Sunday, March 3, 2013

Shorten Sales Cycle and Boost Revenue with Marketing Automation Software


According to IDC, the overall market for automating marketing will grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $4.8 billion in 2015. Moreover, they predict that over the next 4 years, marketing automation is the only segment that is expected to grow faster than any other segment of CRM.This definitely shows that marketing automation is here to stay.However,before delving further into it, let’s first understand the term marketing automation.

Marketing automation is a technology that makes use of software to automate marketing management and customer engagement.An integral component of customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation helps in customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI) and campaign management. Marketing automation helps to streamline marketing and sales activities by automating the processes that have been traditionally performed manually.Thus, marketing automation allows enterprises to:

  • Develop and analyze marketing campaigns and customers
  • Manage marketing campaigns
  • Appropriate customer data organization and storage
  • Review traffic statistics
  • Measure conversions
  • Interact with customers
  • Evaluate customer data
  • Provide marketing content

Marketing automation software provides information across all phases of the marketing process and this includes:

  • Marketing intelligence
  • Workflow management
  • Web-based archive and real-time traffic analysis
  • Lead management, scoring and nurturing
  • Marketing campaign creation and monitoring
  • Built-in or integrated CRM
  • Landing page development/management
  • Blogging
  • Data orchestration
  • Email marketing
  • Social marketing
  • Marketing analytics

Enterprises need to deploy best of the breed marketing automation software to create and manage effective marketing campaigns.Here is a look at some of the important features and benefits of the best of the breed marketing automation software.

  • Builds a pipeline of qualified leads
  • Tracks visitor intent in real time
  • Aligns marketing and sales goals
  • Creates, manages and tracks campaign elements (emails, landing pages, workflow, social media, etc.) using built-in tools
  • Enhance lead nurturing using campaign triggers from website interactions, social media activities, forms-fills, etc.
  • Tracks and correlates disparate prospect interactions with social media
  • Converts anonymous website visits into sales opportunities by correlating all related online activities
  • Identifies and qualifies sales opportunities by measuring the online behavior of prospects
  • Delivers an unprecedented level of intelligence about prospect intent and his/her purchasing proclivities
  • Separates the high-intent, ready-to-buy leads from the low-intent, just-looking-for-info leads
  • Provides complete lead data from company details to decision maker contact data
  • Integrates easily with sales CRM system thereby ensuring a smooth transition of leads from marketing to sales

With today’s business environment becoming highly competitive, investing in marketing automation software that shortens sales cycles and boosts revenue can help enterprises in understanding their customers’ intent clearly and respond to them effectively.

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