heck Do You Need Marketing Automation?

Most businesses are gradually shifting their budgets, focus, and resources from traditional to digital and automated marketing endeavors. Whether B2B (business to business), B2C (business to consumer) or B2G (business to government) marketer or business, companies have shown remarkable growth in quality lead generation, as well as achieved faster sales conversions and greater success in reducing cost and time spent in running marketing campaigns.

Facts:

  • As per Aberdeen Group, marketing automation has been a catalyst to give 451% boost in quality lead generation.
  • As per MarketingSherpa, a transport company has managed to save about 50% cost of customer acquisition using marketing automation software.
  • According to Bulldog Solutions, sales conversions accelerated about 70% after using marketing automation software.

So, does your business need marketing automation? Should you invest in a marketing automation platform – here is how to find out.

If your company is a startup

Flexible price models –

Marketing automation offers easy pricing rates which help startups afford and use these programs as and when they require it. The pay-as-you-go, monthly or quarterly subscription models benefit them with more cost-effective marketing solutions than traditional marketing solutions.

Exhaustive database management –

Marketing automation platforms, with major focus on email marketing campaigns, aid startups in developing and managing an updated lead database. Moreover, these platforms offer detailed analytics and reports to measure the efficacy of campaigns with data on open rates, click-through rates, and many more. They can use such data to segment leads, identify potential leads which can be converted with more nurturing and trash junk leads to maintain a database of only quality leads.

Lowers costs of a large marketing team –

With marketing automation software, startups can ward off the cost of large teams to perform mass marketing campaigns since they can automate all the campaigns with just a few clicks and few people in the herd.

Accelerates mass email campaigns –

Marketing automation platforms make automating and monitoring mass email campaigns easier. Startups can upgrade to mass marketing packages as and when they need to send and track mass emails using a marketing automation plan – they can reduce possible human errors and save time for operations and other business requirements.

Easier A/B testing and landing pages –

Marketing automation platforms alleviate the efforts and costs of A/B testing and landing page creation. Startups can ward off the costs of a design team or professionals with the customizable landing page creation tools of marketing automation software. It is extremely easier to run A/B testing on various landing pages to check which works and which are failing to attract leads.

If your company is a small and medium enterprise

SMB focused marketing solutions –

Most marketing platforms are designed to deliver budgeted, yet effective automated marketing solutions to small and medium businesses (SMBs). 17,500 enterprises making lesser than $5 million dollars reported adopting marketing automation solutions, as per a survey by Raab Associates.

Module based solutions –

Many small and medium enterprises are not willing to spend hefty initially – that’s why they can opt for module based models of marketing automation software. Similar to other software solutions, automated marketing tools allow including add-ons to the basic models, as per the marketing objectives of SMBs.

Supports growing traffic of SMBs –

With growing traffic of website visitors, manually monitoring and nurturing leads of small and medium enterprises gradually becomes a daunting task. Let alone fostering leads, many SMBs fail to keep track of their growing number of prospects resulting from various marketing campaigns such as email, social media promotions, banners, ads and other organic and paid promotions – that’s when an automation solution comes in handy. It not only curbs costs of dodging large teams to maintain lead data, but also aids in managing the database, sending mass emails to leads and monitoring response rates.

Easier drip marketing, more conversions –

These platforms allow automating drip marketing campaigns and reducing the gaps between your leads and your brands. With easier-to-create landing pages, more customizable campaign messages and detailed campaign data in place, SMBs can target their leads following their interests and data consumption patterns. Features and functionalities of marketing automation software, such as lead scoring, nurturing, automated email sending, and email campaign analytics aid in spreading brand awareness and sales conversion.

Inbound marketing campaigns –

Beyond email marketing campaigns, marketing automation platforms are proven to reduce advertising budgets too. SMBs can utilize their automation tool to perform A/B testing and figure out which digital assets are performing and more result-driven, as well as run and track inbound campaigns supported by data analytics I place.

If your company is a large enterprise

Monitor multiple campaigns and websites –

Marketing automation tools bring an integrated view of leads resulting from massive website traffic and multiple marketing campaigns to one place. Comprehensive marketing analytics fetches data on most-visited webpages, emails opened, ebooks and whitepapers downloaded and read, social ads most clicked on and how all your digital assets are consumed.

Manage large database and long lists –

One major challenge marketers in large enterprises face is managing and integrating long lists and their database of leads. A marketing automation platform allows integrating all lists, including those third-party lists purchased, to the existing lists – and it’s done!

Customer segmentation –

Large enterprises with global footprints face a tough time in classifying customers speaking different languages, from different countries. That’s why these enterprises need a marketing automation tool to segment contacts into diverse brackets of nationalities, languages, interests and preferences, lead scores and other parameters.

Trigger mass mails at one go –

Large enterprises maintain large databases of leads to send a massive volume of mails. These digital marketing tools double as database management software and an email marketing tool to send messages to thousands of contacts, with little manual interventions and errors. Target, send and monitor mass mail campaign responsiveness with just a single tool.

Integration with multiple CRMs –

Most large enterprises use multiple CRM systems to operate multiple campaigns simultaneously. Hence, occurrences of duplicate delivery and overlaps are common and are difficult to avoid. However, one effective measure to sidestep these flaws of marketing campaigns is to integrate all CRM interfaces onto a single platform. That’s why large businesses need to adopt a marketing automation platform to sync all CRM systems and be able to monitor and nurture leads from one place, view history and lead scores of all leads and decide pitches as per the data.

There are many other ways a marketing automation platform can benefit your business irrespective of the size, nature and industry you are in. The one thing you need to make sure is that you select the right marketing automation software based on your marketing objectives, volume of customer base, size of the business, and other parameters that factor into the success of your marketing campaigns.