Marketing automation tools make it simple for marketers to enhance the customer experience (CX), enabling them to do things like send out personalized welcome emails or quickly handle problems involving abandoned carts.
But marketing automation technology provides efficiencies in other areas that make a marketer’s life easier and improve CX.
When setting up a marketing automation system, the sales and marketing teams should discuss and agree on what distinguishes a hot, sales-ready lead from a cold lead, said Kerry Nelson, senior director of field marketing at Infor, a New York-based enterprise software company.
“The sales team can also help marketing identify the best behaviors to score a lead and give advice about the timing of the campaign in terms of when to send certain pieces of content,” she added. “As sales helps marketing, the sales team will be able to see the results in a more robust flow of leads, and this alignment is a win-win for both departments.”
Kristin Hambelton, CMO at Marketing Evolution, a maker of marketing optimization software, argued that one of the most important uses of marketing automation software is for the collection of data.
“I can think of dozens of uses in addition to abandoned carts and welcome emails, but no matter what the use case, the data resulting from campaigns is one of the most valuable levers for success — or failure — that marketers have to work with,” she said, pointing out that marketers must capitalize on the information they collect in order to identify both opportunities and problems.
“Using marketing automation, specifically unified measurement and optimization, enables marketers to shift their measurement and optimization lens from siloed to holistic. In doing so, marketers can most accurately assess what’s working versus what’s not, but more importantly, act on those insights in a meaningful way,” Hambelton added. “Only through unified marketing measurement and optimization can marketers maximize their campaign performance, sales and engagement [in a way] that delivers the brand impact and return on investment.”
Masterson noted that adopting automated data analysis processes can be an enormous time-saver that will free up employees so they can focus on more important things that aren’t “mind-numbingly monotonous.”