Person typing email

What is Marketing Automation?

If you run a business, you’ll know being successful is not as simple as creating great products or services. If nobody knows you or believes in your value, you’ll struggle to sell. While it’s essential to build and maintain strong leads through marketing, this can come at a cost unless you automate. Marketing Automation software streamlines everything from email marketing, CRM management and lead generation to take the repetitive marketing tasks off your jam-packed to-do list. Hubspot reported 68% of businesses are using some form of marketing automation. In other words, if you don’t automate, you’ll be left behind.

Marketing Automation Objectives

The main objectives of marketing automation are to save you time and generate better leads in your business. Automating repetitive tasks also reduces manual labour, allowing you to grow your business, nurture leads, create a personalised customer journey and increase new opportunities for the sales team.

How Marketing Automation Works

Do you send an introduction email to new leads? Do you use data to qualify leads? Marketing Automation, as it sounds, automatically completes marketing tasks by using both marketing and sales platforms. Automated marketing campaigns nurture leads by utilising several digital marketing platforms such as email, CRM and data management to deliver specific content to leads based on their level of interest. The type of marketing automation you need will depend on your business and desired outcomes. 

Types of Marketing Automation

Turning leads into customers requires your systems to work together. It’s not enough to automate and send an email to every potential lead. You need to understand the types of marketing automation to create a high-quality campaign—information, for example, from your CRM software can help qualify leads and determine which automated email they receive. 

  • Email Marketing

    Never underestimate the power of email. Used to its full potential, email marketing can be your businesses most influential marketing and sales asset. According to Statistica, email is one of the most popular marketing channels, with over 3.9 Billion emails sent in 2019 worldwide. Communicating long-form content, announcements and opportunities via email marketing has many benefits; however, segmenting audiences to deliver targeted messages has become top of the list. Segmentation is crucial when you want lead converting campaigns. However, understanding your potential customer’s segments requires data and effective lead management automation.

  • Lead Management

    Leads come in all shapes and sizes and via different channels. It can be hard to keep track of them, let alone utilise the data to inform successful marketing campaigns. Lead management software will save you time, and engaging an expert to understand the system will help your sales team differentiate quality leads from tire kickers. Nurture leads effectively filter leads, gain precise insights, facilitate better team coordination, and score potential leads faster. 

  • CRM Integration and Management

    You’ve sent the email and found the lead; now, it’s time to nurture the relationship with automation. CRM integration and management is the next step in marketing automation; why? According to Hubspot, 61% of overperforming leaders use their CRM to automate parts of their sales process, vs 46% of underperforming leaders. Why does CRM integration work? It streamlines and automates processes, allowing the sales team to do their job better and spend less time on quote creation, order processing, emails, sales forecasting and updating data. 

  • Data Management

    As your business grows, keeping customer data up-to-date can become a nightmare. A customer might change their address, a previous staff member may have made a mistake, or information becomes outdated over time. It’s common to find inaccurate data within your CRM; correcting this is time-consuming, can affect sales and customer service. To automate your data management system, you can delegate to an experienced team specialising in data management that regularly monitors and updates your database. You don’t want to miss out on a sale because your customer changed their phone number or address. 

  • Landing Page and Form Management

    Landing pages are the middle ground between a website and form submission—the perfect opportunity to deliver targeted messaging without the over or underwhelm. Whether you’re launching a new product or service, you can communicate just what you want the audience needs to know without the rest of the story. As great as landing pages and web forms are for lead generation, unless you have an automated system, you’ll need to manually transport the customer data into your CRM, taking precise time away from campaign management and lead nurturing. 

  • Campaign Management and Lead Nurturing

    Once you have secured a lead, it’s crucial they feel remembered. Lead nurturing presents itself in various ways. It could be as simple as a personalised email or perhaps a check-in call to chat. Whatever strategies you utilise, if your sales and marketing teams collaborate to look after your new lead, they’re more likely to become a loyal customer. 

What is the Value Of Marketing Automation?

It’s hard to value marketing automation; however, the Annuitas group found that using a combination of processes and automation generated a 417% increase in revenue. Its value is more than monetary and directly impacts employee satisfaction, customer service, and company reputation. 

Lead Generation and Marketing Automation

When it comes to lead generation and marketing automation, businesses can do it themselves; but chances are they won’t be great at it. The sales team has better things to do than trying to navigate their way through organisations to find qualified leads. Lead Express, an expert in sales and marketing, has built a proven strategy that allows us to deliver results at scale—saving you time, keeping your staff happy and generating better leads to make you more money. 

Does Marketing Automation Work?

Yes. Marketing Automation shakes up the traditional lead generation method by taking out the assumptions of potential clients and using proven systems to generate business. Nucleus research found that marketing automation increased sales productivity by 14.5% and reduced marketing overheads by 12.2%. At Lead Express, we guarantee results, so your marketing budget is always secure. We work together to achieve a marketing automation strategy that works for your business with mutually agreed KPIs. 

Want to see how marketing automation can work in your business? 

Get in touch with us through our contact form or call us on 1300 532 339.

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