A company can use any number of tools to grow its business, but adopting a marketing automation suite into a company's sales process is one of the more necessary options.
Marketing automation provides a host of ways to streamline your marketing efforts, ultimately making your job less tedious and enabling your team to focus on what really matters.
So, do you need automation? The short answer is yes. But if you're not convinced that marketing automation tools can transform your company, this article highlights the most important ways automation tool suites are your perfect business companion.
What is a marketing automation tool?
In its most basic form, a marketing automation tool is a technology designed to help companies manage their marketing process of multifunctional campaigns across multiple channels (e.g., email, social media, text, the Web).
An automation tool can have many uses, from lead generation and nurturing to scoring, targeting, and boosting the overall customer experience. It can handle repetitive tasks at scale, which allows your company to tackle higher-order problems while also reducing the amount of human error and manual labor.
It's also possible to devise a strategy and create automation workflows based on your marketing and sales strategy and the customer information you already have. As your lead moves through the customer journey, the tool sends relevant and timely automated communications coinciding with customer's specific actions or certain milestones. What's more, such workflows can be custom-built from scratch or modified at any time throughout the campaign to ensure the best results.
Why does your business need a marketing automation tool?
One Team, One Goal
If your company's sales and marketing teams aren't aligned, implementing a marketing automation tool can be a way to remedy that by extending a proverbial olive branch.
An automation tool encourages teams to join forces on crucial details, such as what makes a lead eligible for "qualified lead" status, as well as other important company goals and efforts. Both teams can then spend more time strategizing on how to increase conversion rates.
The facts don't lie: The use of marketing automation can lead to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
Increased Efficiency
Human error is natural when the sales and marketing teams are busy with manual follow-up and other tasks. But thanks to marketing automation tools, you can reclaim countless hours, send punctual and relevant messages, and potentially do more with less.
When you remove the repetition of sending out individual emails, texts, posts, and messages, your team is free to tackle more important projects and prioritize creative tasks that can attract more leads and continue to engage customers.
An Enhanced Customer Experience
Marketing automation tools have the ability to reach customers in a personalized way across multiple channels, creating a unique and custom experience for them. They can also be used to personalize your customer outreach—sending emails depending on characteristics or behaviors, for example.
Other uses include monitoring and tracking the channels a customer uses to reach out, and keeping tabs on interaction history and providing a seamless experience that moves from team member to team member.
Better Lead Generation
Lead generation is paramount to a business's growth, but there is lot of tweaking required in successfully nurturing a lead into a customer who's converted. Using a tool to automate your lead nurturing process can help. Through preplanned workflows, you can send personalized messaging to your leads based on where they are in your pipeline.
Automating can also improve your follow-ups through autoresponders and give your team time to focus on your overall strategy while nurturing more promising leads.
Automation gives you a richer, more detailed map of your customers' behavior, which further influences and improves the content you supply to them.
Better Data for Smarter Decisions
Ever wanted to read your customers' minds? With the help of a marketing automation tool, you're one step closer. Easily collect valuable data on your customers and measure the KPIs of your automation efforts to see whether your hard work is paying off.
The right software can also generate automated reports and evaluate your data, enabling you to gain insight into what parts of your process need to be revised. Best of all, automation software can help you predict customers' future behaviors and desires, providing the best times and methods to market to them.
