Marketing automation is on fire. It is an incredibly powerful, simple to implement and cost-effective resource you can no longer live without. Marketing automation produces highly qualified sales leads, accelerates revenue growth and facilitates your competitive dominance.
Here are the top 12 Top Benefits of Marketing Automation:
Lead Capture & Identification– Convert Anonymous Website Visitors into Marketable Leads
Lead Tracking– Track Prospects from Initial Contact through Purchase
Real-Time Testing– Test and Optimize your Marketing Creative in Real-time
Lead Scoring– Quantify and prioritize leads based on profile, behavior and conversion readiness
Database Management– Segment and analyze your audience data for pinpoint accuracy
Dynamic Personalization– Automatically adapt content to your audience’s interests and behaviors
Triggers– Automate your messages for immediate and personalized interactions
Attribution– Measure the impact of your marketing on revenue
Automated Workflow– Execute complex marketing campaigns in hours; not weeks<
CRM Integration– Integrate sales and marketing efforts into a unified customer acquisition process
Cross Channel Connection– Track leads across multiple channels
Centralized Marketing Platform– Manage all marketing activities and email delivery within one tool.
1. Lead Capture & Identification
By some estimates, a whopping 98 percent of your website visitors remain anonymous*. There’s a powerful feature in marketing automation software known as real-time personalization (RTP) that enables you to track demographic and behavioral data of your website visitors in real-time. With RTP, you can unmask, engage, and convert your anonymous visitors the moment they arrive on your site by delivering personalized content to each individual based on their behaviors, geography, referrer site, referrer terms, entry page or static attributes such their job title, industry, company size, and more. Another important feature is reverse IP look-up where you can identify the of an anonymous website visitor. Marketers can then quickly identify relevant contacts from the visiting firm and pull these records into their marketing database for follow-up.[*Source: http://www.marketo.com/ebooks/unmask-inbound-visitors/ ]
2. Lead Tracking
The key to improving conversions is your ability to follow your audience through their entire buying journey. Marketing automation represents a major leap forward over last-gen technology because it’s sensitive to your prospects’ behavior. When they open an email, click a link or download content from your site, their actions automatically trigger a cascade of events that flow naturally from your customers’ choices. Instead of handling these decisions manually, this tool allows you set the rules that initiate the triggers that produce the best response.
3. Real-Time Testing
This powerful tool allows you to create, manage and optimize emails, web forms, landing pages and SEO with one platform – Unifying your marketing materials creates a seamless experience for customers and makes managing new campaigns simple. Now you can alter reshape and clone campaign elements with a few clicks, making it easy to repeat and improve on your successes. Build a more cohesive brand, get clearer analytics and ensure total cross-channel integration with marketing automation. Additionally, this tool enables you to test variations from subject line to design and in real-time maximizes results by automatically chooses the winning creative for the remainder of your campaign.
4. Lead Scoring
Marketing automation tools allow you to nurture each lead based on whichever stage they are in within the buying cycle. Now you can produce custom scoring for each lead to identifying whether they are just performing research, interested in learning your value proposition or ready for a purchase. Maximize the value of your sales team’s time by helping them identify each leads readiness to convert as this tool pre-qualifies, nurtured, and prepares each lead for conversion.
5. Database Management
This powerful tool allows you to identify your entire audience base and produces an insightful illustration of every interaction and point of engagement. Now you can query your database while producing actionable insight that will enable you to take advantage of every opportunity. Pinpoint the prospects within your database that are most engaged right down to their specific job title, location, how often they engaged with you, what moved them to become a customer, what propelled them to opt-out and much more within this single view.
6. Dynamic Personalization
This powerful tool allows you to always engage your audience with relevant and personalized content. Now you can tailor your creative so it delivers a more one-to-one tone. Connect with your audiences more fully within each campaign as you personalize key differentiating components such as salutation, images, statistics, and copy tailor-made for their needs. With marketing automation software, you deliver more personalized email, landing pages and even home pages that reflect your prospects’ interests and dynamically shifts to match their behaviors as they interact with you.
7. Triggers
This powerful tool allows you to deliver an automated response to every action or inactivity demonstrated by your audience. Manual responses are no longer efficient. With today’s marketing technology, prospects and customers gauge the reputation of your company based on how quickly and relevantly you respond to their requests. The most successful companies use software enabled automatically triggered actions that interpret the request and respond appropriately, all at the speed of light. Now you can define a set of marketing and business rules so they respond to prospect’s every need.
8. Attribution
Traditionally, it has been challenging for marketing to understand its impact on revenues. With the ‘attribution’ feature, every marketing activity can be associated with revenue. By tracking leads at every stage of the sales process from lead capture to lead qualification to conversion into a sales opportunities and transactions, and combining this with all of the marketing touch points for a given lead, marketers can now get a complete view. For each closed deal, we can see all of the marketing activities associated with this revenue stream.
9. Automated Workflow
This powerful tool allows you to execute your complex or simple marketing program in one day by establishing if/then statement commands in one day. Now you can plan a 10 touch marketing campaign that treats each prospect differently based on the way they’ve interacted with your previous campaigns. You create the plan, the system does the work as it progressively gains intelligence every step until conversion.
10. CRM Integration
Marketing automation is the bridge between sales and marketing creating one seamless pipeline. Through its CRM integration, this tool will synchronize all activities from your marketing campaigns to your sales efforts. Now you can assign and notify a specific sales rep immediately once a lead is generated – Nothing increases the likelihood of converting prospects to customers better than responding quickly to leads when they’re ready for a sales associate to communicate. The key and timely insights will keep your team abreast of each opportunity and be converting at a much higher rate.
11. Centralized Marketing Platform
This powerful tool allows you to personalize, connect and serve up content in real-time through multiple channels – Now you can serve content directly to leads with customized email, landing pages and websites that respond to their immediate needs. No two prospects are the same. They react to content and campaigns differently. Marketing automation tracks which channels, content and efforts prospects respond to best so you can target them with the most effective campaigns. Conventional tools can supply content, but they don’t deliver a seamlessly integrated and customized experience. Integrated content that lets prospects flow effortlessly from one channel to the next reduces damaging interruption to your sales progress.
12. Cross Channel Connection
This powerful tool allows you to follow your prospect’s lineage from email delivery to their activity on your website every time. Now you can identify how your prospects respond to your campaigns beyond the initial click is critical to maximizing your efforts and establishing proper attribution. This tool makes the most complex tracking and analytics simple by connecting the dots within each campaign. Knowing what prompted a client to visit your site, click through on your email or make a purchase is critical to improving the customer’s experience and overall success.