Tracking and following up with marketing leads in a timely manner can sometimes be a cumbersome task. Marketing Automation Software helps to automate and scale repetitive marketing tasks and the successive analysis of those efforts. Leads in the marketing database can be supported through the buying process by providing them with appropriate, personalized content until they are ready to purchase.
Marketing automation software helps businesses to optimize their marketing efforts encompassing all vital areas of marketing including:
- Landing Page Creation & Customization
- Reporting & Analytics
- Email Marketing & Email Management
- Lead Management & Lead Scoring
Before you decide on whether or not to opt for a marketing automation software, here are some prominent features which can be important for your business.
Lead Management
Every business maintains a vast repositories of leads and prospects to build a lead database. It is important that you not only have a lead database but you also maintain a track of various touch points with your leads. This helps you in tracking the journey of your lead through the sales cycle and define a critical path your leads follow in the closure process. The marketing automation database archives actions between your company and individual prospects, much more resilient than a CRM system.
Marketing automation software also often provides advanced lead management features to segment the leads based on engagement levels or the stage of buying cycle. You can also define workflow automations to automate the movement of you leads though your segments.
Lead Nurturing
Based on the prospect’s behavior and various segmentations you can define triggers to take a specific action. You can define a sequence of automated events that runs parallel with the customer’s journey based on your customer’s behavior. Lead nurturing increases the probability of a successful sale by giving a potential customer more relevant information during the sales cycle. This feature may be especially beneficial for B2B and Enterprise buyers who work with a much longer sales cycle.
Email and Digital Marketing
Marketing automation software also provide a wide array of features to design and manage your various email and digital marketing campaigns. For example, you have a new offering or service and you want to inform your existing leads about this new offering. You can automate the whole process using such software. You can also segment your visitors and design a couple of variations to test the message that works best for you.
You can also schedule a specific time regarding when you want send the emails, giving you the flexibility of testing the time of the week that works best for you. You can also automate the responses and actions based on the action taken by your lead on the email you have sent.
Multi-Channel Lead Management
The current digital marketing activities encompass various marketing channels including emails, social channels etc. Each of these marketing channels have their unique set of features. However, it becomes important for the businesses to track the activities of their leads over all these digital platforms. Marketing automation software would help you in tracking the digital footprint of your visitors across your various online marketing channels. It would allow you to understand the content of interest for your various target segments and their buying preferences.
Reporting and Analytics Features
Modern marketers rely on traceable metrics to improve performance and augment their marketing strategies. Marketing automation systems have the capability to track various marketing campaigns, leads generated through each of these campaigns, the revenue generated and many such statistics. You can check the summary of campaigns with built-in dashboards and other reporting tools. Few software providers offer advanced analytics like attribution modelling and integration with CRM and ERP systems to provide a closed loop analytics encompassing all marketing activities and departments of the organization. These analytics would help marketers not only analyze the performance of their marketing campaigns but also provide relevant insights on designing their future campaigns.
The purchase process for almost all the businesses starts online. In many cases it starts with searching about the business and browsing their website for required information. With increased investments by businesses on online marketing channels, it becomes increasingly important to identify, track and engage with the online customers. Businesses should focus more on building a cohesive marketing strategy which would increase engagement levels and ensure that they will not miss on quality leads. Marketing automation software can be used to bring scalability to the marketing process and design efficient lead nurturing strategies to makes the leads sales – ready.
