According to research done by the Annuitas Group, businesses who use marketing automation to nurture leads experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. Why should you automate your marketing? It works.
The Statistics
Without getting too far into business theory, the numbers tell a plain story–marketing automation is highly effective. Here are some interesting facts:
- 75% of marketers are using at least one type of marketing automation tool (Social Media Today, 2019)
- 9 out of 10 marketers use more than one marketing automation tool on a regular basis; only 16% only use a single tool (Walker Sands, 2017)
- Marketers say the biggest benefits of automation are saving time (74%), increased engagement (68%), more timely communications (58%) and increased opportunities up-selling (58%) (Adestra Marketer, 2017)
- Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity. The same report found that companies using automation reduced their marketing costs by 12.2% (Nucleus Research, 2017)
Save Time, Reduce Overhead Cost
As noted in our statistics, marketing automation largely benefits your team by reducing the amount of work they do (and by effect the amount of money spent to get stuff done).
And if you’re a sole proprietor this goes doubly for you–you’ll be getting more done than humanly possible otherwise. For this reason, automation will save you money and free up time simultaneously.
More Reliable Data to Work With
If you’re not automating your workflow, then are you really keeping track of your demographics, your users’ interests, what content is most popular? You may even think that you are, but the fact is that you simply can’t gather data as well as software can, and trying to do so would be incredibly tedious.
When you’ve got access to reliable, comprehensive data, you can make informed decisions that will result in higher ROI for every marketing initiative taken. Don’t fire blindly, gather the right information!
Internal Communication Improves
What happens when the sales team and marketing team are on different pages? Mismatched attitudes and misfires. By having access to the automation platform that also functions as CRM, your team can leave notes about a user, be notified automatically when a user reaches a certain point in their digital journey with your brand, and more.
When your team starts working together more effectively, growth for your company is sure to follow.
Better Lead Targeting
How would you feel if you were reduced to a number? This is why there’s a certain amount of resentment for corporations–because there’s a commonly held believe that they don’t care about their patrons.
The degree to which that is true varies, but the truth is people want a personal connection to the companies they support. So your job as a marketer is to create marketing experiences that are tailored to the individual, while remaining in the realm of possibility.
Through automation platform features like lead scoring, tags, and segmentation, you can create a personalized experience that is conducive to more trust than you’d otherwise be able to do.
Better Iterative Testing
Thanks to features like A/B testing on our landing pages and emails, you can constantly be improving your marketing materials with very little effort. Comedians don’t push new jokes on their netflix specials after all; they test them at smaller gigs first, to make sure they work.
What do you think they do if the jokes they tell aren’t working? They tweak them, and that’s exactly how you should be operating when it comes to marketing. Try something, measures it’s effectiveness, and try to improve from there.
The point isn’t to reach an arbitrary point of perfection, but to constantly improve efficiency and effectiveness. Companies like Microsoft and Google test millions of ideas and designs each year.
Conclusion
Your company is more than the some of it’s parts–it can be more accurately summed up by how your customers feel in response to your efforts. Are they satisfied and happy about their experience? Did they have to wait too long to hear back from you? Was there a disconnect between their expectations and what was presented to them?
You can solve a lot of customer experience issues through automation, and it will improve your productivity. Though it may not be a solution for all problems, it will certainly solve some issues you likely already have.