As we defined on our page, "What Is Marketing Automation," what we are talking about is a form of CRM or customer relationship management.
It is a software tool (typically cloud-based) that allows marketers to better manage their engagement with prospects and customers on communication channels such as: websites, e-mail, social media, online search, and advertising.
Think of it as a way to better optimize your business by adding more efficient processes that help save time, and money, while simultaneously leading to greater productivity.
As the screenshot below shows, one of the core benefits of marketing automation is to automate communication with prospects and customers. When someone conducts some action (such as filling out a form or downloading a white paper), marketing automation is triggered to respond. This is how a company can engage prospects and customers with relevant information, or information that connects to a user's behavior.
There are many reasons why marketing automation is important to your business operations. Take a look at this process chart below that connects stages of lead generation to sale with the technical features of marketing automation.
Marketing automation gives you the ability maximize your personnel and productivity by turning over more administrative and technical functions to automation.
This allows you to:
Another way to think about why marketing automation is important is to ask yourself some key questions, such as:
If you answered "no" to all or most of those questions, then you understand why marketing automation is important.
Now that we have covered why marketing automation is important, and some of its many benefits, the last step is to look at are the common features within systems, and what they deliver.
When many people often first hear about marketing automation, they think of it as an e-mail marketing tool. However, a complete system will cover all phases of your marketing operations, including content publication, social media engagement, advertising tracking, lead tracking, account management, and more.
Send emails with triggers and build personal relationships with leads.
Capture more leads with forms designed to convert.
Close more sales with content that is tailored to the interests of your leads.
Prioritize your pipeline and reach out to sales-ready leads.
Email or text sales team when a lead indicates they are ready to buy.
Triple your leads by identifying anonymous traffic to your website.
Immediately plug your leads into a CRM (internal or third party).
Publish, listen, and track campaigns with fully integrated social media tools.
Manage all outbound e-mails, as well as perform A/B testing to ensure deliverability.
Understand your leads by tracking their activity, so you can create one-on-one communication.
Provide your whole organization with accurate web, campaign, advertising, and sales data.
Use drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor to build sophisticated landing pages for campaigns.
Build out your own custom sales pipeline model, and assign managers for specific accounts.
With built-in, responsive templates, you can quickly build a blog and/or microsites for your organization.
Maximize an open API and CMS nuetrality to use third party applications and platforms.