How marketing automation works
Marketing automation enables marketers to create sophisticated and engaging campaigns that automatically respond to customer/prospect behaviours, lifecycle segments and other criteria. It automates repetitive tasks, increasing efficiency and reducing human error.
The marketing department simply specifies the criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by the software.
Be warned: it works only when the message is relevant. Every customer has a combination of preferences, interests and demands that makes them unique. The closer you come to addressing the uniquely triggered needs in your marketing communications, the greater the likelihood that you will convert prospects into customers. It’s about using the right channel to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
Marketing automation, a component of customer relationship management (CRM), streamlines sales and marketing by replacing repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.
It runs campaigns to support awareness and sales of a business’s products and services, and also helps sales and marketing teams with marketing workflow, budgeting, planning, campaign asset creation, organisational calendars, lead generation and lead nurturing. Some of the most popular vendors are Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, SugarCRM and Genius.com.
The current market
Although still in its infancy, marketing automation is a hot topic, particularly for larger companies. In 2009 Forrester Research estimated that only 2% to 5% of B2B firms had invested in full-featured marketing automation functionality. That number has grown to 18% in 2011, with analyst, Sirius Decisions, indicating that adoption is likely to grow to more than 50% by 2015.
Why? Because businesses are understanding the need to automate their customer communications, nurturing and campaigns. High quality lead generation remains the biggest challenge for most organisations. Market researcher, Focus, also found that more than 80% of best-in-class companies say their number one reason for wanting automated sales platforms is to close sales faster.
But here’s an even more exciting statistic: according to Focus.com, the combination of process with marketing automation yielded a 417% increase in revenue for the companies surveyed. In addition, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads; nurtured leads in turn make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
Marketers can impact revenue like never before
Companies that implement marketing automation are better equipped to manage lead flow and process leads more efficiently. By optimising marketing programmes, companies can create a faster and more predictable revenue cycle, increase profitability with tactics that result in higher conversion rates, and align outcomes with strategy.
Marketing and digital technology coach, John Jantsch, once defined marketing as ‘getting someone with a need to know, like and trust you.’ More recently, he expanded this idea, commonly referred to as the marketing funnel, into a ‘marketing hourglass’. In addition to know, like, trust, he has added try, buy, repeat, and refer.
Jantsch says marketing automation can play a vital role in all seven of these stages, and that the difference between a thrilled customer and a satisfied customer is the follow-up and education provided after the sale.
What are the benefits?
The biggest gain is improved return on marketing investment as a result of better response rates to campaigns. More efficient prospecting is achieved as automated processes provide a vehicle for continuously gathering, testing and refining data, resulting in increasingly accurate customer information.
Marketing automation is also an integral part of effective CRM, offering personalised communications and service to existing customers. The technology enables you to time your marketing campaigns so they send the right messages to customers when they need your product or service. The value comes when you take full advantage of triggers to increase revenues or decrease costs while enhancing overall profitability.
