Four Benefits of Marketing Automation

The job of online marketers, together with sales teams, is to find and nurture leads. Of course, once leads are identified, they must be converted into paying customers. The growth of ecommerce and the maturation of online marketing strategies have encouraged the use of automated email campaigns to influence the buying decision.

According to Marketing Sherpa’s 2011 benchmark report, 80% of companies send automated emails which comprise, on average, 22% of a company’s overall messaging volume. The content of these automated messages span the gamut of the buying process. They include, but are not limited to, free trial offers, reminders of abandoned shopping carts and order confirmation pages.

More often than not though, these emails are viewed as interruptions, pesky messages destined for the spam box. Or, they are simply forgotten.

This is because automated email messaging, while helpful in its ability to reach many people with minimal effort, is just one component of a fully optimized marketing strategy. What businesses really require is marketing automation software, which provides four primary benefits:

Multi-channel visibility
Agile and aligned marketing processes
Enhanced targeting
Relationship maintenance

Multi-Channel Visibility

Marketing automation tools provide marketing and sales teams the ability to track a consumer’s online interactions with their brand through a broad range of channels.

If visitors are landing on your site through links you have set up on Facebook or Twitter, for example, marketing automation software can deliver tailored messages to those visitors at various touch-points throughout their visit. If these visitors give you their email address, you’re marketing efforts are even more powerful. In a Lifecycle Email Marketing whitepaper, WhatCounts discovered that “individuals who interact with a brand via Facebook and Twitter at least once a week are 33% more likely to open an email promotion.”

Agile and Aligned Marketing Processes

By aligned, I mean that marketing automation is the culmination of best practices defined by the marketing and sales departments rolled into a software solution. Whether you are managing a B2C check-out process or a B2B email campaign, it is important to get potential buyers to convert.

If conversions are to happen efficiently, marketing and sales departments must align different goals. These goals include the priorities of various campaigns, the expense and effort to implement them, and the calculation of expected ROI.

These processes become very challenging when departments are not aligned and there are information silos. Mapping the communication stream according to buying stages (see table 1 at the end of the post) and each department’s responsibilities and resources will help streamline marketing efforts.

Agility means getting the right message at the right time to the right person. If your product offering includes both B2B and B2C software, marketing automation matches specific content to visitors. Those messages may be delivered onsite or through email. The content should speak to the visitors interests and actions, based on the product pages they are visiting or the whitepapers they are downloading.

In a way, marketing automation combines the best features of web analytics and automated email marketing. Not only can you discover a visitor’s specific interests and needs, you can talk to them about those needs directly.

Enhanced Targeting

Every successful campaign has a team of people evaluating key performance indicators (KPIs) and buyer behavior. But the KPI for a likely buyer is not the same KPI for a reluctant buyer. This is why it is important to score leads and grade prospects. The marketing automation tool then assigns a score and grade based on a number of determining factors.

For example, many companies assign scores based on whether visitors reach a certain webpage. A search engine user who bounces on the homepage is ranked lower than a visitor who arrives at a shopping cart through direct traffic and then bounces. Capturing job titles goes a long way in lead scoring as well. In B2B situations a C-level executive will rank higher than a customer service rep.

Similarly for B2C companies, scoring can be based on consumer behavior, like the RFM model, to indicate the type of buyer. Segmenting your database by using the combination of demographic data and buyer behavior gets you to your goal of delivering the right content at the right time to the right person.

Maintaining the Relationship

Delivering the right content at the right time is a continuous struggle that marketers are always fine tuning. As markets and the way people interact changes, so must your marketing communication. Marketing automation is a way to set up a framework for your most important touch points in order to deliver content at critical stages in the buying process.

Each sales funnel has its differentiators like length of the sales cycle and the number of people involved in the sale. Marketing automation can be tailored to either funnel, or both. Depicting the funnel that best works for your company then mapping out the content and timing to your targets is essential.

Here is a high-level illustration of the buying cycles for B2B and B2C companies:

Table 1:	B2B		B2C
	Prospect		Discover
	Engage		Engage
	Nurture		Convert
	Qualify		Retain
	Educate
	Convert
	Retain
	Referral

Keystone

The benefits of marketing automation include identifying multiple sales funnels and paths to conversions, optimizing the sales process, and identifying communication gaps within the marketing strategy and internally between departments.