Marketing Automation was inevitable, and it is just that the last 24 months have accelerated its implementation. With the new learnings, marketers will be more stringent on marketing automation features they would like to use. Because “Going forward, real-time marketing will be the holy grail of marketing”.
We don’t want to be sounding like doing a prophecy.
Why use Marketing Automation?
Marketing Professionals will undoubtedly be the first to inform you regarding interesting and brand-new patterns like marketing automation tools. From small companies to large enterprises, marketing automation (MA) is a core aspect of marketing operations. When utilized appropriately, it oversees streamlining substantial renovations in marketing campaigns and sales processes throughout online and offline channels.
Marketing automation technology drives your organization into a new age of relationship-based marketing with quantifiable outcomes. With the right combination of cutting-edge technology, efficient implementation and well-managed internal processes, your firm will be well on its way to achieving new levels of profitability.
What is the role of marketing automation in the sales funnel?
There are several success stories on how marketing automation combined with email and social media marketing can reduce the cost of customer acquisition and increase the lead to cash optimization. For a small business, it is automation at scale.
- Marketing automation is presently used by 51% of firms.
- 40% of marketers feel automation boosts productivity.
- Marketing automation increased lead generation for 80% of businesses.
- Marketing automation isn’t used by 48.6% of organizations owing to inexperience.
- 77% of marketers employing marketing automation tools increased conversions.
- Marketing automation through email is the most common.
Even if you understand marketing automation is vital, you still need to pick the best platform. To do so, you must recognize the essential marketing automation attributes you need for an automation tool. We’ve compiled a list of the most used features across marketing automation tools to assist your selection process. Use them to ensure you understand all the needed parts and their requirements.
We’ve evaluated the best marketing automation software like HubSpot, Adobe Marketing Cloud, SendGrid, MailChimp, SendinBlue, EngageBay, Marketo and Pardo to give you this checklist. These features are applicable for both eCommerce and B2B marketing automation.
How to measure the ROI of a marketing automation tool?
John Wanamaker, the owner of the first department store in the United States, said,
“I know half my advertisement is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
The short-term cost of enhancing the company’s performance is attributed to campaign-oriented marketing and advertising. In fact, according to a new study, John Wannamaker’s “waste” may perhaps be the most valuable resource.
We need to understand why some loss-leading efforts are beneficial to the organization. We must deal with the potential for a campaign’s outcomes to be delayed.
- There is an attribution problem in which the results of many initiatives are attributed to each other.
- Furthermore, it is essential to remember the long-term implications of brand creation, often overlooked.
In the last 18 months, the sales and marketing alignment has been the most significant success of marketing automation. A Marketing Team today want the following answers from a marketing automation platform.
- Who are my best customers? How to obtain more
- Where do users leave the funnel? Lead Management
- Is the sales staff spending too much time on repetitive tasks?
- Even though my pipeline is full, no conversions are taking place. Why?
- Are we producing enough sales leads?
- Do leads occasionally slip through the gaps from marketing to sales?
- Do we have a particular way of assessing our success?
- Are we making the most out of good customer experience and customer data?
But as a CEO or company owner, you may leverage marketing automation and inbound marketing to have the following answers from your sales team:
- How much quicker are sales today than last quarter? 2017?
- How much more profit do we make this quarter than last?
- What do you expect for next quarter’s sales and profit?
- ROI on Digital Marketing spend
The right time to onboard an automation software
For the most part, companies in need of a comprehensive platform for all aspects of marketing efforts have already identified a small number of effective marketing channels.
That is to say:
- You’ve had success in more than a few different places.
- You’ve already made financial commitments to expanding your marketing efforts.
- Scale up the functioning channels or try out new ones to see what works best.
These marketing automation tools are perfect for your company and even for a small business making its first move. All-in-one automation technologies may help you grow and automate all parts of your marketing operation, from email automation to ad purchasing to lead nurturing.
But there is no need to go all-in in the beginning. If you’re looking for email marketing automation, don’t get an all-in-one solution because you don’t need it for everything. Take some time to reflect on your needs and use cases, and then identify how a marketing automation platform may serve those goals.
Lead scoring is one of the most critical components of the marketing activity, but there are many more. Lead scoring is a vital component of all automation campaigns, whether you’re using it for social media monitoring or email marketing. Among the other features are CRM connectivity and email campaign capability.
Which are the most used features of marketing automation across businesses?
Find a marketing automation software with vital capabilities for your company and use that. For example, it’s impossible to create and manage many users in Mailchimp. Budget-conscious companies and online store owners should consider it, though. Mailchimp’s e-commerce connectors and transactional email capabilities make it a good choice for online retailers, even though it lacks some of the more complex features.
We have implemented, integrated, and operationalized more than 50 functionalities across ten automation systems. The top 20 qualities of every marketing product are responsible for 80% of the marketing goals achieved. To avoid the “shiny object syndrome,” marketing directors should instead focus on the customer journey and experience.
Listed here are the top 19 marketing software functions:
Visitor Tracking
One of the features of your marketing automation will be visitor monitoring. You can know who is coming to your website and how long they stay on each page using visitor tracking software. It also tells you which articles are getting the most attention and responses. Visitor Tracking lets you learn more about who is reading your content and what they find most appealing. That’s a lot of information to have!
Create and Distribute Sponsored Content
You may host (upload and publish) your marketing automation content on your website. Typically, a website and a marketing tool are combined. It might be a downloadable asset connected to a form (i.e., the user completes the form, submits it, and receives the free download), a landing page, or email content.
Keep track of content marketing
How to prove the value of your content? Indicate the importance of content initiatives by linking them to marketing analytics. Your marketing automation solution can track the traffic and performance of your content. Content marketing analytics is a terrific way to find out what works. All good marketing automation software has this feature in-built.
Observe the Prospect’s Activity
Tracking a prospect’s progression through a funnel is time-consuming for sales and marketing teams. Thankfully, marketing software enables you to configure your tool to notify you when a lead does ready-to-convert actions, allowing you to intervene at the proper time and focus on crucial tasks until then.
Score And Grade Leads to create an Ideal Profile
Outbound or inbound marketing initiatives might help you identify which leads are more likely to buy than others. Using lead scores and grading can be beneficial in this situation. This feature allows marketing automation platforms to provide a score to a lead based on their behaviours or specific demographic and firmographic criteria. As a result, the higher a lead’s score, the more probable it is that the person will make a purchase.
Make it easier to assign leads
The automated assignment of leads is an additional feature that complements lead scoring. To determine the point at which the lead is ready to buy, you’ll have to set your threshold. A salesperson can be automatically assigned to a prospect if it reaches the minimal score. You have complete control over managing your potential customers and sending them to your sales representatives. Whatever works best for your company can be done alphabetically, geographically, or in a round-robin fashion.
Nurturing New Leads
Lead nurturing is an essential part of any marketing task. It saves your sales reps time on non-buying prospects. As a result, lead nurturing is for the less experienced, younger opportunities which need to be educated (marketed to). It’s called “drip marketing” because you continuously deliver little content to maintain a brand recall. So that, when they’re ready to buy, they’ll think of you first. Lead nurturing may also aid with client retention, loyalty, and upselling.
Design Forms & Landing Pages
Landing pages and forms are vital in marketing initiatives. A decent marketing tool will let you create and configure professional landing pages and contact forms without coding skills. Create, host, and ab-test landing pages and forms with drag-and-drop ease and track their real-time performance during marketing campaigns. You may also create triggers to send an email, inform you, or improve a lead score based on a lead’s engagement with this material.
Continuing profiling – forms, lead scoring
Forms are a great way to capture leads. Lengthy forms harm the lead generation efforts. However, marketing automation software developers have come up with a solution! Progression profiling is the technical term for what we’re doing. Incremental profiling lets you reduce the number of form fields to only those that are essential. Once the step-1 form is complete, it creates a potential lead in the system. Subsequently, they will be shown more fields on any future forms they fill out for downloading content, registration and other related marketing activities. Over time, this allows you to gather enormous insight about a potential customer.
The use of dynamic content
If you’re looking into marketing tools, you already know that today’s consumers don’t want just to be sold to; they want to be involved. With dynamic content, you can segment the subject matter and prospect together. This feature has significantly affected how many people visit and interact with a site. Best of all, it can take more than one shape. Landing pages, emails, forms, and templates can all use dynamic content.
Email marketing software
Email marketing and autoresponders are the first things that spring to mind for most beginners when considering an all-in-one marketing automation solution. While marketing automation encompasses much more, email marketing is a significant component. With marketing automation, you can segment the content you send to specific contacts, use A/B testing to enhance engagement and open rates, and send automatic follow-up messages in response to a prospect’s activity.
Contact Profiling
Contact profiling or Contact Management is a simple yet precious function of marketing automation software. Profiling allows you to save and retrieve contact information effortlessly. It can also log all your company’s interactions with the contact so you can understand where they are in the sales cycle at any one time. Furthermore, most salespeople rely on contact management to save notes and other enrichment materials used to supplement their sales talks with prospects.
Smart Lists and Segmentation
Smart lists allow you to segment your database based on any criterion or measure. If you have content that would only appeal to a subset of your database, a smart list is the best way to reach them. Remarketing, also called retargeting, primarily uses these potential leads to increase conversion rates.
Local Integration
If a particular program or software was built for operation on a specific platform, it is known as “local integration.” In some instances, the same business creates the application and platform. A firm’s purchase might attempt to make the application work with the platform effortlessly, as Salesforce Pardot has done in the past. For the most part, local or native integration (like CRM integration) results in better performance and easier maintenance. As a result, it’s a sought-after feature.
A/B Testing
As discussed before, ab testing is a method for making minute adjustments to content to determine which version is superior in lead engagement. The customer data will provide new ideas to appeal to your lead database. They will be able to optimize your campaign via the use of A/B testing if you are utilizing marketing automation software. With this newfound information, you will be able to produce content, tweak your marketing process to be more pertinent to your audience and enhance your metrics.
Seamless Integration
Marketing automation software should be able to interface with sophisticated enterprise-level technologies. The following are some common instances of integrations:
- Connectors for Webinars and Videos, respectively
- Social Media
- Paid ad
- URL shorteners
- Tools for Customer Success
- Messaging Tools (Chatbot, SMS, Text)
- eCommerce
- Optimization or SEO Tools
- Creative and Design application
- 3rd party Analytics
Combining these products is extremely important to many of the same firms that are heavily reliant on marketing automation.
Integration & Reporting for CRM
Reporting on customer data is the essential aspect of marketing automation software. Real-time reporting enables you to link closed transactions to the campaigns that generated them, analyze campaign expenditures, and synchronize client data with your sales staff’s customer relationship management solutions (CRM). Thus, you will have the clarity and knowledge to evaluate your ROI and attribution. CRM will help you establish the source of your top leads, but it will also allow you to prioritize your budget and channels.
Application of AI to Marketing Automation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enhance your marketing automation initiatives. It may personalize email marketing, nurture campaigns and cross-selling possibilities, and increase client retention. AI algorithms can rapidly identify all possible campaigns for each consumer. AI and ML enable marketers to design more campaigns and experiences at scale.
Organic Search and Paid Search Insights
Organic search is unpaid, natural rankings. It demonstrates that people demand your product via landing pages/websites. Paid search enables you to deliver to have your ad campaign’s keywords or phrases visible on a search engine or social media site. Marketing Automation software frees you from dull and repetitive chores like scheduling and publishing, allowing you to concentrate on developing and executing new marketing strategies. A marketing automation platform’s SEO and paid marketing functions consist of:
Search Engine Optimization:
- Discovering search phrases
- SEO-optimized content
- Using search engine keywords
- Content tailored to demographics and localities
- Building a website reputation that the audience trusts
Paid Marketing Automation:
- First-visitor tracking (referral source).
- Conversion-tracking (the first form they fill out or engage with your chatbot).
- Orchestrating how marketing and sales engage the buyer.
- Tracking the prospect’s purchase.
Another primary usage is reporting. Marketers may develop reports to see which marketing is effective. They may also monitor which advertising or organic links attract site traffic.
Social Media Management
Social media management and marketing automation may automate and scale promotional efforts, giving more time for online interaction. Use these technologies correctly, focus on outcomes, and tweak automation to retain a human-like experience. Many companies lack a dedicated social media staff. Marketing automation systems let you submit content calendars and plan articles. You can plan off-hours postings. These systems evaluate real-time data, report critical metrics, deliver personalized reports, and suggest client responses. They can even auto-reply to client questions. The functionalities include:
- Choose which platforms to automate and how much.
- Automate: Analytics reports, chatbot scheduling
- Determine the most engaging content forms.
- Content and calendar creation
- Content scheduling
Here is a comprehensive list of social media automation tools that can help your business – https://bloggingwizard.com/social-media-automation-tools/ – speak to us if you face any difficulty in selecting the best tools for your business.
Next Steps:
We undertake Lead to Cash Transformation projects for companies with licensed marketing automation software for their business. In conclusion, we realize that marketing automation solutions support the company’s overall marketing strategy. CRM system like Microsoft Dynamics is a must-have for the sales department (and many others).
Moreover, given the sophisticated integration capabilities of modern platforms, the two types of technology are built to function together in a manner that was never previously feasible. Besides curbing repetitive tasks, it drives ROI for the company and huge savings on precious marketing dollars. Understanding what each system does for you – and what it does not – is essential before you cut the cheque for your new marketing automation platform.
The post 19 Most Used Features of Marketing Automation Platform for your Business appeared first on DINTW Digital Marketing Shots.
