Marketing Automation FAQ

By MAX ADMIN – 12/12/2015

Considering adding a marketing automation platform to your marketing and sales teams? Here are some frequently asked questions to get you started:

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate your marketing processes in a much more efficient way across multiple channels. Marketing automation allows companies to decrease their manual workload and allow processes like email blasts, lead generation, and campaign management to be set up and automatically executed.

Does marketing automation really work?

Yes! Marketers say that the biggest benefits of marketing automation are saving time (74%), increased customer engagement (68%), more timely communications (58%), and increased opportunities, including up-selling. Clearly, marketing automation brings many benefits to both your marketing and sales team. From saving time to increasing customer communication across channels, marketing automation truly does work.

Can marketing automation be used for both sales and marketing?

Marketing automation allows companies to push customers and prospects through the sales funnel with limited time and resources. From a sales perspective, marketing automation tools help turn those potential prospects into actual leads with automated actions that keep you on top of the sales process. Keeping track of all of your prospects and sending out the right touches at the right time is key to any sales team. From the marketing side, automating your campaigns gives you the ability to reach your targets with various engagements. From social media posts to email campaigns, there is no better way to push out your content than on an automated basis.

What are the benefits of using marketing automation?

While using a marketing automation platform, you can spend time following up with leads rather than wasting time trying to schedule your next marketing campaign. You can have targeted campaigns ready to go and automatically execute everything with the click of a button. Marketing automation allows you to gain results and actionable knowledge that will allow you to change and gain even better results next time.

If I have an email auto-responder why do I need marketing automation?

An email auto-responder is a single outbound marketing tactic. You have pre-written content that automatically gets sent out to anyone trying to reach you. And while this tactic can be beneficial in some ways, it is vastly different than what can be accomplished through automated marketing. With an automated process, you first will set up a marketing campaign. Then, depending on how you set up your campaign, different automated actions can be put in place based on the actions of the recipients. This process takes communication past simply responding to an email and brings it across multiple channels. Yes, both an email auto-responder and marketing automation platform are created to make your life easier, but that is about as far as the similarities go.

Is my company too small for an automated marketing software?

Marketing automation platforms are for organizations of all sizes. For small organizations, marketing automation allows you to stretch your limited resources and reach just as many prospects as any larger sized entity. For larger organizations, automated processes help keep campaigns organized to make sure you do not lose sight of your contacts. It utilizes efficiency and communication in so many ways that size is not a factor. Whether you have a contact list of 50 names or 500,000, automated marketing makes it easy to reach them in multiple ways.

Do you have any other questions regarding marketing automation? Tweet us, @MarketWithMAX!