This lesson discusses the benefits of marketing automation.
The benefits of automation
If you’re considering marketing automation for your company, it’s important to have a good understanding of what to expect, and what the key benefits are before you begin. At a fundamental level, marketing automation is about optimisation. From optimising your staff’s time, to optimising which customers your sales team focuses their effort on, the scope of marketing automation goes way beyond simply automating your marketing department’s repetitive tasks.
We’ll walk through many of the ways that marketing automation can be used throughout this post, but let’s start off with some of the macro-level benefits that marketing automation has on the business as a whole.
Increase your staff's resource
Using marketing automation software, one employee can compete with a 50-person marketing and sales department. How? By setting up lead nurturing and marketing campaigns that are automatically triggered based on certain criteria.
After a few months of building these automated campaigns, your business might be sending out thousands of personalised emails each day on autopilot.
Lead nurturing leads to increased revenue and average deal size
By automating your cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups you’ll likely notice an increase in your customer lifetime value. When you combine this with better lead management and prioritisation, it’s likely that your sales activity will produce a better ROI.
Virtually all of the benefits outlined in this post contribute to increasing revenue and deal-size in some way or another.
Improve accountability of marketing & sales teams
Marketing automation makes it very clear where the bottlenecks in your company are, thanks to having clearly defined processes and birds-eye view reporting of the company’s pipeline.
If marketing is capturing hundreds of leads, but none of them are being nurtured to become ‘sales-qualified leads’, the marketing department will receive instant and impartial feedback that they need to improve their nurturing campaigns.
This feedback system not only reduces tough conversations and company politics, but also improves accountability of staff and departments to ensure that their part of the system is performing effectively.
Be more effective
No matter how large or small your team, you have a finite amount of resources to grow your business. Marketing automation enables you to squeeze more juice out of the hours available to you.
Less repetition, more creativity
When you replace manual repetitive work with automated rules and campaigns, you naturally free up your staff’s time to focus on more creative tasks.
While this has clear benefits of staff productivity and effectiveness, there’s a softer and less tangible benefit on creativity and overall happiness that comes from focusing your staff on varied creative work instead of mundane repetitive tasks.