Top 5 marketing automation benefits

“Hey! We have a lot of new leads this week!” Chris - an enthusiastic sales manager at a Saas company - could easily say if his company uses an Inbound Marketing strategy.

But, now what?

“What do we do with these leads? Chris, the sales manager, may question himself. “How can we connect with each one of them?"Here is where the 2nd best advantage of Inbound Marketingappears (the first one would be attracting leads through quality content). We’re talking about the Marketing Automation software.

“Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier,” HubSpot explains.

“At its best – this Boston-based company adds- marketing automation is software and tactics that allow companies to buy and sell like Amazon -- that is, to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers. This type of marketing automation typically generates significant new revenue for companies and provides an excellent return on the investment required.”

This solution helps companies generate leads, followed by nurturing them using automation through an online smart platform that uses several metrics and behavior parameters and identifies which stage of the conversion funnel (image below) every lead is at.

Due to this, a company that embraces Inbound Marketing can actually verify several concrete advantages in its internal process and business results. Let’s explore some of the essential benefits of marketing automation:

1. More and Better Productivity

“One important function of marketing automation is simplifying routine organizational and marketing tasks. It effectively eliminates repetitive manual processes by substituting automated solutions –Business 2 Community explains- This, in turn, increases productivity as the marketing department personnel can put increased focus on tasks that require more stringent manual monitoring.”

This brings beautiful results, according to Marketing Matters Inbound. “Companies that add marketing automation report their sales cycles are 70 percent faster than they were before. In addition, salespeople have an almost 55 percent improvement in their quota achievement. Being able to get more sales in a shorter amount of time is a sales manager and business owner’s dream.”

2. Control

Technology for Marketing Insights says that “in a good marketing automation system, the marketer should gain better control of their marketing by getting a single customer view and seeing how the various channels work. And being able to do something about excess inventory where there is a retailer SKU or travel company destination. Feeling in control is a good feeling. It helps a marketer to feel that they are a functioning brain, rather than a pair of hands unthinkingly carrying out a set of predetermined commands.” 

3. More time to plan and innovate

Marketing automation allows your marketing department to do more with less. “I haven’t met a marketer who can say, ‘I have loads of free time to dream up new ideas and implement things really well. Who wouldn’t want a system which makes communications more effective and efficient?”, Technology for Marketing Insights says.

4. Increase revenue

“Investing in marketing automation – or any software, for that matter – isn’t necessarily cheap. But the benefits of the tool, if properly utilized, can justify the upfront investment,” Business 2 Community stands.

Here are some statistics to consider:

• “B2B marketers with successful lead-nurturing programs reported, on average, a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads.”
• “78 percent of high-performing marketers identify marketing automation as a key contributor to improved revenue.”
• “Between 2012 and 2015, 84 percent of top-performing businesses use or plan to use marketing automation software.”
• “By 2020, 85 percent of customer relationships with businesses will be managed without human interaction, says Gartner on their Gartner Customer 360 Summit.”

5. Integrate different solutions into one platform

How beautiful would it be to manage all your databases, lists, online channels, metrics, and other key elements of marketing management in just one platform? Behind just one user and password? Even more, to check it everywhere on your smartphone?

The Knowledge Blog (Hubspot’s International Partner of the Year 2016) says that “the campaigns tool in HubSpot integrates the statistics between website, blog, landing pages, social publishing, calls-to-action and even your paid social media campaigns.

All this is linked to keywords and significant analytics to give your marketing a complete return on investment and accountability (…). The integrated CRM means that your sales activity is connected to your marketing activity. It's all one platform working harmoniously together. In one timeline, you can see all the contact information with your prospect at once.”

Still not convinced? Sure, searching for an automated solution takes time. But here we have some key numbers that can help in your decision:

 “Companies that excel at lead nurturing will see an increase of up to 50% in sales while reducing costs by at least 33%.” (Marketing Matters Inbound, quoting Forrester Research)

“Companies which implement marketing automation see a 225 percent increase in Prospect volume that become Leads.” (Marketing Matters Inbound, quoting ShipServ)

“Use event-triggered messaging to save on direct marketing costs – Instead of blast marketing a bunch of people, using events to trigger personalized messages can save up to 80% on costs.” (Marketing Matters Inbound, quoting Gartner Research)

“Companies which use marketing automaton for Prospect nurturing see an over 450 percent increase in qualified Leads.” (Marketing Matters Inbound, quoting Annuitas Group)