What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a new buzzword that you’ve probably heard of in the last year or so. However, not many businesses know much about it beyond that. What exactly does this do and what does it mean for marketers?

What is Marketing Automation?

In plain words, marketing automation gives you the ability of going beyond just sending an email to a list.

Marketing automation is the use of software to manage customer lists and automate the tasks and processes involved to reach those customers in a more efficient and effective way. With this feature, marketers have the ability to segment their customer base and send behavioral based targeting and communication with them. This is different from basic email blast solutions like Constant Contact of MailChimp. While these basic email services allow you to “blast” an email out to a list a multiple lists, it does so in a non-targeted, “linear” way.

For example, a B2B company can send an email out to a fresh prospect an email with high level information about their company. When that same prospect is ready to buy later down the road, they can send a more relevant email that caters to that lead’s particular needs. On the backend, the business’s salesperson would receive notification of the lead at every step and even a task to contact the lead by phone.

Similarly, marketing automation can work for B2C companies too. Leads who have looked on one product page of a business’s site may receive a different email campaign than one looking at another product page. Follow up emails can be sent to encourage additional purchases later down the road. The best part is the entire  automation process is done without requiring the salesperson to reach out to every lead manually.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

Whether you’re a large or small business, marketing automation provides these three greatest benefits marketing automation can provide for your business’s marketing strategy:

Marketing and Sales Alignment

The biggest benefit that marketing automation can provide is streamlining your marketing and sales departments. You have the ability to manage your list of contacts in one place, creating a central hub for your leads to be reached by your marketing team and converted by your sales team. This allows for  an automatic feedback loop between the two departments. Your sales team will no longer have to fend for themselves. The team will have the opportunity to see what marketing campaigns the lead has been exposed to before even contacting the customer.

Better Insights

With marketing and sales being under the same roof, marketers have the benefit of seeing what parts of the entire picture is working and what parts aren’t. When marketing tasks are automated into an assembly-line-like process, you can easily find and tweak certain parts of it without starting over.

Reduce Operating Costs

How does a marketing automation dashboard decrease costs while increasing efficiency? There are two ways marketing automation does this. 1. By automating the process of qualifying and routing leads to the right people, that data is being collected. This same data can help businesses measure the effectiveness of campaigns later. 2. Marketing automation helps deliver only those golden nugget, qualified leads that have shown the greatest interest for your business. This helps eliminate the lost time/money/resources spent on not-so-qualified leads.

Marketing Automation Services

The level of behavior-based targeting found in marketing automation services will generate higher conversions, more revenue, and overall better results for your business. If you’re interested in learning more about marketing automation, Small Screen Producer is partnered with Sharp Spring to provide our clients with easy marketing automation and real results!