What is Marketing Automation Software?

Marketing automation software, as the name implies, automates marketing activities, measures campaign metrics & streamlines workflows. It provides a centralised marketing database to store all marketing-related information, which can be used by businesses to create personalised marketing experiences for their prospects. It provides automation features across different verticals of marketing like email, social media, lead generation, online advertising and more.

Marketing automation software gives marketers an analytical solution that can be used to measure the effectiveness of an entire campaign across channels and demographics. This lets them better understand the impact of a campaign in terms of KPIs, company revenue & ROIs.

Why You Need Marketing Automation Software

Unlike the sales-focused approach of CRM software, marketing automation software tools follow a prospective customer’s top-of-the-funnel activities. It keeps a track of customers who visit your website, open an email sent by you, read a published blog post or fill out an enquiry form. Typically, this software is used by marketers to schedule, track & analyse different types of campaigns such as email campaigns, bulk business to customer communications, and so on.

Marketing automation tools let you segment prospects and visitors into mailing lists based on their previous interactions with the company & preferences. You can also use this software for lead nurturing and send automated emails to keep prospects interested.

You most certainly need a marketing automation software if your business is experiencing any of these problems:

Your Prospect List is too Big to Manage Manually

Having thousands of contacts on your email list is a truly phenomenal feeling. But manually tracking opening rates and compiling metric analysis reports isn’t the greatest feeling in the world. Not to mention, it’s a tedious task & there’s always the possibility of human-made errors. Best marketing automation software ensures that each prospect passes through the right stages of the marketing funnel to nurture and turn him/ her into a good lead for your sales team.

Your Customer List Needs to Expand

Every marketing professional wants to generate more leads for the sales team. With marketing automation software, you can homogenize & enhance your outreach experience.

Your Excellent Content Isn’t Getting Traction

If your business has excellent content that you want your prospective clients to see, marketing automation software can get your content in front of the right audience faster. It lets you identify the right demography and geographical locations, where your content will get more reach and engagement. Once your content viewership starts expanding, you can then moderate engagement and focus on ways to make existing readers share what you’re posting.

Features of Marketing Automation Tools

Marketing automation platforms simplifies campaign setup & tracking, analysis & communications. The features of best marketing automation tools are: -

Campaign Management

At the core of marketing automation are various marketing campaigns. Marketing automation software can manage a range of campaign types across various channels. The goal is to send your customers the right information at the right time via the right channel to get them interested in your product or organization. Campaign management involves the planning, execution, tracking and analysis of these campaigns.

Campaign management helps with integrated campaign automation which means that every step of the campaign takes place within the same interface and doesn’t require users to bounce around between systems. Marketers don’t need to create multiple campaigns to promote different products; a marketing automation platform does it for them.

It lets your sales and marketing teams work together like a well-oiled machine. It facilitates collaboration and communication to improve campaign execution and efficient opportunity management. Campaign management supports both outbound and inbound marketing campaigns.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are webpages that customers see when they click on a promotional link. Inbound marketing automation software captures lead details and forwards them automatically, from landing pages to the sales team.

The landing page is used to obtain leads, and it contains a call to action to get a visitor in touch with the company or to facilitate a sale. The software also comes with the option to add a lead generation form (the form that’s filled out by customers when they visit your page). Best marketing automation CRM software provide professionally curated templates for landing pages & lead generation forms, to help businesses save time in designing and in streamlining the creation process.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is at the heart of the most successful marketing campaigns. Email marketing automation software can be used to send emails to customers, acquire new customers, advertise and generate sales. Tracking such campaigns gives you ROI information & helps track visitor engagement and other customer-related data. Email marketing automation software allows marketers to have personalised interaction with prospects and customers by sending messages that are more likely to engage customers and promote retention.

CRM Integration

CRM and marketing automation software are two highly compatible solutions that work on the sales and marketing process of a company. Marketing automation software comes with integrated CRM features.

With this feature, you can add lead history and other important data to the CRM, to maintain crucial records of customer information. When a lead is generated, a new record is created and assigned to a salesperson for follow up. Sales teams can then pinpoint when a lead last visited your website, what they were interested in and if they requested for further information.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a much sought-after functionality of digital marketing automation software. If you don’t know what it means, lead scoring is when you rank prospects against various metrics to determine their perceived value to your organization. It helps in prioritizing leads that should be focussed on, and in what order.

This feature of marketing automation software allows users to determine which stage of the buying cycle a lead is in and target them accordingly. Organizations can use this to gather data about customer types, their behaviour & interests, to improve their experience with the company.

Lead scoring feature helps businesses with increased sales efficiency, improved marketing and sales team effectiveness, workflow optimization, tighter sales and marketing alignment, and overall increase in revenue.

Drip Marketing Tools

This feature lets you pass leads down the sales funnel faster using email marketing and drip marketing. You can also check the engagement at each step, so you can plan your marketing moves efficiently.
Reporting and Analytics

Reporting and analytics are business intelligence tools that are crucial to any organisation’s marketing department. Digital marketing automation software allows you to view quality reports and analyse them for further improvement. With this feature, you can view different kinds of auto-generated reports, factoring in different criteria such as customer demographics, sales figures, ROI, etc. Furthermore, the analytics tool lets you understand your marketing efforts better and strategies for the future success.

Email Analytics

Email marketing automation Tools can be used to track emails that have a high response rate. This data lets you replicate the same success in future email blasts.

Benefits of Marketing Automation Software

Marketing automation platform makes a marketer’s life a lot simpler with its advanced features. The benefits of marketing automation software include: -

All-in-One Marketing System

Inbound marketing automation software has all the necessary automation features you need to launch a successful campaign. You can generate more traffic, easily convert leads, and track your marketing funnel without spending on other software to back it up. It can also be integrated with CRM software for further enhancement.

Personalization Capabilities

Every business operates differently, and it can be exhausting to modify your operations to suit certain software. To save time and money, digital marketing automation software can be used to personalize your workflow and prepare marketing strategies however you want.

Reliable Analytics

Wrong decisions can be costly for any business. With marketing automation software’s analytics tools, you don’t have to worry about making incorrect predictions. It allows you to get accurate, real-time reports that can be referred to, whenever you make changes to your campaign.

Easy Data Synchronization

CRM and marketing automation software work seamlessly with each other. Solutions such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, etc are the best example of this.

Advanced Lead Nurturing

This software offers advanced feature which enhances lead management, demand generation and client retention. Thus, you can focus only on quality leads and maximize time used on campaigns.

Quality Emailing Tool

Email marketing automation software comes with an email management tool that can be used to create customised and strategically scheduled emails.

Tracks Customer Preferences

With inbound marketing automation software, you can have a more personalized marketing approach by keeping track of your customers’ preferences. It records the interests of your clients and matches them to corresponding products and services.

Simplified Social Engagement

Through inbound marketing automation software’s simplified social engagement features, you can easily share, promote and engage both new and existing leads quickly and conveniently.

Individualized Workflows

Target your audience with the right content at the right time with marketing automation software’s configurable workflows. No matter what your process may be and no matter how you categorize your leads, this feature can accelerate your operations with minimal disruptions.

Buyers Guide

Before you buy a marketing automation software, here’s a list of things you need to be wary of: -

What Features Do You Need?

When choosing a marketing automation platform, take a good look at all the features offered by the system. Don’t go for solutions with flashy tools that don’t meet your expectations. Go for a solution that provides you with expertly engineered features you will certainly use.

What Analytics Tools Do They Offer?

Analytics is an important part of any marketing campaign, but the process of collating and organizing data can be overwhelming. Therefore, it’s important to choose a marketing automation solution that has a robust built-in analytics tool. With this, you can get a better insight into your marketing campaigns effortlessly.

Seamless Integration with Other Software

Choose a platform that can seamlessly integrate with other third-party solutions you’re using in your business currently or you are thinking about using in the future. This way, you minimize potential disruption to your business operations and avoid the hassle of having to implement a new software each time your company buys a solution.

Mobile Optimization

Having control over your marketing campaign on the go is a nice edge to have. To do so, ensure that you pick mobile-optimised platforms that allows you to manage campaigns, collaborate with your team, check campaign progress and engage leads on-the-go.