Benefits of marketing automation — alignment, efficiency, and ROI

Marketing automation dashboard Customers today expect highly personalized experiences from the brands they support. However, delivering that personalized experience to every customer across every channel takes an investment of time and work — and may even seem impossible.

But with the right marketing automation tools, you can provide the personalized experiences your customers expect. Whether you’re working in lead-based or account-based marketing (ABM), building automated campaigns, connecting with your customers, and collecting the right data for insightful analysis is easier than ever before.

To help you learn more and make an internal case for marketing automation, this post will look at the top nine benefits your teams can enjoy.

  1. Identify and nurture leads across every channel
  2. Align marketing and sales teams
  3. Increase efficiency
  4. Provide a better customer journey
  5. Personalize your marketing strategy
  6. Scale and repeat your process
  7. Email smarter
  8. Improve insights from analytics
  9. Increase ROI and conversions

1. Identify and nurture leads across every channel

Marketing strategies are increasingly omnichannel, which is a great experience for your audiences but a lot of work for your marketing team. And it’s important. Outreach reports that 37% of prospectives drop out of the funnel due to lack of engagement.

Finding, organizing, and nurturing each lead on every channel is not scalable without the right software. Marketing automation and machine learning provide a holistic view of every customer throughout their entire buyer’s journey and the connections needed to keep them engaged.

With automation, you can collect behavioral data from every site visit, social media engagement, and email click. Then, keep your customer moving through the sales funnel with content automatically sent and personalized based on activity and contact demographics.

2. Align marketing and sales teams

Marketing automation platforms use a lot of customer data, which means they collect, organize, and unify customer data as well. Sales and marketing teams can both benefit from real-time customer profiles and targeted audience insights. When both teams are using the same platform, better alignment happens naturally.

Unifying marketing and sales efforts with automation also strengthens your corporate strategy. If you use the same tool for your sales and marketing efforts, you can funnel data into a customer relationship platform (CRM) or customer data platform (CDP). This increases productivity and ultimately boosts revenue.

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3. Increase efficiency

Sales and marketing processes naturally include a lot of repetitive tasks. Marketing automation boosts efficiency by completing these steps, so your staff can focus on the big picture, creative work that matters most.

Schedule automated emails and social media posts, and place triggered content both on- and offline. Automated reminders help keep your brand top of mind and move audiences through the sales funnel.

When your employees can delegate routine, administrative tasks to automation, they become more efficient and experience greater job satisfaction. Overhead should decrease too because you won’t need as much labor with automation. Smaller teams can accomplish more.

4. Provide a better customer journey

Designing meaningful customer journeys for so many audiences, across a growing number of channels, can no longer be done manually. Marketing automation can help create engaging buyer personas, so you can better manage each customer journey. Artificial intelligence (AI) can draw insights out of customer data to help segment audiences according to multichannel behaviors.

Then, marketing automation helps your team understand each persona’s customer journey. With a clear map of that journey, automation delivers the right content to each user at each step.

5. Personalize your marketing strategy

Buyer personas are a necessary tool, but competitive marketing strategies need to move beyond personas into real-time customer profiles for personalization that drives revenue. Marketing automation unifies every touchpoint into an always up-to-date view of every member of your audience and delivers relevant, personalized offers and content right when they need it.

For example, a site visitor researching personalization solutions might get a follow-up email that addresses them by name and offers a targeted resource to help them learn more. If they fill out that download form, the new data will be used to offer a case study featuring a company in a related industry. Later, they might get a customized offer, based on the size of their company or marketing team.

Every engagement and interaction is cataloged in an automation system, so leads never get irrelevant emails or content offers.

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6. Scale and repeat your process

Marketing automation works with a small customer base and it scales up as you grow. And the best part is that if set up well, automation will scale without any additional effort from your team. The drip campaigns, lead scoring, personalization, and more, that work with a few hundred leads and customers will work exactly the same with a few thousand.

As your marketing programs grow, marketing automation will continue to deliver insights on what strategies and tactics are working with a larger, more diverse audience. This helps you scale even better, by enabling your team to fine-tune your process.

7. Email smarter

Marketing automation is usually associated with email marketing first. While automation impacts every digital channel, email marketing campaigns may have the most to gain. Marketing automation helps teams design and automate email nurturing campaigns that can engage buyers and help them through their journeys for weeks or months without any input from a marketer. Then, automated lead scoring capabilities can hand off a lead to the sales team at the right time.

In fact, leading automation tools can do the segmentation and predictive audience-building on your behalf. Triggered content personalizes your email campaigns with just the right touch.

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8. Improve insights from analytics

Automation makes marketing analytics and reporting simpler and more meaningful. The best marketing automation tools can be set up to generate reports themselves.

Because marketing analytics platforms unify sales and marketing data, the analytics and reporting that these platforms provide is more thorough and insightful. Marketing analytics software also collects and stores a lot of behavioral data as it monitors user engagement. Those insights can clearly demonstrate to your team what is working, where leads fall out of the funnel, and much more.

9. Increase ROI and conversions

Ultimately, marketing automation increases ROI and conversion rates. Nucleus Research found that marketing automation returns an average of $5.44 for every dollar spent on it and most companies recover the initial cost of automation software within six months.

Marketing automation software helps manage your leads and customers more strategically. Automation platforms can even track leads so you can automatically retarget them and increase your conversion rate. Marketing teams quickly see measurable benefits of an investment in automation because the software helps your team work more efficiently.

Automate your marketing process

The benefits of marketing automation are clear — greater efficiency, better internal alignment, improved customer experiences, actionable analytics, and increased ROI.

When you’re ready to get started, evaluate your current automation capabilities and needs. Decide which processes are already running smoothly and which tasks your team is still doing manually that could be streamlined with automation.

Adobe Marketo Engage is industry-leading marketing automation that lets you streamline lead management, cross-channel engagement, and multitouch attribution. Achieve personalization at scale, effectively nurture and score leads, and get key performance analytics to determine which investments give the greatest return.

Watch the overview video or take a free product tour to see how Adobe Marketo Engage can help automate your marketing processes for greater ROI