Functionality
The concept of marketing automation has been around for few years now, but there is still confusion about the potential and limits of this technology. Basically, Marketing Automation solutions offer three things (most tools offer a lot more features but in general the value comes from the three features to follow).
- First, it gathers information and creates detailed lead's profiles based on identities and the online interactions performed across all your online marketing campaigns.
- Second, it provides tools to automate marketing campaigns using the previously accumulated information. This allows highly targeted and relevant marketing campaigns to be performed as well as lead nurturing and lead scoring.
- Finally, it generates reports and data on various marketing metrics (campaigns performances, email performance, ROI, cost per lead...) that you can use to justify and optimize your various marketing efforts
To recap using a marketing automation solution , you will be able to:
- Monitor in real time all your online campaigns,
- Synchronize lead and opportunity information with your CRM.
- Automatically perform tasks like send emails, send alert to sales, lead scoring, lead nurturing... all based on leads' behaviors and attributes.
- Obtain accurate ROI and various other marketing metrics information
Purpose
You should always keep in mind that the main purpose of using a Marketing Automation Solution is to understand your customer and to provide them with the information they need at the time they need it so they can make an informed buying decision.
To illustrate this lets suppose that you are at a car dealer and you're looking at sport cars, the dealer certainly won't come up and talk to you about pick-up trucks, which would be a big turn off for you. He would talk to you about horsepower, traction control, and driving experience. That is what Marketing Automation helps you to do. Because automated tasks can be performed over lead's personas, you can automatically open dialogs with every leads based on their preferences. The future customers will feel more confident over your corporation when receiving personalized and relevant content. Confidence and trust is what gets leads to become customers ( not only that but it helps a lot!)
Keep in mind
One thing you should keep in mind before going into marketing automation. Marketing Automation solutions are tools and they won't do anything unless you know how to use them efficiently. You should make sure your solution provider offers you the expertise, training and proper services that will ensure you get a 100% value from you purchase.
At Alsamarketing we believe that too many marketing automation vendors sell their products but do not offer adequate services and best practices to their customers base. We totally disagree with this approach. At Alsamarketing we provide each of our customers with a top of the line marketing automation software COMBINED with services to ensure you get 100% value from our products all at a reasonable price.
Learn more at www.alsamarketing.com