With marketing automation beginning to be more prominent in our day to day activities it makes sense that businesses are quickly adapting to this fast growing industry. If you've read this line and show no interest, that's fair. A lot of people might not understand the value of marketing automation but here are two facts that might make you want to read on. 
Fact 1: Marketing automation increases sales productivity by 14.5%. 
Fact 2: Marketing automation decreases marketing overhead by 12.2% 
Source: invespcro.com
Do I have your interest now? Let me explain what marketing automation is and 4 ways you can benefit from it. 

What Is Marketing Automation?

At a basic level, marketing automation provides a solution to streamline and automate tasks to help increase efficiency by saving time and generating more leads and sales. This can be anything from email automation to revenue attribution. If you look at your current job and assess your day to day, how many of your tasks are repetitive? My guess is a lot. Marketing automation takes the pain of doing these tasks over and over by doing the work for you and allowing you to have more time to focus on closing that next sale. 
Currently marketing automation is in its infancy stage but you can be over time its going to be more part of every businesses day to day. 

1. Increased Revenue and Deal Size

Once a deal is closed there is always opportunity for future earnings assuming you delivered a great experience. By automating up-sells, cross promotions and follow ups it will increase how long you have that customer for. When you pair this with great lead management your sales activity will see an increase as well. 
Here's an example: You just sold a piece of machinery. Your client is super happy with the product and had a great experience. Once you move this along in your deal stage you can kick off a series of emails and follow ups to talk about monthly service packages or accessories to create an even better experience. 

2. Improve accountability

When marketing automation is part of your strategy, it is very easy to determine where the bottlenecks are. This is because you have set a clearly defined process. 
If your marketing team is capturing dozens of leads but none of them are moving down the funnel to become a sales qualified lead then marketing needs to improve their campaigns to nurture the client properly to that point. At the same time, if your marketing team has brought dozens of sales qualified leads and your sales team isn't converting them, its clear to see where the issue lies. 

3. Removing Repetition

Most people spend a lot of time doing the same tasks over and over in their job. With marketing automation  you can take away some of this. Creating templates with personalized tokens for emails, follow up emails that you use regularly will save time everyday. Although the average email only takes 6 minutes a day to write, if you are writing 100 emails think of the time saved when you start using automation. 

4. Know When To Reach Out

Timing is everything, right? Marketing automation gives you an inside look of what leads are ready and what leads are still in the decision phase. Having the ability to know when a lead is on your website through tracking and lead notifications through email. This allows you to see what pages they have visited, pick up the phone and start having a conversation. 

These are just a few of the ways marketing automation can help streamline your business and processes. Want a free assessment on how we can help? Book a meeting here.