Do I need marketing automation?
Whether you should use marketing automation or not is relatively straightforward to determine. If you need to improve your lead generation, nurturing, and overall inbound marketing and sales performance and are looking to save time, then marketing automation might make sense for your business.
What are some marketing automation features?
Here are some of the common features that a good marketing automation platform provides.
- Email Automation
- Dynamic Form Builder
- Built-In CRM
- Landing Page Builder
- Social Media Management
- Anonymous Visitor Identification
- Personas
- Dynamic Emails & Landing Pages
- Blog Builder
- Dynamic Lists/Segmentation
- Lead Scoring
- Behavior Tracking
- Sales Notifications
- Campaign optimization
- Progressive profiling
- Chatbots
- Integrated advertising for Facebook and Google
- End-to-End Reporting & Analytics
What Does Marketing Automation Software Do?
Marketing automation brings three principal assets to the table:
- Drive More Leads
- Convert Those Leads into Sales
- Maximize Marketing Spend.
There is considerable evidence supporting the value that marketing automation can bring to marketers. According to the VB Insight report, 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw their number of conversions increased. Furthermore, companies using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates from initial response-to-MQL and a revenue growth rate of 3.1% higher than non-users.
For small and midsized businesses, marketing automation comes with a distinct set of benefits, including:
- Create higher-value relationships.
- Generate more sales revenue.
- Prove value to your customers.
What are the marketing automation objectives?
Marketing automation allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks such as sending emails, maintaining social media, tracking website interactions, and handling various other jobs.
Marketing automation centralizes all of the features and functions that make up the marketer's role in an organization. A marketing automation platform should have the ability to integrate with other sales and marketing tools (CMS, CRM, social media, meeting software, and more) to provide a streamlined platform for data management and analysis.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to software platforms that help businesses automate their marketing and sales engagement processes to generate higher quality leads, nurture leads, convert those leads to sales, and optimize ROI.
Marketing automation is a powerful marketing and sales tool that automates many of your communication programs, lead generation campaigns, and lead nurturing programs. That way, you can move prospects through the sales cycle with minimal time and resources. Simply put, marketing automation is email marketing, lead generation, social media, search marketing, analytics, reporting, and prospect tracking - all in one integrated system.
What is SharpSpring’s Marketing Automation Software?
SharpSpring is a fully integrated cloud-based marketing tool that offers customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, mobile and social marketing, sales team automation, customer service, and more, all within one solution. SharpSpring marketing automation will reduce your sales and marketing operating costs and boost sales.
I’m already using an email services provider, Mailchimp.
It's not possible to do marketing automation with email service providers. Email service providers (ESPs) send emails and offer modest analytics, whereas a SharpSpring's marketing automation software can track precisely where contacts have traveled through a website, score these behaviors, and automatically provide relevant, targeted content based on those behaviors. A marketing automation platform provides an end-to-end picture of the customer journey, from first interaction to conversion and beyond.
Behavior-Based Emails
The SharpSpring marketing automation platform will send follow-up emails based on a lead's activity, allowing you to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.
Example: A lead visits a particular product page on your website three times, indicating that he or she is interested in making a purchase. At this point, the system sends the lead an email (which was pre-programmed to send upon the lead's third visit to that page), offering a discount on that item, and he or she moves further down the pipeline.
Sales Notifications
SharpSpring marketing automation and CRM notifies salespeople of leads' activities, so they can be ready to turn a lead into a sale.
Example: Your client operates an apartment community and has unoccupied one-bedroom units to fill. By setting SharpSpring to notify a salesperson as soon as a lead has visited three pages about one-bedrooms, you can ensure that salespeople are spending most of their time targeting leads who are likely to convert.
Common Objections and Questions: Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
What are the benefits of using marketing automation and a CRM?
CRM software like Salesforce, Pipeline, Nimble, Zoho CRM - serve as business tools for tracking marketing and sales communications and contact informaiton on prospects, leads, and customers. A CRM does not generate leads or help convert them to sales. On the other hand, marketing automation provides a whole suite of tools for generating and qualifying leads and converting them to sales.
Robust Set of Sales and Marketing Tools
With marketing and sales efforts growing increasingly interconnected, clear communication and visibility between departments have become more critical. Unlike CRMs and other traditional management tools, marketing automation offers a whole range of capabilities that help improve communication between teams and maximize sales and marketing productivity. You can reduce sales and marketing operating costs while boosting sales and marketing productivity, in one secure place. The results are lower cost, reducing the sales cycle, and converting more sales quicker.
SharpSpring's marketing automation uses forms, behavior tracking, email automation, lead scoring, sales notifications, analytics, and more to feed leads into the sales funnel. Then the marketing automation system optimizes the sales cycle by tracking leads closely throughout the buyers journey.
Other CRM Integration
Your CRM and marketing automation need to be working toegther and sync, as they each offer specific functionalities. SharpSpring CRM is built right into the platform, and it also integrates easily with third-party CRMs. By having an 'all-in-one' platform you have all the data in one secure place, and your sales and marketing teams aligned for better productivity.
Common Objections and Questions: Marketing Automation Cost Justification
Marketing automation cost justification objections for marketing automation software.
Marketing automation cost justification is an easy calculation and proofs to worth every cent.
I can’t afford a robust CRM and marketing automation.
How can justify a CRM and marketing automation platform?
SharpSpring is more affordable than Pardot, HubSpot, Act-on, and Marketo affordable. If you are concerned about the cost, it’s essential to look at the value-add of proven CRM and marketing automation system. The cost far out weight the cost.
You are investing in the results you will get from a marketing automaiton platform - and with SharpSpring software, you can deliver and prove a significant return on that investment.
Depending on the marketing automation software you choose, you will get see that SharpSpring on average is 1/10th the cost of competing platforms liek HubSpot, Marketo, Acti-on and Pardot. For more information go here.
Marketing Spend Optimization
If are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on a PPC campaign that is only driving a handful of leads,
SharpSpring will identify the issue and help you redirect that marketing spend toward productive campaigns and see a higher marketing ROI.
Consolidating Marketing and Sales Tools
SharpSpring offers a robust set of CRM and marketing automation features and secure integration capabilities to consolidate all of your existing customer data and operate from a single, affordable marketing and sales platform.
You will see all the activities across the life of the customer and their buying cycle. By replacing your current system like MailChimp, Aweber, or Constant Contact subscription can find the budget for marketing automation and provide more value for those marketing dollars.
Marketing Automated Processes
Evaluate your sales and marketing processes and see how SharpSpring can help automate the frequently repeated processes and communications across the buying process.
By setting up a series of workflows and emails for new prospects and customers, you could relieve staff of multiple calls and emails associated with onboarding, freeing them up for client service tasks that cannot be automated.
A simple rule of thumb, you can estimate that marketing automation will take up between 3-5% of your marketing programs budget.
On average, large technology companies report that marketing automation accounts for 3.5% of their programs budget, and 2.2% of staff allocations, according to IDC’s.
Meanwhile, MarketingSherpa’s Marketing Benchmark indicates that companies spend 7% of their overall budgets on marketing automation.