Marketing automation has the potential to add serious firepower to your business growth. According to Oracle, “[For] every dollar spent, marketing automation returns $5.44 over the first three years with a payback period in under six months.” The potential return on investment of marketing automation makes it something every business owner should consider.
Marketing automation is a broad category. Tools that fall under marketing automation can do everything from scheduling social media posts to segmenting your email lists. Ideally, marketing automation technology can alleviate the more time-consuming, tedious tasks that take up too much of your team’s energy. Here are a few examples of ways marketing automation can help your business grow.
Personalize the customer journey
Marketing automation tools make it easy to ensure your content is seen by the right prospective customers at the right time. These tools can pull key details from your CRM to make every piece of outreach feel personalized and tailored to the individual. In addition, marketing automation tools capture data from each stage of the customer journey that can be used to further improve the customer experience.
For example, an automation tool can start sending emails to different customer segments with relevant offers and promos. “Once users are receiving email marketing messages or newsletters, the automated email system will keep track of whether email messages from your company are opened, and which links are clicked,” wrote Constant Contact. “This adds even more data to your marketing campaign to provide a personalized experience and ‘seal the deal’ with a potential new customer.”
Bring together sales and marketing
Alignment between sales and marketing helps enable the omnichannel experience that customers have come to expect. Marketing automation tools can bring together data from across these teams to deliver higher customer lifetime value. These platforms can extract insights from sales channels and marketing campaigns that improve lead quality, increase revenue, and automate manual processes like lead assignment and follow-up.
[Read more: Automation Is the Future of Sales (Even for Small Business)]
Ideally, marketing automation technology can alleviate the more time-consuming, tedious tasks that take up too much of your team’s energy.
Improve lead generation and nurturing
Better collaboration between sales and marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. Marketing automation can also improve lead generation and nurturing to improve customer acquisition and retention.
“Marketing automation can help you identify, engage with, and gain insight into your best customers’ behavior to deliver personalized content when and where they need it most,” wrote Adobe. “It builds a partnership with your sales team to quickly connect with the right leads at the right time in a meaningful way.”
Automation tools can segment your email lists, post on social media at the right time of day for maximum visibility, engage customers across their path to purchase, and send mobile marketing messages to boost loyalty.
[Read more: What Is AI-Powered Business Automation?]
Quickly understand what’s working
Marketing automation tools do the heavy lifting of analyzing your campaigns to see where you can improve. Most marketing automation tools have a unified analytics dashboard collecting data from across your email, social media, mobile, and other marketing channels. This dashboard provides virtually instantaneous feedback on campaigns and predicts customer behavior. You can use these insights to adjust your messaging and boost growth.
“Marketing automation helps you create and keep a system of record, run cross-channel tests to optimize programs and prove ROI and funnel impact. You are able to see what’s driving ROI and what needs work,” wrote Adobe.
Ultimately, this information allows you to stop spending money on ineffective campaigns and allocate resources to those that drive growth.
Alleviate growing pains
The bigger your business, the more customers you have to communicate with — a great problem to have. However, with only eight hours in the workday, there’s only so much your team can do to keep the content engines running.
As your business grows, marketing automation tools can scale with you, taking on the manual and labor-intensive tasks of running campaigns. “Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead overall,” reported Salesforce.
Rather than add headcount, boost productivity and continue to fuel growth with an automation tool.
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