marketing.automation.solution -hmftj

1. How Marketing Automation
Streamlines Sales and
Marketing
BY H.M.F.T.J
THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2016
If you're looking to turbo charge
your marketing and sales efforts, try
combining marketing automation with
your CRM and email marketing tools.

2. Combined with your customer
relationship management (CRM) database,
marketing automation software can improve
simplify, and accelerate your sales and
marketing efforts. Although marketing
automation has been wrongly associated
with spam, businesses and customers both
benefit from the personalized, timely, and
dynamic messages this powerful software
enables.

3. Your competitors probably already know
this, but more than 70 percent of businesses
are using marketing automation software,
and B2B marketers see an increase of 20
percent in marketing automation-based sales
opportunities compared with leads nurtured
through other means, according to IDG.
In this article, we'll examine seven
ways in which marketing automation
software can help turn your static,
impersonal marketing messages into
sales generators.
1. Set It and Forget It
Marketing automation tools are
first and foremost designed to turn
manual processes into pre-programmed

4. actions. For example: If your Salesforce
CRM gives you enough data to tell you
when a customer's birthday might be, or
when his or her contract is ending, you
can use your marketing automation
platform to pre-set an email to launch on
a specific day.
Yes, most email marketing tools can help
you get this set up, but the data you
generate from these emails won't
automatically transfer across each of
your systems. If your customer opens
your email, clicks on a link, heads to your
website, asks for a demo, purchases your
products, shares the product with
friends on social media, and then goes on
to buy a second product, your email
marketing and CRM tools won't be able
to seamlessly track that entire
progression without a marketing

5. automation tool connecting them in the
middle.
2. Prospect Scoring
In its most basic terms,
prospect scoring enables you to rank
prospective customers against one
another to determine how valuable
each person will be to your sales

6. interests. If you've got a white whale
account, your marketing automation
solution will gather data from
your Apptivo CRM database to rank his
or her account atop your prospect
scoring rankings.
This is particularly useful as you get into
the middle and lower rungs of your
prospect database. Knowing whether a
lead is important enough to dedicate
valuable resources to can save you lots of
time and money, as well as help you to
improve overall sales performance.
3. Prospect Nurturing
Once you've determined whether
someone is a top or a middle-rung
prospect, you can begin to develop your

7. prospect nurturing campaign driven by
your marketing automation software.
Sure, you can manually send emails,
social media requests, and write blog
posts that might attract or engage with
your prospect, but a marketing
automation tool will help you pre-
establish a cadence, the messaging, and
the deadline for when these
communications need to deliver
business results.
With your marketing automation
solution, you'll be able to track your
customer down the sales funnel to
determine if he or she is advancing,
backtracking, or remaining stagnant, and
you can adjust your campaign so that
future automated communications
reflect this change in tone.

8. 4. Pull In Prospects with Content
No marketing automation suite
is complete without the ability to create,
track, share, and draw customers in
through content marketing. Your
company blog, whether it's proprietary
to the marketing automation suite, or if
you use a third-party tool, is the
lifeblood of your content marketing
efforts. Every piece of paid and earned
media should end up on your blog. You
should be constantly creating new
content that speaks to the values of your
organization.
Your marketing automation software will
help you track, share, and design that
content in a way that provides the most
business value for your team.

9. 5. Marketing Analytics
We've discussed tracking your
campaigns in-depth already, but it's
absolutely worth reiterating, especially
for larger organizations that don't mind
having a few interns bang out the
manual work done by automation
software.
Even the best interns won't have the
technology to be able to determine
things like return-on-investment (ROI),
how the customer journeyed through
your messaging, whether or not the
customer opened and forwarded your
email, among many other data points.
Once you have this information, you'll be
able to adapt your campaigns, accelerate
or decelerate your messaging, or scrap
your idea completely.

10. These analytics will be what you
ultimately use to defend your campaigns,
your budget, and your job to your CFO.
Make sure you get as much as you can
from them.

11. 6. Enhanced Customer Data
Behind all of your campaigns you'll
want to pack as much customer data as
you can into your messaging, your blog
posts, and your social activity.
We already discussed things like
birthdays and contract deadlines, but
there are other useful tidbits you can
pull from your Zoho CRM tool to enhance
your sales and marketing efforts.
For example: How often does a specific
user share your content? How much did
it cost to acquire this one specific
customer? How influential is this person
on social media? These metrics will turn
your generic marketing efforts into
focused, timely, and user-specific
messages.

12. 7. PERSONALIZATION
Speaking of customer
data: We've all received emails and
pitches that have absolutely nothing to
do with our interests. In fact, most of you
have probably received messages
addressed to "Dear Customer" or
"Friend." Those messages could have
used some help from marketing
automation software.
With these tools, you'll be able
to segment customers in order to send
messages to groups of people for whom
only that specific message is relevant.
You can also pull in rich user data such
as a person's name, title, and location to
make it seems as if the email message
was sent by a human and not software.
Perhaps more importantly, you can
determine when users are more likely to

13. open, read, and forward a message, and
then set your software to communicate
with him or her at that specific time only.
Sure, this sounds really easy when you're
dealing with one person at a time. But
imagine if you had to send messages to
thousands or millions of customers. Only
marketing automation software,
combined with email marketing and
CRM tools, can get the job done.