It’s no secret that marketing automation has had huge implications for online business. And over the coming year or so we are going to see the capabilities of these platforms continue to increase as artificial intelligence becomes ever more sophisticated.
One of the primary reasons that marketing automation usage has exploded is that it enhances so much of your workflow. Marketing automation simplifies processes so marketers can concentrate on marketing and sales people can concentrate on sales.
Here are 5 ways that automating your marketing lets both departments work smarter, not harder.
1. Marketing gets to enjoy the best customer retention methods
For many years marketing has been “automated” in the sense that emails and other content like newsletters would be sent out at regular intervals to keep prospects interested and customers returning. Today, marketing automation lets your marketing team run ever more of their activities on autopilot like never before.
Marketing automation enables teams to move beyond periodic outreach without adding more to their workload. A marketing automation platform, for instance, lets you tailor promotional content based on a visitor's purchasing history, follow-up with relevant content, and tailor your marketing outreach based on their behaviour and interests. Marketing automation makes manual “bulk” drip marketing outreach a thing of the past.
Automation gives your marketing department the smartest ways to retain customers while reducing the effort needed.
2. Marketing is able to do more with their data
In the information age, data is being made at an exponential rate, with business collecting huge amounts of data every day about their customers and prospects purchases and web behaviour. As a result, firms doing business online, whether in the B2C or B2B realm, are scrambling to find ways to harness this data to come out on top.
Marketing automation software lets marketing teams answer many questions in-house which they would have once had to outsource. These systems offer unified platforms which can do crucial A/B testing, capture data analytics, and perform the closed-loop testing that marketing teams need, in close to real-time.
Every purchase is not just money, it’s also information that will help you reach the next customer. Marketing automation gives you new ways to leverage that data for your business.
3. Sales get their leads scored like never before
Speaking of data, your sales department will find that marketing automation can give them a much needed edge. Any major marketing automation platform can deliver massive support when it comes to lead scoring and grading—before your sales team even jumps into action.
Marketing automation platforms score leads according to very precise and specific criteria. These include who is reading your emails, how they are interacting with content on your website, and how they match up to the profiles of your target personas. They can provide your sales team with alerts in real time, too. Marketing automation gives your sales team concrete, actionable information, and advances in AI mean that this will increase greatly in the future.
4. Automation lets your sales team spend time selling
According to a 2017 survey by HubSpot, the average salesperson doing business online spends roughly two-thirds of their time doing something other than selling—writing emails, researching, looking for leads, and so on. A study from two years earlier said the same thing. If you ask any business owner what their sales team should be doing, everyone would say selling, but most sales professionals end up having to do work that can a marketing automation platform can handle.
So many of these tasks that are currently draining time and resources from your sales team can be automated. Email templates, alert scheduling, and other basic tasks can be handled by a marketing automation platform. And of course, these platforms offer the sort of lead nurturing techniques that make all aspects of selling easier.
5. Both marketing and sales get to work more harmoniously
Marketing automation provides data where once a team had to do guesswork. This means that one of the areas where friction traditionally developed, the handoff from marketing to sales, can now be done with greater accuracy. Marketing automation platforms today use analytics to determine when it’s time for sales to step in, bringing a degree of objectivity to the process.
Time to bring in automation
It’ll be no surprise to hear that it’s time for your firm to work smarter, not harder, by bringing a marketing automation platform into your business model. If you know that now is the time, our introduction to marketing automation is a good place to start!
