Who should use marketing automation?

The beauty of a marketing automation system is that it can help your business maximize on efforts that have already proven successful. Attracting new audiences through the use of effective marketing strategies is step one, but if you want to do more to nurture those people so that they become customers, marketing automation is a good bet.

How can marketing automation benefit my business?

Marketing software solutions removes the hassle from your marketing strategy and allows you to streamline, automate and evaluate tasks and workflows. Your business will be able to scale its efforts and improve how you target customers.

What is marketing automation software?

In essence, it’s a set of solutions that automates, streamlines and analyzes marketing-related workflows and engagement to get more leads and qualify them for sales. The idea is the more qualified leads you get the higher the conversion rate and the more revenue you generate.

Marketing software programs differ from CRM in that the purpose of marketing automation software is to get top-of-funnel leads, while the latter nurtures middle- and bottom-of-funnel leads. In short, marketing automation qualifies leads to feed into the CRM sales funnel for nurturing prospects to conversion.

Marketing automation plugs into a company's CRM system, which, typically, has its own native marketing automation cloud service (such as Salesforce Pardot and Oracle Eloqua). Eloqua will work with other CRM platforms that compete with Oracle's, and Marketo, an independent marketing automation platform, will work with Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft and other CRM systems. HubSpot also is a popular marketing automation platform that has its own CRM backbone.

This becomes important when a company's marketing operations rely on a survey, email, social media or chatbot app for inbound lead-generation efforts that plug into Marketo or Eloqua, which, in turn, allows those marketing processes to continue regardless of which CRM the company uses. In effect, they act as middleware connecting the thousands of niche marketing automation tools and large CRM systems, where a company's customer data resides.

What are the types of marketing automation software?

CRM integrated. Many CRM solutions today have multi-channel marketing tools to make lead generation a seamless experience from top-of-funnel to conversion. If not fully packaged, at least the marketing automation and CRM are modularized and have native integration.

Email marketing. Marketing automation has its beginnings with email marketing software. Many mailers are established and have maintained their email marketing UI as their core functionality, but they now offer newer marketing automation features like lead scoring, landing page integration and analytics beyond the open-click metric.

Marketing automation. This is the primary category featuring the standard tools, such as: forms, landing pages, lead scoring, lead database, reporting and analytics and pre-built or integrated email marketing and CRM functions.

Marketing analytics software. They can be standalone apps or modules to a bigger marketing automation system. They lend more powerful analytics to the base system and cross over to the business intelligence category.
Social marketing. These are marketing software solutions with focus on social media functionalities such as Twitter and LinkedIn prospecting, brand mention tracking on Facebook and triggered posts on your pages based on your rules for keywords, hashtags or mentions.

What does marketing automation software do?

Here are the main features of marketing automation technology, which you should look for when subscribing to one.

Lead scoring. Allows you to automatically grade leads based on specific criteria you set, including demographics, prospect behaviors and historical interactions. You assign a weight to each criterion and the system aggregates them to calculate the prospect’s lead score. The lead scores can be segregated by range and automatically funneled to their respective workflows.

Lead database. The lead database captures a qualified prospect’s details and other marketing activities like web visits, email clicks and downloads. This database funnels leads to your CRM sales pipeline and, once converted, into your main customer database. The lead database may also allow for segmentation to help you target groups.

Lead nurturing. Generally runs workflows designed to filter or shortlist prospects, which include managing the processes in email marketing and other channels and capturing data that helps in further qualifying leads.

Email marketing. Business email marketing software allows email drip campaigns and features newsletter and email templates or an editor that lets you design your layout with ease. It allows for mass emails to targeted lists with a tracking tool to view number of opens and click-throughs. It may also feature an advanced tool for triggered emails, which send the right response in real time to specific customer actions.

CRM integration. Once the leads are qualified at the top-of-funnel, they are sent to the sales team; hence, marketing automation software should have seamless CRM integration. The integration can be with a third-party solution or as an add-on to the marketing automation software.

Forms and landing pages. A form is embedded on the landing page to collect lead data, where it is funneled into your database for lead scoring. The landing page can also include dynamic content, where images, texts and calls-to-action are customized to the lead based on profiling like geolocation, industry, job title, previous interactions with you, etc.

Progressive profiling. This is a smart form that delivers the right fields to different leads. A web visitor is analyzed for key details (for example: IP address, source page, Y/N customer) and is led to a series of unique short forms to capture specific data. This feature may also require social credentials for deeper profiling.

Reporting & analytics. You can calculate an individual campaign’s cost and ROI and, generally, your marketing activities, by running analytics on key metrics that are sliced and diced in different ways that include open emails, downloads, lead volume, etc. In conjunction with CRM, you can associate these values against sales metrics like conversion rate, win-loss rate and total sales.

Mobile-optimized. Mobile-optimized landing pages and emails help you target users who access the Internet from their smartphones or tablets. Mobile-optimized also means you can access the system and your data on the go.