Are You Making The Right Use Of Marketing Automation Solution?

Marketing automation solution is often looked upon as the panacea to all the sales and marketing woes. To most of the marketers it is like a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of solution that can move the leads swiftly through the sales cycle with no extra effort required. But unfortunately what they don’t realize is that using the solution alone will not suffice. In fact most of the organizations fail to realize the full value of the investment made in marketing technology. The truth is that if you are going to depend solely on an automated tool to nurture your contacts and leads, you are in for some big trouble.

Using barely marketing automation solution to grow contacts list

One major disadvantage of using only an automated solution for the purpose of adding new contacts to your database is that you will run out of people you can direct your marketing efforts to in a while. Generally, email marketing lists keep losing its relevance to some degree with every passing year, retaining on average 75% of the members after each year due to overturn at companies. With people swapping jobs and companies undergoing management changes, the current email addresses no longer remain valid after sometime. As a result you end up having a pretty deflated email marketing list that you cannot rely on to generate leads.

Merging marketing automation solution usage with sales efforts

Marketing automation in itself is not bad. But you need to concentrate on filling the top of your sales funnel by luring and adding net new contacts to your database while optimizing marketing automation efforts simultaneously. Practicing inbound marketing is the best way to achieve your target. You can create interesting and search engine friendly content that addresses your prospects’ needs and queries and use social media to promote that content and extend your reach. Convert the visitors into prospects or leads using proper call-to-action and land pages. They will make up for the 25% of members that you lose to list expiration each year.

Using marketing automation solution in all its complexity

Even if you are focused on growing your email marketing list alongside the automated solution usage, unfortunately, most organization fail to make optimum use of marketing automation solution; barely leveraging the complex features like lead intelligence, contacts’ behavioral traits, etc that can be utilized to plan and craft segmented and personalized marketing campaigns. Rather, they go with a one-size-fits-all approach that results in a series of spam mails that lack targeting. And this is mainly due to dearth of integration between their marketing channels.

Conclusion

Marketing automation solution is a crucial element for every organization to grow market share. If the marketing automation solution, marketing database and marketing analytics tools are properly integrated you can easily segment your communication in the best possible way to address your contacts’ needs and interests. So what you need to do is include technology marketing into your inbound marketing plan in order to be successful. Leveraging marketing automation solution in a comprehensive way is what is required to be precise.