Marketing Automation? Here are the classic 10 reasons why your business needs it…

*This article was original published on WebEngage Blog.

Based on the latest stats by emailmonday, nearly 51% of companies worldwide are using marketing automation while 58% are planning to adopt the technology soon.

At a fundamental level, marketing automation refers to a category of software that automates, streamlines and measures workflows and marketing tasks so that brands can boost operational efficiency and up their revenue faster.

We’ll now list some of the important reasons why your business needs a marketing automation platform.

1. Huge Time Saver

Ehsan Jahandarpour, a startup coach and growth hacker, and Brian Downard, an online marketing and lead generation consultant, published a great infographic on how marketing automation saves both money and time.

Here are some excellent takeaways:

• You can boost your reply rate by nearly 250% by automating your outreach efforts and follow-ups
• Automating your ads and social posts can save you over 6 hours every week
• Setting meetings or client appointments using automated tools can save you 80% more time

You don’t have to get into your workspace every morning and dive into a tool that schedules your posts for the entire day on social media or ship one-off emails. With marketing automation, it’s possible to schedule everything you require in advance. This will free you up to concentrate on other important marketing activities. After all, the idea of “setting it and forgetting it” can help you to loosen up a bit.

In addition, all-in-one marketing software like Hubspot will save you energy and time jumping from one platform to the other. When you’re repeatedly flipping between tabs to set up a campaign or track its performance, you’re draining a lot of energy than you think.

2. Adds Value To Your CRM

While marketing automation software and CRM software are greatly different, they can help you achieve more out of your marketing efforts.

CRM software is used more for sales and is contact-focused. This type of software saves the basic contact information like name, contact number, address, and all your conversations. On the other hand, marketing automation software is more focused on marketing.

Besides saving contact information, marketing automation tools give you insights on the location of your contacts in the marketing funnel, the resources they use, the web pages they interact with besides enabling you to establish processes that will perform important tasks automatically based on the interactions.

When combined, marketing automation software and CRM can be of immense value to you. You’ll enjoy the benefit of viewing the sales and marketing activities of your contacts all in one place, giving you a comprehensive picture of the relationship a person shares with your brand. This makes your outreach efforts a cakewalk.

For instance, when you integrate your CRM with marketing automation, you can send targeted emails to your contacts in your system. However, in the absence of the integration, you’ll have to upload your contacts from your CRM database, which drains time and money, while increasing the risk of user errors. You may miss out on a lucrative sale if you accidentally mistype the email address.

3. Get Big Picture Data

While dealing with the issue of increasing your ROI and ensuring success, you got to have direct access to your important marketing KPIs. If you use multiple tools, you’ll spend a huge amount of time switching platforms and find the task of tying your metrics to your campaign absolutely onerous.

A marketing automation tool enables you to tag your entire marketing activities with the associated campaign and also allows you to have a better picture of your traffic, clicks, conversion rates and more all in one place. Powerful, multi-functional tools like Hubspot give you a bigger picture of your data and how things work together, instead of forcing you to switch platforms.

Add to that, you can access reports and look at the performance of various metrics in real-time.

When using a specific tool designed to track the impact of your marketing efforts on your sales, you can see the red flags and poor performance, and change your strategies immediately.

4. Allows Personalization

Marketing Land recently released a report, which states that personalized emails deliver 6 times higher transaction rates; however, 70% of brands do not use them.

With a great marketing tool, you can easily personalize content to your personas. For instance, in many automation tools like HubSpot, InfusionSoft, WebEngage, and Marketo, you can include personalized tokens (like the recipient’s name) into an email blast. Your emails will look more personal by incorporating such elements. It will appear as if they were sent particularly for them instead of a huge list.

And when one of your contacts gets an email that looks more personalized, it’s likely they’ll open and engage with it.

Take it this way-will you click through an ordinary newsletter or an email as though it was meant only for you? Let’s say you receive an email with your name along with a line of text saying, “We thought you’d love these tools since we noticed you just downloaded our offer#1.”

It’s highly likely that you’ll go for the latter.

Marketing automation not only makes such personalized workflows easy to set up but also delivers incredible results.

Let’s face it; there are simply too many ways to reach your target audience online. You can use banner ads, SEO, social media, remarketing, and many other techniques to build your brand. And it’s challenging to keep up with all of these opportunities in the absence of a marketing automation tool.

At the end of the day, your marketing efforts have to reach the right person with the right message and at the right time. It’s about personalizing your content to cater to the needs of your personas or/and provide the solutions when they want it the most.

Explore more reasons why marketing automation is important for your business and all the benefits it can bring in!