10 Awesome Benefits of Marketing Automation for Your Business

While marketing automation has become popular in recent years, it is estimated that just four percent of U.S. businesses are currently taking advantage of what it offers. This is shocking considering all the benefits it offers.

If you have been thinking about changing your marketing efforts, now is the time to learn about the benefits of marketing automation to see if it is something that could help your business. Keep reading to learn about some of the main advantages offered by this technology.

Getting to Know the Benefits of Marketing Automation

By using marketing automation properly, you can achieve increased marketing ROI along with overall growth. Here you can find the specific ways that marketing automation can help your business.

1. Generate Higher Quality Leads

Lead generation is a crucial part of any business’s growth. By automating the steps between sales and marketing, you give your team the ability to focus on the overall strategy and to nurture the leads that show promise. This results in more prospects and more customers.

Marketing automation also provides a more detailed picture of the behavior of your customers.

By using behavioral tracking methods, like following a user’s path through the website, software for marketing automation can help your marketing team understand a prospect's interests and where they are in their purchase journey. You can then customize your follow-ups around the insights.

An example of this is if you have a customer reading about a broader category of products you offer. This can indicate they are at the start of their purchasing process. During this phase, they research and compare, while creating a shortlist of options.

If the customer downloads white papers (or other information) on a product, that could indicate a narrowed focus. It may also indicate they are ready to speak with a salesperson.

Bringing together all the information from touchpoints, including downloads, website visits, direct marketing, and social media activity the software you have in place provides automatic scoring, prioritizing, and qualifying of leads.

With this information, you can create wider marketing campaigns. Examples of these include:

• Twitter or Facebook messages
• Personalized emails
• Infrequent “drip-feed” emails to maintain a customer’s interest
• Trigger-based marketing messages

With this more targeted approach, the likelihood you can turn an interested buyer into an actual buyer is improved significantly.

2. Improved Productivity

A crucial function of marketing automation is the ability to simplify routine marketing and organizational tasks. It helps to eliminate the need for repetitive manual processes by providing automated solutions. In turn, this helps to increase productivity because your marketing staff can focus on things that require more manual and stringent monitoring.  

3. Reduce Staffing Costs

When you automate your up-sells, cross-sells, and follow-ups with customers, you will see an increase in the lifetime value of your customers. By combining this with improved lead management and prioritization, chances are that your sales activity will provide an improved ROI.

4. Nurture Your Leads

Nurturing leads is both time-consuming and tricky. Guiding your leads through the journey is worth it when it results in a sale. Unfortunately, not all leads will convert to sales. It’s estimated that up to 50% of the leads your business generates are qualified but aren’t ready to make a purchase.

If you have a small business, this can create a huge dilemma. You know that about half of your leads are qualified, but they still need nurturing. When you have a small team that handles both marketing and sales, you can’t afford to keep up with what half of all your leads are doing.

This is the exact reason computers were invented. They handle the work that humans don’t have the time to do. Marketing automation can help with this task.

5. Workflow Automation

When you develop a successful inbound marketing campaign, you need an array of assets, such as calls-to-action (CTAs), forms, landing pages, and conversion pages. While this is true, it’s your automated workflow that will tie all of these together.

If you are manually performing repetitive and routine tasks, again and again, human error may get in your way. With marketing automation, you can systemize the documentation, processes, and activities, providing a much smoother marketing workflow.

Some of the more advanced automation platforms include the automation of your internal marketing processes. This includes more complex things like workplace collaboration, planning, budgeting, approval, and an array of other processes.

6. Improved Accountability for Your Sales and Marketing Teams

With marketing automation, you gain a clear picture of where the bottlenecks in your company are occurring. This is because you have processes that are clearly defined, along with a birds-eye view of your pipeline.

If marketing is all about capturing hundreds of leads, if none of them are nurtured to reach the “sales-qualified leads,” your marketing department receives impartial and instant feedback. This feedback lets them know how they need to improve their nurturing efforts.

With this feedback system in place, you can reduce company politics and tough conversations. It also helps to improve the accountability of your departments and staff, making sure their portion of the system is working effectively.

7. Personalize the Customer Journey

Having personalized content is essential if you want to nurture leads. Most buyers today not only want but expect, targeted and unique content during each stage of their research process. With marketing automation tools in place, you can simplify the process of ensuring the right content gets to the right buyers at the right time.

Also, automation tools can capture data from all content. For example:

• What emails are customers opening and clicking?
• What posts do well on social media?
• What posts are leading to website visitors?
• Are your mobile messages resulting in more engagement?

With automated data, these questions (along with others) are answered.

The data your marketing automation system captures is also beneficial when it is time to qualify leads. This means your marketing team can use the information before passing it on to the sales team.

8. Improved Customer Retention

If you want your company to continue to grow, there must be a balancing act between customer acquisition and customer retention. While the idea of getting new customers is one that’s exciting, it costs much less to keep your existing customers.

An effective way to use marketing automation to retain more customers is with marketing intelligence. This offers relevant insight into customers (both prospective and existing) intent. When you have this information, you are in a better position to “predict” customers' decisions and needs. This allows your teams to act properly without wasting time.

9. Less Repetition and More Creativity

When replacing manual repetitive work with automated campaigns and rules, you can free up your staff’s time and focus on more creative tasks. While this offers an array of benefits for staff effectiveness and productivity, there is a less tangible and softer benefit too.

It helps with overall happiness and creativity that is derived from focusing your staff on creative work rather than repetitive, mundane tasks.

10. Better Data Leads to Smarter Decisions

You have probably heard the phrase “big data” a time or two. Today, though, very few businesses understand how they can use and collect it. With marketing automation, you can embrace all big data has to offer, collect intelligence at scale, and make it work for you right away.

With a single platform offering analytics and dash boarding, along with closed-loop reporting, and the ability to collect and sort data, marketing automation platforms offer a comprehensive solution to measure and predict consumer behavior. All this is made possible while adhering to a small business budget.

A huge benefit of using marketing automation platform is the ability to create a profile that is more complete on your prospects than before. You can use A/B test marketing to find what techniques work best.

Benefits of Marketing Automation: Now You Know

As you can see, there is an array of benefits offered by adopting marketing automation for your business. If you have been thinking about investing in this technology, it is clear that it is one marketing investment that’s worth the money.

If you want more information about the benefits of marketing automation or are ready to get started with this technology, contact us today. We can help ensure you get the solutions and results you are looking for a price you can afford. Our team is dedicated to helping ensure you get customers and keep them, ensuring you surge ahead of the competition.