Top 5 Benefits of Using Marketing Automation

Wondering what the true benefits are in using marketing automation?

Here's a list of the main benefits of Marketing Automation by marketers using it:

Efficiency - Automate repetitive tasks
Better targeting of customers and prospects
Improving the customer experience
Better email marketing
Lead management

1. Efficiency - Automate repetitive tasks
Businesses that use marketing automation software are able to manage their time and staff more effectively. Marketing automation software allows you to automate repetitive tasks like sending out lead nurturing emails, and changing lifecycle stages of prospects based on activity triggers, including notifying sales of qualified leads. This allows marketers to spend more time on creating content or developing new lead generation strategies.

2. Better targeting of customers and prospects
Companies usually have multiple types of prospects/customers (personas). And each of them will want different types of information and different strategies to move them into a paying customer. Marketing automation allows you to target each of them differently through keywords, content and lead nurturing. The goal is to educate them and build a relationship of trust.

3. Improving the customer experience
By sending the right content at the right time to the right person based on where they are at in the buyer’s journey. Marketing automation allows you to easily segment contacts using different criteria. For example, you can send an email to a group of people (persona) that have downloaded a specific piece of content or multiple pieces of content. No need to export data from multiple applications and try to match up corresponding data.

4. Better email marketing
Setup the strategy once and automate it. You no longer have to rely on sales reps to check their emails in a timely manner for form submission request emails and hope that they send them the most recent copy (from the shared drive versus their PC). Marketing automation allows you to setup form submission emails to deliver the content requested and setup lead nurturing emails to automatically send them additional content over a period of time to help close them as a customer, versus asking sales to set reminders to follow up with them. When you replace manual repetitive work with automated rules and campaigns, you naturally free up your staff’s time to focus on more productive tasks.

5. Lead management
Do your marketing and sales team differ on what a qualified lead is? Marketing automation allows you to setup criteria for each lifecycle stage - lead, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) - and triggers to move them to the next stage. Only the leads that meet the SQL status will be sent to sales.