Marketing Automation: 5 Benefits Beyond Email Marketing

Marketing automation platforms have been widely used by companies around the world as a means to support marketing campaigns, increase sales productivity, and even manage customer support services. However, according to a recent infographic from Invesp, 27% of organizations still consider themselves “beginners” when it comes to marketing automation and need some support.

The point here is that it’s not just about implementing marketing initiatives, but about striving to improve their efficiency to achieve a higher ROI (with HubSpot estimating a staggering 3,600% return on investment from email marketing alone). But marketing automation also offers several other benefits, ranging from aligning marketing and sales to generating reports with predictive metrics. If we had to point out the most incredible aspect of marketing automation, it would likely be the fact that all omnichannel expectations can finally be fulfilled—supported by the delivery of highly personalized content, at the right time, and respecting every stage of the customer journey. It’s about adopting a people-centric mindset rather than a sales-focused one.

In this article, we explain the less obvious reason why marketing automation should be a key component of your strategic marketing plan.

1. Access to digital behavior data

It’s common to read about everything companies “supposedly” should do, create theoretically perfect email marketing campaigns, and still get poor results. Why? Because context and relevance aren’t being properly addressed, and marketing efforts need to align with specific goals and the business’s growth stage.

A marketing automation platform will allow you to monitor the behavior of potential customers on every section of your company’s website—from which buttons they clicked and which specific pages they visited, to the premium content they downloaded. Content is king, but so is context.

2. Continuous Engagement Through Nurturing Campaigns

If you’re looking for a tool to create drip marketing campaigns and track their performance, marketing automation software is exactly what you need. Say goodbye to the challenges of converting leads with no real intent to buy into closed deals.

The best part about using marketing automation software is the ability to configure it to send contextualized and relevant emails as leads complete specific actions in their digital journey, until they’re qualified for their first contact with the sales team.

3. Simplified Revenue Attribution

Most email marketing tools don’t highlight the impact a particular email had on a customer’s purchasing decision—especially if they opened an email one day and made the purchase two weeks later.

Fortunately, with marketing automation, the picture is much more favorable, as it allows digital marketers to track the entire process from the first indication of purchase intent. How? Through the well-known marketing attribution reports that credit all interactions that generated new leads and revenue and then establish a connection with every touchpoint along the lead conversion journey.

In short, instead of having to guess what drove the purchase, it’s possible to simply and accurately map out the entire journey that led to that action.

4. Dynamic lead scoring for sales

How does your sales team identify and prioritize the most qualified leads? Are you taking advantage of any sales software, which is crucial for growing the sales pipeline? How do you assess the value of each potential customer? Lead scoring is a widely used methodology that allows you to classify leads to determine their potential readiness to be approached by a sales representative.

Whether by assigning points to each defined criterion or through machine learning—which analyzes large volumes of data to predict behavioral patterns and purchase readiness—lead scoring is one of the most promising features of marketing automation.

In addition to laying the groundwork for better alignment between marketing and sales teams, it also automates the lead qualification process. This means you don’t waste time on unpromising leads, and your sales representatives can reach out to more people who match your ideal customer profile (ICP) at the most opportune time.

5. Customer-Centric Communication

It’s time to be authentic. The human side of automation exists. Have you ever sent a monthly newsletter to your entire database and gotten only minimal results? And why is that? Because the message you sent was likely irrelevant to most of the contacts in your CRM. But with marketing automation software, you can segment recipient lists and send different types of emails based on previous interactions.

Marketing automation is now a cornerstone of scalability across many industries. Increased sales efficiency, exponentially higher ROI, and the foundation for personalized customer relationships—just to name a few—are some of the reasons why it’s worth embracing this technology and taking the next step.

Did you find this article helpful? Discover how marketing automation improves marketing and sales productivity.

Today’s business environment demands a clear picture of the customer’s journey through the sales funnel. And, more than that, it requires scalable processes to boost conversion rates based on data management and advanced personalization.