What is marketing software used for?
Marketing automation streamlines digital marketing efforts, reduces human error, and helps drive better results. Instead of doing repetitive processes manually, you can focus on more strategic tasks such as planning and designing, setting goals, conducting research, ensuring branding consistency, measuring KPIs, and more.
While email automation is the first thing most people think of when they hear about “marketing automation,” this software does more than just email. For example, marketing automation facilitates the following tasks:
- Lead generation, management and evaluation.
- Audience segmentation and targeting.
- Upsells and cross-sells.
- Lifecycle marketing and customer retention programs.
Analytics and reporting to get insights into what people resonate with, which in turn can help optimize your marketing and content strategies (i.e. customize topic titles or choose post times).
A/B testing to help you understand which headlines, sentences, text, or images work best
Marketing automation software also helps you expand and preserve customer data by improving your customer profile. This customer data can be used to tailor each interaction and build a personalized experience in each channel.
Modern digital marketing campaigns include a huge number of components. Various solutions are available, from specialized ones that need to be integrated with other solutions, to comprehensive all-in-one marketing automation solutions that support several of the tools and capabilities listed above (or all such tools and capabilities).
Finally, marketing automation helps to understand the behavior of potential buyers on the Internet (digital body language) and determine what product or service they are interested in and where they are on the path to purchase. Based on these observations, marketers can reach potential customers with high-value content.
As marketing moves from mass outbound messages to understanding and simplifying the buying process for each potential customer, marketers need new technical capabilities. Marketing automation can help you communicate with a potential customer, draw up a communication schedule and find an individual approach.
How does marketing automation help marketers?
Marketing automation software replaces manual and repetitive tasks, making processes more efficient. The software can do operational, process-oriented tactical work, allowing marketers to devote more time and effort to strategies, content, and creative problem solving.
Marketing automation allows you to personalize the most effective demand generation and lead generation programs with the right content and targeting to show the right messages at the right time. Doing this manually would be impossible given the complexity and sheer volume of components and details of today's omnichannel digital marketing campaigns.
Benefits of Marketing Software Development
Marketing automation provides companies of all sizes with a number of benefits. It helps you find and develop leads, acquire customers, upsell and cross-sell, and perform other digital marketing and sales tasks.
Marketing automation enables marketing departments to do more with less cost and effort. 63% of companies expect to see the benefits of marketing automation within 6 months of implementation.
Higher conversion rate. When a lead generation campaign uses marketing automation, clean customer data makes it easy to identify the right customers, target them, and make offers to the right contacts. Thus, there is interaction with actual potential customers, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of a sale.
Time is not wasted on ineffective campaigns. Pull opportunity and revenue data from your CRM system to get a complete picture of what's going on and understand what works and what doesn't. Stop planning based on intuition. Use data to make informed decisions about your marketing campaigns and allocate marketing budgets for maximum financial returns.
Complete order. Marketing automation allows you to sort transactions, coordinate actions, create task schedules and ensure the coordinated work of internal teams on the way to goals. Everything runs smoother.
Increased labor productivity of workers. With the right marketing automation solution, your employees can eliminate the need to manually perform repetitive tasks and focus on strategic tasks, working more comfortably, more productively and more engaged.
Stimulation and optimization of income growth. Unified customer data in your marketing automation system enables you to respond to customer signals with orchestrated campaigns that engage potential customers and encourage them to purchase.In addition, revenue growth can be optimized through the following features:
- Eliminate data silos between sales and marketing departments.
- Opportunity to optimize spending on marketing programs.
- Accelerate the creation of more approved leads for the sales team.
- Identification of key customers and the ability to enrich customer data to improve accuracy in scoring and prioritization.
- Improve campaign results by using reliable and complete customer data across geographies and instances.
- The ability to guide prospects along the path to purchase by delivering the right message at the right time in the right channel.
- Ability to measure and manage marketing performance at every stage of the buying cycle.
- Successfully identifying the most effective campaigns and go-to-market strategies.
- Analytics to predict sales and marketing results
- Better customer retention. Marketing doesn't end with customer acquisition. Keeping a customer is just as important as acquiring. Marketing automation supports loyalty programs and provides cross-sell, up-sell and other initiatives that help build strong, long-term relationships with customers.
Best Practices and Opportunities for Marketing Automation
Marketing automation involves the use of multi-channel marketing software that allows you to customize the content, automate the targeting, timing and content of marketing messages based on the actions and behavior of potential customers. But what capabilities should a marketing automation software solution have? Here's what you need to get started.
- Campaign orchestration tools to create, optimize deployment and manage campaigns easily.
- Segmentation and targeting tools that can use data from CRM, website visit data and other sources to create audiences, filter and segment them, and dynamically update goal lists.
- Lead scoring and modeling tools that can be used across multiple campaigns and different business units
- Editors to create responsive emails, landing pages, and forms without the need for support from IT or agencies.
- Workflow and content management tools.
- Support for dynamic content that can be adapted and personalized based on various factors.
- Subject Line Optimization Toolkit.
- Key Account Marketing (ABM) program support.
- Integrations that allow you to exchange data about the actions of contacts, their profiles with the sales department in real time.
- Native CRM Integrations.
- Analytics/dashboards that give insight into campaigns, email messages.
When is the right time to invest in marketing automation?
You can ask yourself a few questions to see if it's time to invest in marketing automation.
- Can you name the quality content that you create and publish?
- Do you choose what content to show based on where the customer is on the journey?
- Is there a consensus across sales and marketing about when a potential customer should be moved from marketing to sales?
- Are you creating a steady stream of organic leads?
- Can you track lead behavior across every touchpoint and every marketing channel?
- Are you ready to start scaling up your marketing efforts?
If so, then it's probably time to invest in a marketing automation solution.
