How to Sell Marketing Automation to a Skeptic

You only have so much time in your day to accomplish everything you need to get done. But what if there was a way to save time, target effectively, and increase your revenue? By using marketing automation, you can achieve it all with little to no effort from you.

If you (or your boss) is still deciding whether or not to shell out the money to get these tools, here is a list of marketing automation's benefits that may just tip the scale.

This post is part of Your Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation blog series.

Benefits of Marketing Automation for the Business

1. Increased revenue and average deal size

By automating your cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups you’ll see an increase in your customer lifetime value. When you combine this with better lead management and prioritization, it’s likely that your sales activity will produce a better ROI.

2. Reduced staffing costs

Using marketing automation software, one employee can compete with a 50-person marketing and sales department.

3. Improved accountability of marketing & sales teams

No longer can sales point the finger at marketing, or marketing point the finger at sales. Marketing automation makes it very clear where the bottlenecks in your company are, thanks to the birds-eye view reporting of your pipeline.

4.Improved effectiveness and efficiency

You have a finite amount of resources to grow your business; last I checked there are still only 24 hours in a day. Marketing automation enables you to get more out of the time and resources you do have.

5. Decreases repetition, increased creativity

When you replace manual repetitive work with automated rules and campaigns, you naturally free up you and your staff’s time to focus on more creative and strategic endeavors. This has an added benefit: happier employees and less turnover.

Benefits of Marketing Automation for the Marketing Team

1. It saves time

With marketing automation no longer do you have to go into a tool every morning and schedule your social media posts for the day or ship off emails. You can schedule everything you need ahead of time, which will free you up to do other marketing activities. Plus, all-in-one marketing automation tools will save you time from constantly flipping between tabs just to get a campaign in motion.

2. It makes gathering data and reporting a cinch

When figuring out how to increase ROI and ensure the success of your business, you need to have direct access to your key performance indicators. Rather than jumping from platform to platform to compile a campaign report, a marketing automation platform allows you to tag all of your marketing activities with the campaign they’re associated with and see comprehensive analytics of your traffic, conversion rates, clicks, etc. all in one place and in real-time!

3. Ability to reach potential customers across multiple channels

With marketing automation you're able to reach customers in a personalized way across different online and offline channels with messages via email, text, social media, or phone call all from one place. You can choose to send customers an email, postcard, text message, tweet, or phone call when they reach certain stages of the customer journey using marketing automation tools.

4. Ability to ultra-target

The ability to create and provide the right content to the right person at the right time at a huge scale is one of the biggest opportunities available to marketers today. Never before have we had the opportunity or privilege to reach 1,000 different leads with 1,000 different messages in a fully-automated way.

5. Improved lead management

When it comes to the marketing-sales funnel, generating new leads and closing them are two obvious main priorities on a company's list. Unfortunately, too many leads (and their contact data) get lost along their way down the funnel, especially in the transfer from marketing to sales.

Marketing automation is invaluable when it comes to processing and storing information on high volumes of digital leads. It can determine when a lead becomes a marketing qualified lead in need of nurturing and when they become a sales qualified lead that should be passed over (seamlessly) to your sales team.

Benefits of Marketing Automation for the Sales Team

1. Sell to your leads when they're ready

Less than 2% of your website visitors are completing the desired result - typically a sale. But who has the time to cold call each and every lost lead? It would be a waste of your time that could be better spent elsewhere.

With marketing automation there's no need for following up and nurturing every lead - the tools take care of that for you! So instead of wasting your time contacting people who aren't ready to buy, you can focus your energy on those who are.

2. Improve your email conversion rates

Automation software can schedule and send your messages at optimal times and personalize the message for each potential customer. Additionally, with these tools you can create triggered follow up emails; emails that are sent automatically based on what actions a lead chooses to take.

Triggered emails have been shown to perform three times better than other types of emails. For example, if a potential lead views your services page, an email would automatically be sent out to them describing further details of the services your company offers - without you having to lift a finger.

3. Gives you the information needed to follow up

Following up with the right message is essential in order to convert your leads into customers. Marketing automation can track the the interactions your potential leads make on your website so that you'll know what they've seen and can then approach them effectively with the appropriate message at the right time.

4. Know your best customers

Many marketing automation systems have helpful CRM features that rank your leads so you know who your best potential customers are. This can help you focus you efforts towards a handful of leads versus your entire database.

5. Create your ideal buyer

Many automation tools will allow you to enter specific criteria you would like from a potential lead. This makes filtering all of your contacts much easier so that you can find exactly which leads are worth following up with.

I hope I have prompted you to consider investing in a marketing automation for your company. If you'd like to learn more about which marketing automation platform is the best fit for your needs check out our newly released Which Marketing Automation System is Right for You? comparison guide.

Benefits of Marketing Automation for the Customer Service Team

1. IMPROVES EFFICIENCY

Marketing automation can turn incoming emails into tickets and route them to the right person on your team or to your conversations inbox.  It can also provide scripted responses to the most common queries and problems. Conversation bots, also known as chatbots, are another automation tool you can use to route customers to relevant help documents (FAQ) or an appropriate chat agent.

2. PREDICTABLE COMMUNICATION

Automation can make your job easier by automating your predictable communication like confirmation emails after customer requests (to let them know you've received their request and you're working on it), post-purchase survey requests, billing reminders, and responses to questions on help forums.

3. ERROR COMMUNICATION

There are many automation tools out there that can immediately identify errors, automate alerts to developers when something may be broken (Ex: 5 support requests regarding a certain feature in a 30 minute window will send an alert to developers), and minimize the time between error, discovery, and solution.

4. CHECKS FOR UPDATES

Despite a high level of importance, checking for updates is a part of life that oftentimes is easily overlooked. With automation, you can avoid the potential pitfalls of human error by automating internal progress notification updates. This can eliminate time lag and help customer service reps coordinate projects between different departments by notifying them when different departments complete different tasks.

5. FASTER & BETTER RESPONSES

HubSpot CRM is fully integrated with conversations inbox and contextual information which provide customer history, product details, service issues, and more. This allows you to guide conversations and provide the best possible support.

Automation can help to eliminate human error as well as provide instant updates when the time is right. If you're looking for a CRM software you should definitely check out HubSpot's, it has a lot of great features that can really help to streamline your customer service process.