If you’re not still convinced that you need to implement a solid marketing automation strategy for your business, we’re going to try one last time to convince you otherwise.
There are roughly a billion blogs online heralding the benefits of marketing automation. You’ve undoubtedly stumbled across a few of them before. But we get it. Facts and figures – not sugary blog posts – are your cup of tea. You need hard evidence before you start budgeting for anything new in your business. And we tend to agree. Implementing anything based on hearsay is a terrible idea – and with so much data being collected every day, why wouldn’t we base our decisions on hard evidence?
Let’s bring out the facts.
What is marketing automation, anyway?
Before we go any further, what is marketing automation anyway?
Marketing automation technologies allow companies to streamline, automate, and measure their marketing workflows. That means rather than having someone with their hands permanently on deck, you can organise your digital marketing to work independently, only tweaking it occasionally to keep it relevant. The idea behind this being you can spend more effort bolstering in-house efficiency, save money and time, and thus grow revenue faster.
Nowadays, with intelligent, hyper-connected software and huge online audiences, marketing automation has gone from being a ‘nice-to-have’ to a staple of any marketing strategy worth its salt.
‘Why’, you ask? Well let’s take a look at some of the numbers
What the market leaders have to say
In 2014, back when marketing automation was just starting to take off properly as a marketing staple, TFM&A Insights and RedEye surveyed 250 lead marketers, asking for their opinions on its biggest benefit their businesses.
36% of the respondents said they found automated marketing removed repetitive tasks from the hands of their marketers, allowing them to focus on new or more exciting projects.
30% said it allowed for better targeting of customers and prospects, and 10% thought it improved customer experience.
The other 24% claimed automated marketing allowed for better email marketing, reduction of human error and better lead management and multichannel marketing.
They all agreed it was a game changer for their business.
Since then, marketing automation has well and truly taken off. Salesforce’s State of Marketing report for 2017 shows that a whopping 67% of marketing leaders now use automation technologies to get the best results. And, as discovered by Marketo and Ascend2, 63% of companies were planning to increase their marketing automation budgets.
All in all: extremely positive feedback. Now let’s take a look at the sort of ROI can you expect to see from adopting a marketing automation strategy of your own.
Marketing automation return on investment
It’s not possible to give you a definitive dollar-figure that you can expect to make from automation. Like any other marketing strategy, you only get out what you put in. However, we can take a look at a few of the trending improvements companies have experienced after adoption…
Venture Beat Insight, in their report ‘Marketing Automation, how to make the right buying decisions’, found that a whopping 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase. What’s more, 77% also saw an increase in their conversions.
Marketing automation makes you more money. In fact, as Hubspot discovered, it can octodecuple your money. (Not a typo – just a lot of time wasted in a dictionary). Turns out well automated emails generate, on average, 18 times the revenue of garden-variety email blasts.
Now, that’s not to say that by simply swapping your old email platform out for something with automation capabilities is going to make you 18 times more money overnight. Marketing automation works because it’s so good at slowly, but surely, nurturing leads into buyers – without the need to worry about human error.
In fact, according to B2Bmarketing.net’s Automation Benchmarking Report, only 8% of companies see increased revenues within 6 months of adopting marketing automation. It’s certainly not an instant fix to your marketing woes. But! After a year of use, 32% claimed to see increased revenue. And for those who used marketing automation for over two years, the figure rises to 40%.
The bottom line: marketing automation is a must-have if you want to compete. Start researching a solution for your business today.