11 Powerful, Proven Ways to Benefit From Marketing Automation

Marketing automation. We’re sure you’re heard of it and know companies who have benefited from it. Maybe you’re considering it yourself.

If so, this piece is for you. We’ll take you through 11 ways in which marketing automation can benefit your marketing efforts to help you reach your goals faster.

In a nutshell, you can sum up the benefits of marketing automation in two words: optimization and effectiveness. It optimizes time, efforts, and strategies and does so in the most effective manner.

Take this case study from SmartBear Software. By using marketing automation, it was able to:

• Grow lead volume by 200%
• Generate 80% of global leads with automated trial downloads
• Generate 85% of revenue by the trial download leads

You, too, can reap such benefits. Here are the specific ways in which you can take advantage.

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1. Super Efficient

Successful marketing involves many jobs, big and small. With marketing automation, you can make full use of the resources available in an efficient way.

You can say goodbye to tedious labor such as posting manually, personally sending out emails, figuring out who to send them to and when, and so on. This lets you focus on the big picture, and work towards your overall goals without the distraction of these smaller jobs.

You can be sure that your online campaigns will progress as planned, with relevant results. Studies show that marketing automation causes a 14.5% increase in productivity, which is why 91% of marketing automation users agree that it’s an extremely important tool in the success of their marketing efforts.

2. Saves Time

There are several ways in which marketing automation will free up time. For example, you can manage all your online campaign posts from one dashboard and post to many accounts in one shot.

Besides, you can pre-schedule such posts ahead of time, and rest assured that they will be taken care of without follow-ups. Further, various templates and built-in interfaces mean that you can save time in designing emails and other communication.

In fact, 74% of marketers say that this time-saving ability is the most important aspect of marketing automation.

3. Aligns Marketing and Sales Teams

As a team leader, you know how frustrating it can be if sales and marketing departments aren’t in alignment. One study even shows that 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Such a waste of effort. Marketing automation can come to the rescue!

With automation, marketing leads can mesh with sales follow-ups and vice versa effortlessly. You can get more leads as well as sales. Efforts to increase conversion rates can mesh with increased productivity from the sales team.

Analytics and personalized content will push consumers up the funnel so that conversions and sales grow. The result: revenue goals are met seamlessly.

4. Increases the Conversion Rate

When leads are managed properly, conversion rates go up. Automation software enables you to do this.

You’ll reap the benefits of A/B testing, personalization, and email optimization techniques. Further, you’ll be able to analyze data to check on the best ways to get visitors lets you nurture consumers by following best practices that have been tried and tested.

In fact, marketing automation helps increase your conversion rate by 53% and growth rate by 3.1% compared to the non-users, according to an Aberdeen Group Study. So you can sit back and watch those numbers zoom.

5. Provides Specific Measures of Success

Marketing automation software can operationalize your CRM data and provide you with specific numbers that spell out what works and what doesn’t.

These reports can also give you an overview of the consolidated campaign so you can check at a glance what needs to be corrected and what needs to stay.

With multichannel monitoring, you can get detailed analyses, with statistics and graphs. These can be organized and shared across the team for swift action.

By delivering and collating data over time, you can also clearly see how to improve campaigns in the future. All these metrics will be at your fingertips as an effective gauge of what you’re doing right or not.

6. Personalizes Strategy for Long-Lasting Relationships

With the data gathered by automation, you can send prospects relevant and valuable content that they will look forward to, no matter which stage of the consumer journey they are in.

Such data can allow you to segment by past actions, geography, behavior, or other demographic cues. The result can be a focused campaign that will enhance the consumer experience.

When this is done consistently over time, you’ll not only have made a sale, and you’ll have created a loyal customer for years. This means not only repeat purchases but also an interest in new offerings. Take a look at how e-commerce brands can drive repeat business.

7. Lets You Score Leads Fast

Lead scoring, of course, helps in aligning marketing and sales. What also happens is that the entire process is automated, so that no time is wasted in reaching out to the prospective consumer.

You’ll realize the importance of this from this Harvard Business Review study. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later. And more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.

At other times, the sales team will not have to make cold calls and they can also be armed with information such as past purchase history, website clicks, and so on.

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8. Helps in Data Management and Updates

We’ve already touched upon how marketing automation can provide you with information and analytics that is of considerable help in clinching sales.

Marketing automation also goes further by confirming that key information is the same, but constantly updating relevant data. Such accuracy will always let you make the strongest appeals that can convert prospects.

This helps you streamline processes within the organization. Such data can be accessible and shareable and leads to better decisions. For example, see how mobile-first brands can greatly benefit from this approach.

9. Helps You Scale Up Operations

Obviously, the idea behind all your marketing efforts is growth. But what should also be kept in mind is that when that growth happens, will you have to change or replace your processes and systems?

With marketing automation, you get scalable processes. Since operations are based on machine learning, they are not dependent on one person’s expertise or a set of people.

Leads from the hundreds to the thousands to the tens of thousands can be efficiently handled. Everyone can still be reached at the appropriate time. And messages will continue to be personalized, depending on the nature of the consumer.

10. Helps You Nurture Leads

With marketing automation, you’ll be able to conveniently develop and track lead nurturing strategies. After all, as you already know, very few people become customers overnight.

With specifically targeted messages at every stage, you’ll be able to engage your potential customers. You can offer relevant information, support them in queries and clarifications, and make sure they remain engaged throughout.

Targeted content, personalization, appropriate follow-ups, and multiple approaches are just some of the powerful methods that will be at your disposal.

So effective can marketing automation be in this form of nurturing that the Annuitas Group reported that businesses using marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. They also report that 47% of nurtured leads make larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

11. Can Reduce Your Staffing Costs

When properly implemented, marketing automation can do the job of several employees. This allows you to reduce hiring costs without lowering productivity.

Typically, this will be reflected in marketing, sales, support, and human resources. Automation can help in handling leads, sales tasks, funnels, and other elements, which reduces the time and manpower normally needed.

Automation also reduces many smaller costs, such as invoicing, all of which can add up over time.

(Image Source – aeroleads)

Be it productivity or scalability, reducing costs or reducing time, increasing leads or revenues, marketing automation has the ability to easily achieve all this and more. If all this has made you keen to try it for yourself, you can start by checking out this brief guide. You’ll realize why a majority of marketers are already using automation, and many plan to spend more on it in the years to come.