Complex sales can take months or years to close. Many potential deals are lost when leads are not nurtured and end up falling through the cracks.
If you can respond appropriately to a customer, at appropriate buying stages, you have a better chance of converting that sale. It’s about getting the right message to the right customer at the right time.
If you can’t observe buyer behavior, you’re left largely unaware of the buyers’ needs or timing. So you’re confined to blasting out the same messages to everyone on your list, or you fail to nurture leads at all.
Competing in today’s digital business environment requires a tool that helps you to:
- Nurture non-sales-ready leads until they’re ready to buy
- Maximize the number of leads that convert to sales opportunities
- Help buyers navigate their buying process
- Boost customer lifetime value via cross selling, up-selling and renewals
- Improve marketing workflows and make their efforts more effective
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing is a software-as-a-service platform that facilitates the management, monitoring and nurturing of marketing generated leads so that you can shepherd them to becoming qualified sales leads. Email, web forms and website visitor tracking combine to provide insight into the activities and behaviors of your audience. You can segment that audience based on behavior or role to provide targeted content that moves them toward the sale. Marketing automation also allows you to apply lead scoring based on criteria your team sets to identify marketing- or sales-qualified leads.
Marketing automation enables the automation and measurement of marketing campaigns and workflows. It allows marketers to be more efficient, deliver a more personalized, segmented experience to prospective customers, and improve marketing’s contribution to revenue. It includes functionality to expedite or enhance:
- Personalized email marketing based on a prospect’s digital behavior
- Lead engagement across marketing channels
- Landing page creation
- Lead generation
- Audience segmentation
- Lead nurturing and lead scoring
- Cross-selling and up-selling
- Customer retention
- Measuring ROI and revenue contribution for campaigns
- Website personalization
- Programmatic content delivery
How Does Marketing Automation Differ From Email Service Providers (ESPs), like MailChimp?
Email is the most valuable tool in the marketer’s toolbox. EMarketer found that 78% of marketers say email is their most effective digital channel for lead nurturing.
Email service providers (ESPs) offer simple-to-use templates to create attractive, graphically rich messages. They also provide the means to monitor opens, clicks and unsubscribes.
But what if you want to know what pages your site visitors viewed after they clicked from an email? How do you measure the ROI of your marketing campaigns and programs? ESPs don’t track this information.
Marketing automation does that and more. It allows you to turn anonymous visitors into known leads that can be profiled and tracked. It can trigger email campaigns based on behaviors like clicks, page visits, sign-ups and other trackable events. This allows you to make your emails to a prospect much more relevant and timely.
With marketing automation, you also have the ability to notify Sales when a specific lead visits your website or downloads an offer, allowing them to immediately follow up.
Marketing automation also helps to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and tie that performance to pipeline and closed sales.
To compare the difference between marketing automation and ESPs, click here.
Why Do I Need It?
Your marketing department is responsible for contributing to revenue and demonstrating ROI. You can’t afford to leave money on the table. For the complex sale, it is imperative that you maintain a relationship with buyers until they’re prepared to purchase. Marketing automation provides the insight you need in order to gauge individual buyer behavior and respond to that behavior with relevant content.
Site tracking gives you a view of where visitors have been on your website and what content they’ve interacted with. Based on their choices, you can guide your audience through automated nurture programs that help to accelerate the path to purchase. In concert with tools like Google Analytics, you can measure ROI within automated campaigns.
Think of marketing automation as the bridge between the various components of your marketing and sales infrastructure. In addition to monitoring website traffic, marketing automation can connect to your company’s CRM, enabling Sales to monitor the progress of leads. It connects to social channels so you can observe and engage with individual leads.
With the right marketing automation tool you can keep track of sales opportunities and help them negotiate the buying process [and stay on top of your pipeline].
Marketing automation also helps you to see what content is working and what isn’t so that you can optimize and improve its effectiveness.
Harness The Power of Marketing Automation
PropelGrowth can help you harness this power by helping to align your business goals with an effective marketing/sales enablement strategy aimed at attracting, nurturing and qualifying leads. Combined with a content program uniquely crafted to your audience and business, we can help you apply marketing automation to execute:
- Lead generation and nurturing programs
- Account-based marketing programs
- Customer retention programs
We’ve optimized lead generation and demand generation strategies for clients using the top marketing automation platforms. Our consultants can assist your team using:
- Marketo
- Act-On
- HubSpot
- Eloqua
- SharpSpring*
Whether you’re looking to convert more website visitors into leads and automate follow-up, or want to improve your ability to track ROI on marketing campaigns, marketing automation is an essential component of your marketing infrastructure.
For a comparison of marketing automation vs email service providers, click here.
To get a sense of how we work with clients, click here.
To speak to a PropelGrowth representative regarding marketing automation, click here.
*PropelGrowth is a SharpSpring partner.