What do you think of when you hear the phrase “marketing automation”?

Do you think of lead nurturing, or maybe email marketing?

Marketing automation, in its simplest form, is a tactic used to streamline and automate marketing and sales efforts with software.

Why use marketing automation software? Marketing automation software offers several key benefits to small business owners and professionals. Here are 5 key benefits:

Gain a Better Understanding of Your Leads

One of the greatest benefits of marketing automation software is that is allows you to gain a better understanding of your leads. Automation software will keep track of what Web pages your lead has viewed, what emails they have opened, which links in the email they’ve clicked, and what forms they have filled out.

With automation, you gain insight into exactly what the lead is looking for and what content speaks to them. With this information, you can then add them to new lists in your marketing automation software and nurture them with content that’s specific to their wants and needs.

Shorten Your Sales and Marketing Cycle

When you nurture leads through marketing automation, they typically close faster and generate more sales than those that are not nurtured. According to SoftwareAdvice, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture leads, experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. Marketing automation shortens your sales cycle by sending specific marketing campaigns to leads based on their interactions with your website and emails.

Automation saves you time (and money) by shortening the amount of time needed to qualify and nurture marketing leads into sales qualified leads. Create multiple marketing campaigns ahead of time and have them run when a lead takes certain actions on your website.

Score Your Leads

Lead scoring is a HUGE benefit for those using marketing automation. It gives you the ability to assign scores to leads based on how they interact with your emails and website. This is automatically tracked in your marketing automation software.

The higher the lead’s score is, the more likely they are to be interested and qualified for sales. Quickly run reports to find the highest scored leads and send only those leads to sales. Leads with lower scores can be saved for marketing to further educate and qualify them. This can save your team countless hours every month.

Nurture Your Leads

Another great benefit to marketing automation is that it helps you nurture new (and old) leads with automated workflows and drip email campaigns. Create multiple marketing campaigns based on what actions your lead might take and load them into your marketing automation software. From that point on, leads will be nurtured with relevant content based on their actions and interests.

Marketing automation software can also help you reengage older leads with no activity. Create reengagement campaigns to spark a renewed interested in your product or services. Any activity generated by your automation could suggest a renewed interest from that lead. Lead nurturing emails typically get 4-10x the response rate than that of a standalone email blast.

Align Sales and Marketing

This is possibly one of the best benefits of marketing automation. By using marketing automation software, you’re able to easily align your sales and marketing goals with lead scoring and website tracking. The customer information gained from your marketing campaigns can be leveraged to more effectively close sales.

Marketing automation software allows you to run reports of the highest scoring leads in your database. This information saves your sales team time by cutting out leads that are not ready to close.

Automation also allows you to scale your most effective marketing campaigns. Using the click-through data and ROI gathered from your most recent campaigns, you can create marketing campaigns that share similarities, helping you increase your sales leads and ROI.

Wrap-Up

There are many benefits of marketing automation we didn’t list here, such as organization, personalization, customer insight, and increased customer retention. Marketing automation software, along with a CRM, can help you dramatically increase your sales leads if used properly.

Ready to learn more about marketing automation? Want a free step-by-step course on creating your first marketing automation campaign? Sign up here for our soon-to-be-released marketing automation course. We’ll email you when the course is released and can be watched or downloaded (for free)!

This post was originally published on Automational’s blog

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