Today is an age of high-tech sales and marketing. Technology has dramatically increased in the last decade and many programs have decided to bring together core strengths and support elaborate business goals. Marketing automation provides sales productivity tools and comprehensive solutions that go hand-in-hand with sales management and marketing aspects of any business. There are numerous benefits that come from the use of marketing automation which can not only increase the effectiveness of sales, but can heighten the overall return on investment (ROI) on your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Let’s take a look at how marketing automation can dramatically increase your revenue through making it more predictable and enhance your business practices to gain close rates. 63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation; this statistic shows just how brilliant this tool is in creating more effective business practices.
Embrace Marketing and CRM Systems
Given that information, wouldn’t you want to use the same techniques? Marketing is the lifeline of every business, forming the brand-to-customer relationship. At the beginning formation of a company, 1:1 correspondence is simple because there are relatively few clients, but as a business begins to grow this level of involvement is not feasible. Once you have reached this point, a marketing director or team should be devised to specifically handle tasks associated with marketing and gaining potential clients. The best way to describe this specialized tool is that it is made to execute and manage marketing tasks automatically through software that tracks and responds to consumer activity. Customer relationship management systems usually have a module specifically targeted towards marketing, which spells out a process for managing leads and follow up on them.
How Automated Marketing Works
Now let’s review some specifics in how automated marketing works! In order to manage marketing leads, they must first be obtained through website information and list imports. Email dialogue can be customized to deliver important and relevant information to individuals whose information was obtained though the data collected on websites and imports. Often called lead nurturing, this is a trigger-based email technique that leads to a multi-step marketing campaign. Marketing automation also provides the ability to collect data on whether a potential lead opens up emails and clicks on links. Furthermore, the programs can gather information on how frequently an individual visits your website and which specific pages they look at. Once this crucial component is completed, an email campaign is generated with numeric scores given to potential leads in relation to their sales readiness.
The key features of most marketing automation programs are essential to generating leads through a management process. These features ultimately allow for the increase in the return on investment of your sales and business organization, which is the ultimate goal, right? The ability to have every lead in a centralized location is valuable not only to the marketing aspect of a business, but also for sales opportunities through the generation of data based on how a lead responds to potential sales tactics. Take a look at these components below.
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Email Marketing: Customized and optimized for easy deliverability
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Lead Nurturing: Emails that are trigger-based to create multi-step marketing campaigns
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Lead Scoring: Measurement of activity based on demographics and lead behavior
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Activity Tracking: Data collected through email and website activity
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Comprehensive Reporting: Data and analytics gathered on marketing techniques
How Marketing Automation can Help Your Business
Given the significant impact that automated marketing can create on a business, it comes as no surprise how popular it has become in recent years. On average, 49% of companies are currently using marketing automation with more than half of B2B companies (55%) adopting the technology. This showcases how the field of automated marketing is growing at such an astonishing rate with its ability to combine marketing, sales, and technology. One reason that this form of marketing has topped charts is because it holds a primary feature of focusing on why your targeted audiences should care about the services your business has to offer. It provides the nurturing capabilities to make customers feel as though you truly care through inspiring delight and pulling audiences closer to your brand through focusing on specific users with the right message at the most opportune time in their buying journey.
If you’re not convinced of the impact that this marketing technique can have, take a look at the percentage of companies in higher revenue tiers that have adopted marketing automation. These are some pretty astonishing facts!
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60% of companies with revenue over $500 million
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10% of companies with revenue between $20 and $500 million
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5% of companies with revenue between $5 and $20 million
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3% of micro companies that have less than $5 million in revenue
Help Conquer Your Main Goal
The main goal of a marketing team is to generate and develop leads and subsequently turn these leads into sales opportunities. Scaling this to a much larger version is where marketing automation systems become essential. These systems are designed to create massive productivity boosts for businesses because it takes out the manual work involved and funs automatically. This equates to more campaigns for less money, requiring fewer individuals, and delivering leads based on an astonishing amount of data that will hopefully turn into sales. Another important factor to consider is that the response times are significantly shorter and campaigns can be developed quickly and easily while providing all the metrics on how they are performing. Response to marketing attempts are easily doubled when automated marketing program are used in the correct manner.
For businesses that have adopted automated marketing and incorporated it into their sales strategy, they say that the main benefits of marketing automation are:
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Taking repetitive tasks out of marketers hands, allowing focus on new and more exciting projects (36%)
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Better targeting of customers and prospects (30%)
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Improving the customer experience (10%)
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Better email marketing (9%)
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Reduction of human error in campaigns (8%)
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Lead management (4%)
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Multichannel marketing (3%)
Change Your Industry’s Marketing Game
This innovative strategy has revolutionized the potential for businesses to generate more revenue. Because more information is gathered in relation to each lead, sales are given more qualified leads that are prioritized and sorted by scores. Nearly 70% of businesses are using a marketing automation platform (MAP) or are currently implementing one. This is due to the high value that the automated marketing data holds and the end outcome of an increase in potential clients. Marketers say that the biggest benefits of Automation are saving time (74%), increased customer engagement (68%), more timely communications (58%) and increased opportunities including up-selling (58%)
Increase Your ROI
Looking at marketing automation more closely, we can pinpoint how it increases your return on investment and generate predictable revenue. Marketing automation helps to convert leads to sales through clearly identifying which leads should be followed up with. For those in the marketing industry, it comes as a sigh of relief! It provides automated processes that not only allow you to save time and money, but provides the ability to do more with less. Another great reason to implement automated marketing is that it allows sales employees to follow up with leads that show an active interest while providing more information to those who are not quite ready to talk with an individual yet. This comes through prioritizing leads through information gathered interactively. Overall marketing automation provides the information required to increase sales effectiveness and make accurate predictions within the revenue cycle.
The biggest question that a business is faced with is “What’s in it for me?”. Marketing programs should be designed to answer this question directly and automated marketing can make this task simple. These programs not only generate quality leads, but they can provide incentives such as white papers, guides, e-books, and free consultations. These resources can be just the thing to give potential clients a look into your business and its thought process, value, and quality. Most often, these incentives are a critical component is moving leads through the conversion funnel. With such an innovative design that technology has given society today, a company would be losing out on a burst in business if they did not take full advantage of such a wonderful tool, so what are you waiting for?
