Marketing Automation – Time to Get Things Done Automatically!

The term automation has taken its toll on every technological space and marketing is no exception to this. Marketing automation is a combination of tools and software which helps automate various marketing processes including email campaigning, social media campaign, phone campaign, lead generation and management, fetching insight-focused capabilities from CRM and managing web analytics. Such a marketing automation approach helps streamline and align marketing strategies with the organization objectives.

What is Required to begin Marketing Automation?

• Centralized Marketing Database

The marketing database acts as a repository to store all the marketing data which includes lead information, data about prospects, details about customer interaction, deals closed and leads in the sales pipeline.

• Proactive Marketing Engagement Engine

A space for the creation, management and automation of the marketing initiatives across online and offline channels.

• Interactive Web Analytics Engine  

This is a dynamic medium to measure and judge the initiatives taken by the organization. It helps identify the pros and cons in procedures and also correct them when issues occur.

Read also: Digital Marketing – Important For Your Online Businesses

Marketing automation techniques were used only in large sized companies previously.  On the contrary, automation has risen as a quintessential in organizations of all scale and sizes irrespective of their industry and business type in recent days.

• A study by eMarketer found that after shifting to automated marketing techniques, B2C marketers were able to scale up their conversion rates by 50%.
• Nuclear Research states that organizations can expect an increase in the average productivity from 1.5 to 6.9% along with an increased sales productivity by 4%. Also, nearly 95% have found marketing automation to be really beneficial.

Functionalities and Features of Marketing Automation:

Marketing Automation Encompasses:

• Email marketing
• Landing pages
• Campaign Management
• Prediction and scoring
• Lead Management
• CRM integration
• Social Marketing
• Marketing analytics

The Three Vital Success Factors in Marketing Automation are:

• Strategy and process
• Content and Lifecycle
• People of the organization

Why Marketing Automation?

Let us list down few reasons of why should a company opt for marketing automation?

• Marketing automation allows the flexibility to plan your work based on priorities. You could plan multiple campaigns simultaneously and still work on another assignment. This automated tool would run the campaign and generate the results for you.
• It is a very systematic approach wherein less labor and effort is included. It is highly error proof than manual processes and also cost effective. This gives you greater results and improved efficiency.
• Marketing automation tool can be integrated with internal elements of the marketing ecosystem in an organization. Such an integration includes the CRM where in the contacts are synced from the CRM into the automated software. This adds on to the consistent flow of information across the organization, improving collaboration.
• It also acts as a source of supportive information to enhance deals and customer relationships.
• This tool helps create appealing content which can be personalized using in-built templates including less labor and effort.

It delivers results in a snap and hence organizations prefer depending on it to reach out to customers and improve experiences.