According to statistics published by SAP in 2014, 30% growth in market share can be achieved by organizations that integrate campaigns and offers across traditional and digital marketing channels. This means, customers now expect an overall brand experience that is consistent and transparent across all channels. To enhance and simplify the customer journey while making it more personalized and engaging, you must deal and juggle with many channels at the same time: email-based marketing campaigns, leads generation, social media, search marketing, etc. This can quickly turn into a headache. SAI Digital experts suggest that you implement a marketing automation system to do a lot of this work for you. Here are the top 8 reasons to adopt a Marketing Automation solution.
Reason #1: An excellent tool to manage outbound email campaigns
Using a marketing automation solution helps you send outbound email messages in response to the action and behavior of your customers. You can also manage the targeting and timing of your outbound email campaigns.
Reason #2: Deal with complicated sales cycles
Any marketer knows that longer sales cycles need more touchpoints, especially when your potential customers have reached the bottom of the funnel. A marketing automation solution will generally offer you to deal with a variety of channels and touchpoints, making it easier to manage your sales cycle.
Reason #3: Prioritize leads
With a proper marketing automation solution in place, you can score & grade leads that the sales should be following up with. Lead scoring and lead grading will also help you judge the interest level of your company’s prospects or if they are a good fit for your product or service. All this information helps sales teams and marketing teams efficiently prioritize leads.
Reason #4: Automate the important tasks that CRM systems can’t execute
A CRM system can do a very brilliant job for sales forecasting and task management, but it isn’t equally effective and efficient in segmenting and qualifying leads. Marketing automation will help you automate these important tasks that the CRM cannot properly execute. If you’re looking for greater segmentation and lead qualification capabilities, we strongly advise looking into a marketing automation tool.
Reason #5: Get full insight into campaign ROI
Measuring the impact of marketing to improve the ROI of your marketing spend has never been easy.
According to the 2017 State of Pipeline Marketing Survey, 41% of marketers are still using single-touch attribution models. The last channel that the consumer interacted with before making a purchase is going to be assigned 100% conversion credit. This might have been relevant a few years ago, when there were fewer touchpoints along the customer journey.
But the problem has only gotten more challenging with the multiplication of channels. Marketers need to understand how each component plays out in the mix. These insights also need to be actionable and based on what is actually happening today, not months ago. This is a big challenge.
Marketing automation helps you pull all reports into one place and see which campaigns worked best or had the greatest marketing ROI.
Reason #6: Bridge the gap between your sales and marketing teams
Lead quality and revenue attribution are the two main reasons sales and marketing teams are often at odds. With a marketing automation system, your marketing team will be able to generate quality and qualified leads for your sales team so that they can act accordingly.
Reason #7: Spread your content better
“Good content delivered in a way that resonates with your customers plus technology will be successful”, said Ann Rockley – CEO of The Rockley Group. Marketing automation tools will put your content creation efforts to good use. With this, you can target communication, create landing pages or forms in a simpler way, and see an improvement in the conversion results.
Reason #8: Nurture leads effectively
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost (source: Marketo). Marketing automation helps you nurture your leads until they are sales-ready, which in turn minimizes the risk of letting them get picked up by your competitors.
A proper marketing automation solution will help you execute all the manual and tedious tasks so that you can spend more time on the other new and exciting marketing initiatives.
If you want to build a strategic roadmap for your commerce platform as well as an effective marketing automation strategy to offer the best experience to your customers, our experienced SAP Marketing Cloud team at SAI Digital is available to assist you. Click here to contact us.
Still wondering what solution to choose? We tell you all about SAP Marketing Cloud’s benefits in this article.