By some accounts, 75% of B2B marketers have already experimented with marketing automation solutions as a way to turn leads into sales. And, in most cases, they are seeing real results, especially at the very top end of the sales funnel. In one study, companies using marketing automation saw as much as a 451% increase in the number of qualified leads. There are 4 key reasons why marketing automation can be so powerful:
Reason #1: Marketing automation enables the scaling of personalization
In many ways, personalization is hard and time-consuming. It’s the art of making sure that every piece of content that a prospect or customer sees is highly customized and tailored to their specific needs. The only way to scale that process is via marketing automation.
That means that prospects only see relevant offers based on behaviors or actions they’ve already taken. It means that emails are customized according to their unique interests. In short, it means they are seeing the right content at the right place at the right time.
Reason #2: Marketing automation boosts productivity and efficiency
The goal of marketing automation is to take all the little mundane tasks that take up so much time and then automate them so that you don’t have to worry about them. One good example is social media, where something as simple as automating social media posts can save a marketing team anywhere from 5-10 hours a week.
Reason #3: Marketing automation speeds up the sales cycle
It can take a lot of time to nurture a prospect from lead to sale. Before marketing automation, it usually required a marketer to “touch base” with a prospect from time to time. These calls might have seemed planned and orderly, but they often could not be carried out like clockwork due to new priorities and workflows.
That’s where marketing automation steps in. You can literally program emails or other correspondence to go out at certain times to as many customers as you would like. For example, after a major trade show, you could ensure that prospects get a follow-up email exactly 30 days later. Or a customer visiting your website and downloading a whitepaper can get a follow-up email exactly 48 hours later. All of that has the impact of speeding up the sales cycle. You can think of this as “pushing” the customer through the sales funnel more efficiently.
Reason #4: Marketing automation boosts retention and lowers attrition
Finally, marketing automation is great for reaching all of the prospects in your sales funnel that most companies typically ignore. If you think about it, most B2B marketing focuses on two parts of the sales funnel – the part where all the leads go in and the part where all the leads pop out. But what about leads stuck in the middle? That’s where marketing automation can help to boost retention and lower attrition. You can give plenty of attention to existing customers (who may be ready for an upsell or cross-sell) and you can also prevent all of your “unqualified” leads from dropping out of the sales funnel entirely.
In many ways, marketing is still a numbers game. And the best way to stack the odds in your favor is by embracing all the efficiencies and enhancements made possible by marketing automation.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.