Marketing Automation refers to various technology and software platforms specially designed for marketing departments and companies to efficiently market over multiple channels on the internet and streamline repetitive, low-value tasks. This includes tasks like posting of promotional advertisements, creating and printing mailers, outbound calling, web analytics, ad management, lead generation, follow-up interactions and much more. It helps cut marketing costs, enhance productivity and save time, and ultimately increase sales for a company. Marketing Automation software packages are specifically designed and modified for marketing departments to do away with most of these inbound tasks while focusing more on the critical business activities that drive an organization.
Sales, Customer Service and Marketing Automation complement each other and work hand in hand. The basic goal of a company would be to sell a product or service. However, most companies fail to achieve this primary objective because of their inability to effectively manage their customer relations. CRM platforms help in streamlining and organizing customer information in a way that marketing automation can make sense of it, hence helping the company improve its bottom line.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. In simpler terms, it is the process of defining, organizing and managing customer information to improve customer satisfaction and boost customer loyalty. Today, more organizations are realizing the benefits of customer relationship management and are slowly incorporating marketing automation into their CRM systems. The main benefits of marketing automation are: faster leads generation, better direct response and greater customer retention. Marketing Automation software packages are designed and modified for marketing teams to eliminate most of the inbound marketing activities while focusing more on the on-screen interactions and lead generation.
Marketers now know what kind of customers they have to target, where to find them and how to reach them. With the help of effective marketing automation, marketers can focus more on these aspects and eliminate all the other data irrelevant to the specific task at hand. Marketing automation helps marketers focus more on the leads themselves and less on chasing leads or sending out mass emails. Marketers who use such systems can organize their data better, which in turn means they can send only targeted emails to prospective customers or use marketing automation to manage their lead generation processes. If marketers want to increase their chance of generating quality leads, they should focus on prospecting, tracking and measuring the results of each prospecting activity.
Marketing automation can also help marketers measure results of direct mail campaigns. This will enable marketers to set goals and set parameters for the right message and content. This will let marketers determine the number of emails to send out and how often to update the prospect on the offer. It will also allow marketers to track the response rate of the email campaign and see if the message has achieved its goal of generating new leads. Tracking the results of any email campaign is an important part of market campaigns. In fact, marketers should be able to analyze the results of every aspect of their marketing campaigns including lead capture pages and emails to the prospect.
The main challenge for online marketers is getting prospecting to work. Without a strong platform, it will be difficult for marketers to attract and close sales. Many online marketers are now turning to marketing automation systems in order to create campaigns that work. Such systems can streamline existing campaigns as well as generate leads. In this manner, marketers will be able to make full use of online resources such as social media, email and search engine optimization.