5 reasons why marketing automation is important

Marketing automation can turn a lean marketing team into a force to be reckoned with, allowing startups and growing businesses to compete with large-scale enterprises in the war for customer attention.

Automation is the future, there’s no doubt about that.

Marketing automation, in particular, can turn a lean marketing team into a force to be reckoned with, allowing startups and growing businesses to compete with large-scale enterprises in the war for customer attention.

According to a Salesforce report, 67% of marketing leaders rely on marketing automation and 21% plan to implement a new marketing automation platform in the year ahead.

What’s more interesting is that 82% of marketers recognized a positive return on investment (ROI) from marketing automation and said that it makes them more efficient.

The number of options is vast, though, and it can be a challenge to find the ideal mix of software as a service (SaaS) automation tools to work for particular businesses and their unique marketing strategies.

But here are 5 reasons why marketing automation is important to any business:

1. Increase Efficiency

Traditional marketing tactics that force sales to make frequent phone calls and client visits can still drive business success – but marketing automation can make them more efficient. Once customers make a purchase, they are immediately added to the “customers” list in the automation platform. When inquiries are made on your website, they are immediately added to a “lead” list. As the system gathers more information about contacts, you can create a workflow that triggers specific actions at specific times, delivering automatic communications that feel customized. And, by automating repetitive sales operations processes, you can reduce costs and your sales team can spend less time hunting down leads, and more time pursuing qualified leads.

2. Personalize Communications

Content is only good if it delivers the right message, reaching the right person at the right time. Marketing automation allows you to adapt messages to match the specific needs of each customer. You can design content that corresponds to a lead’s behaviour during the lead nurturing process and schedule that content to be delivered in response to specific lead behaviour. So, instead of resorting to interruptive ads, you can implement targeted messaging to an eager, willing audience.

3. Get Better Data (and make it work harder for you)

Marketing automation is an analytics goldmine because it enables you to collect and analyze customer data from multiple digital marketing channels. You already probably know that email makes it easy to track responses and acquire useful analytics, which then can be used to optimize subject lines, CTAs (call-to-actions), topics and much more. Marketing automation systems give you access to this info across all of your channels for all contacts on one, unified dashboard. This enables you to use historical consumer behaviour data to improve your targeting, and better targeting means better conversion of leads.

4. LEADS, LEADS, LEADS

Marketing automation software provides an effective framework for nurturing leads. Using your marketing automation system for lead nurturing can provide insights into what is holding up a purchase decision, then guide leads throughout the sales funnel until they are ready to buy.

In today’s society, personalisation is everything. So, your ability to respond to a lead and establish a relationship until they engage with the company’s products and services is essential. This is where marketing automation can help. For example, leads who visit your landing page and fill out a form to receive more information can be sent a follow-up email almost immediately, as the form triggers an automated response to deliver content in a timely fashion.

Marketing automation also allows for lead scoring, in which the tool assigns each lead a given score/grade based on their behavior and interest in specific products and services. This gives your business the information needed to determine where the lead is in the sales funnel, including how likely a lead is to make a purchase. So, you can focus on hot leads rather than pursuing cold leads.

5. USE Those Leads

In addition, to lead nurturing and scoring for existing clients and prospects, marketing automation can help you with lead generation and actionable insights. Marketing automation has important features that will enable marketers to analyze data and identify new resources for growth.

While most marketers were challenged by generating leads and building brand awareness, top marketers using artificial intelligence (AI) and SaaS marketing automation had already moved on to tasks with stronger financial impacts, including improving the hand-off of marketing-qualified leads to sales and retaining existing customers.