Marketing Automation: Your New Friend in the Digital World

Email Marketing AutomationHas email marketing been your steady go-to in order to communicate with prospects and maintain great relationships with your current customers?  If it’s worked well enough until now, maybe you need to make a switch to an marketing automation solution. But what’s the difference between regular email marketing and marketing automation? And how do you know if your company is ready to make the switch? Whether you are a big or small business, these questions can come up at any point.  If you think you are ready to graduate to marketing automation keep reading…

There are a lot of notable differences between an email marketing program and a marketing automation platform. For example an Email Service Provider will provide you the functionality to send mass blasts and track open rates.  This is well enough for a small business that has a small amount of customers for the time being, but if you think about whether or not your business is growing, you might want to reconsider this option when the time comes. Marketing Automation provides access to powerful features like multi-step campaigns, lead scoring, and analytics- all of which can make your email tactics much more strategic. However, as you grow, if you solely rely on email marketing, you might find yourself at a halt. Here are some challenges you face if you decide to stick with email marketing:

Time to send out the emails:
If you don’t have the time or the resources you could find that email marketing is taking up a lot of your time. By having an Email Service Provider, you are able to do any automation or fine tuning to your campaigns, such as sending your eblasts at the right times to the right target users. Take out the manual work of crafting individual emails! This, in turn, will let you focus on creating multi-stage, automated campaigns to nurture those leads.

Lead Generation Issues:
Are you not generating the right leads or gaining any in general? Email marketing by itself does not have the functionality to deliver leads to your sales teams. After a blast, if you are tracking click throughs and open rates, your sales team may not be getting desired results because those potential leads may not be ready to buy. There is no bigger waste of time than chasing down a lead that isn’t ready to purchase or who isn’t even qualified. Using a marketing automation system can make sure that your sales team are only following up with leads who are ready to buy but can also help you score leads based on how they engage with your campaigns or content. These types of systems can also score based on demographics or lead characteristics.

These are only a couple things that a marketing platform can help you with if you decide to evolve from email marketing. Still not sure if this move is right for you?

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 sales people 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

Feel free to contact us if you have any further inquiries. As frequent users of marketing automation software (like Hubspot, BlueHornet, and Hootsuite) we can serve as a great resource for clients and potential users that are just interested.

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