Wayne Lockwood: How Marketing Automation Can Save You From the Email Marketing Doldrums

Tuesday 7 February 2017

How Marketing Automation Can Save You From the Email Marketing Doldrums

Author: Dayna Rothman

What is the difference between email marketing and marketing automation? And when do you know when your company is ready to make the switch? These are questions we get asked all of time by both small and large businesses. We all know how powerful and important email marketing is to your marketing toolbox, but implementing marketing automation can dramatically increase the effectiveness of the email marketing strategy you already have in place. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages of marketing automation and see if you company is ready to make the leap.

The Advantages of Marketing Automation:

Saves you time:

Marketing departments need to produce high quality leads in the least amount of time. Through marketing automation, you can start to take the manual work out of crafting individual emails. Instead, you can focus on creating multi-stage, automated campaigns that nurture your leads while you get other work done.

Saves sales time:

For a sales rep, there is no bigger waste of time than chasing down a lead that isn’t ready to purchase or who isn’t qualified. With marketing automation, you can make sure that sales are only following up with leads who are ready to buy. Additionally marketing automation platforms can score your leads based on how they engage with campaigns or content. You can also score based on demographic or lead characteristics.

Enables you to produce more sales-ready leads:

Typically when a prospect engages with you, they are often not ready to buy yet. If you are only using an Email Service Provider all you can really do is send out individual email blasts, which is time consuming and not very effective. With marketing automation, you can nurture your leads until they are ready to purchase. You can set up lead nurturing campaigns and triggers that will move your prospects through the funnel.

Generate more revenue:

You only get very basic metrics from an ESP and typically these stats can’t show you whether or not your marketing campaigns are creating sales. Marketing automation has much more sophisticated metrics, so you will be able to show your executives exactly how much impact each campaign had on the bottom line. Then you can iterate and improve!

Is Marketing Automation Right for your Organization?

If you are still unsure whether it is time to graduate from your Email Service Provider you should take a look at your organization and marketing practices. You should consider marketing automation if:

Your customer buying process lasts longer than a week
Sending emails alone does not seem to drive sales
Your marketing team needs an easier way to create and send targeted, multi-touch email campaigns
Your marketing department does not have enough time to do everything they need to do with their current resources
You sell different products or services to different demographics
You want to send different messages to different titles and industries
Your salespeople are complaining about the quality of leads your marketing team is delivering
You want to know which of your marketing campaigns are the most effective
You can’t tell if you should be spending more or less money on marketing

Still not sure? Check out our new whitepaper Graduating from Email Marketing to Marketing Automation for more insight.

Image via Bark & Clark

How Marketing Automation Can Save You From the Email Marketing Doldrums was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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