A business needs to run multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously to reach the maximum number of people and get regular leads and conversions. It can take up a lot of human resources and time and cannot always give real time results. Therefore, marketing automation software’s become a need and a necessity. A research indicated that by using marketing automation, there is an increased lead volume by 27%, conversion by 30%, and ROI by more than 25%.
Types of marketing automation
- B2B marketing automation. (business to business)
- B2C marketing automation (business to customers)
- Small business marketing automation
- Mobile market automation
If you go searching for marketing automation platform for your business, you will see many options in the market. Each offering a plethora of options, some essential for your product or service and some not so. Automation can be any business’s best friend and handle many tasks, such as
- Attracting and nurturing leads
- Eliminating the guesswork by collecting and reporting data automatically.
- Respond quickly to queries and salesÂ
So which one to choose? The marketing automation should have features that solve the problem or challenge you are facing. Here is a short checklist that covers the top features that you will need today and for years to come!
Easy workflow creation and management
The basic and foremost requirement of the best marketing automation platform is the ability of easy workflow creation. Software should be easy to manage, and the aim should be to increase and optimize the workflow. It should be easy to follow and amend.
Mobile Capabilities
In this day and age, every business needs the reach to mobile devices. With the mobile networking subscriptions reaching billions and expected to increase in the coming years. Best marketing automation software will have tools that include native iOS and Android mobile applications to enable creating campaigns. Mobile capabilities will give you the freedom to create landing pages, websites, etc. from wherever you are. Other features include creating campaigns, scanning with OCR technologies, offline contact access, etc.
Real-time alerts
Any good marketing automation software should have the feature of sending out real time alerts to the team members or other people who are part of the campaign. If there is an issue in the workflow that requires immediate action, then immediate alerts should be sent to those involved.
Email Marketing
Building and managing personalized email campaigns is a must have feature of an automation marketing software. Marketing automation can generate personalized messages to increase customer retention. Tracking the campaign will also help improve customer relationships and making ROI sales.
Lead capture
The lead capture page should be advanced to capture all about the prospects and what they are looking for. The landing pages will be the first to know what are the pain points, and how your business can help eliminate the issues.
Lead scoring and management
All the best marketing automation platforms will have the feature to separate hot leads from the ones just browsing. For every company, the lead score is different, but it helps the organization segregate the promising leads for a given product, time, or campaign. Any automation platform should have an easy and detailed complete lead nurturing process, and be able to perform all tasks from lead scoring and lead assigning. Best marketing automation services also offer services like assigning leads to sales reps based on the lead’s journey, the sales rep’s expertise and building a personalized journey.
Expert campaign management
One of the most critical requirements of a marketing automation platform is to have an integrated and omnichannel campaign management. It is a feature you will need the most for most of the things, such as planning, designing, and creating campaigns, analyzing ROI, managing messages, images, videos, document, and more, schedule and analyzing campaigns, and meeting the benchmarks. An advanced campaign management can also track the audience behavior and tailor the campaigns for better results.
Expert CRM integration and reporting
You need a marketing automation platform that does good CRM integration to be intuitive enough to classify drip or nurture campaigns, welcome the leads, and track engagement. The automation will alert the sales team when the prospect is active and basically do all the grunt work for you, including analytics and reporting.
Visitor tracking
It is a great way to not only know which customer segment is viewing your content, but it also gives insights on what content is appealing to them. That is a powerful information to have for any business.
Track prospect activity
One of the most refined features of top marketing automation platforms is the ability to track the moves of the buyer in the sales funnel. You will get an alert when your prospect is ready to take action so that the sales team can jump in at the right moment and convert the lead.
Dynamic Content
The modern consumer is not looking to just buy things, they expect engagement with the brand. An expert marketing automation platform will let you customize the content on your website or landing pages or messages, emails, forms, & templates in a way that appeals the most to the prospect.
Tool integrations
The marketing automation platform that you select cannot be standalone, it should have the seamless ability to integrate powerful tools used by various enterprises. These include paid advertisement, social media, URL shorteners, e-commerce, and other optimization tools.
Artificial Intelligence
This modern tool is now a part of all top marketing automation platforms. AI is the game changing advancement that can be used by all businesses to boost automation by personalizing marketing, drip marketing, nurturing campaigns, identifying sales opportunities, and overall improving customer retention. AI based capabilities can also include chatbots, lead scoring, and send time optimization.
Marketing automation software does not replace human creativity. Employing the best marketing automation platforms in your business will give the human ingenuity a boost by taking up the mundane tasks such as managing campaigns, social media management, personalizing customer journeys, and visualizing the journey in the campaigns.Â
Read Also: What are the advantages of partnering with a marketing automation agency
Written By – Amit Bhateja
Amit Bhateja is the co-founder of enrcloud and helping brands and Unicorns from the last 15+ years and overachieve their Engagement and Retention goals. He is passionate about solving customer problems with modern technology, new age solutions, and consultancy approach. Besides Building ENR, He enjoys reading books, spending time with his family and Teammates, traveling, meeting new people, learning new things, and love to close the business deals.
