Marketing Automation Software is supplementary software for business websites. In other words, these are a kind of digital marketing software. This software platforms have become an essential requirement of almost all the businesses. No matter the business is online or offline, you can find different types of Marketing Automation Software suitable for your business.

What is Marketing Automation?

What marketing automation simply does is, reducing your marketing work load. That is by automating your marketing tasks and processing in an efficient way using different channels, platforms, and applications. Therefore marketing automation can be defined as using software platforms and technologies to automate, execute, and measure streamlined marketing strategies in an effective and efficient way. This is done by fully understanding the customers and making strategic marketing plans.

Marketing Automation Software generates and optimizes leads to potential and existing customers. And provides a significant growth in ROI and revenue. With the main intention of generating higher revenue, Marketing Automation Software attracts and drive as much traffic as possible to your business websites. Then convert traffic into leads and then to prospects. Prospects are finally turned into happy customers.
This is a combination of several processes. To do this in a productive way and to use this technology on a large scale you need the following platforms.

A Strong Marketing Database – This is to store all your details about potential and existing customers, markets, strategies and all other results.

Marketing Engagement Platform – This a platform to create execute and to manage all the marketing automation processes. Companies use different marketing communication channels in this process.

An Analytics Platform – Analyzing and controlling part is done under this. Efficiency and effectiveness of the results are measured relating to RIO and revenue.

What is Marketing Automation Software?

It is the software platform used to perform marketing automation activities and tasks. There are a number of different Marketing Automation Software suitable for every marketing operation. But it is important to select the best and the most suitable software for your requirement. When selecting Marketing Automation Software for your business especially you need to consider the following facts.

• Type of the business – whether it is a product or service providing business
• Size of the business – whether it is small, medium or a large company
• Customer base
• Company requirements and expectations
• Expansion of the business – local or international

You can find Marketing Automation Software designed to achieve specific individual marketing goals as well as complex multiple goals. All these marketing automation products perform the below mentioned key tasks.

• Analyzing and planning marketing campaigns and customer information
• Managing and controlling the strategic marketing campaigns
• Organizing and storing customer details and results from campaigns
• Making customer leads and contacts

What does Marketing Automation Software provide you?

Marketing automation is a total package for a business. This includes the following Marketing Automation functions and features.

• E-Mail marketing
• Managing campaigns
• Customer activity and lead management
• Landing pages
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Scoring and grouping the prospects and customers
• Social marketing
• Analytical support and reporting

Advantages of Marketing Automation Software

Earlier marketers had to do a lot of work to achieve their marketing goals and objectives. And they could reach limited customers even with those hard working. But with the use of Marketing Automation Software companies could emerge in a new face with a strong customer base. Advantages of using this software are discussed below.

• Marketing Automation Software helps you to increase your biggest asset which is the customers. If you have got enough happy customers that will generate more revenue.

• You can cater to separate and unique customer groups or individuals according to their needs. This is more effective than catering to large target groups.

• It saves your valuable time. This software helps you to avoid repetitive tasks and they are automated instead. On the other hand, you can finish up the whole workload of the upcoming month in during the first week. Then you can schedule them accordingly.

• These software solutions will help you to generate better customer leads and maintain them easily. That means you can reach to the perfect and most related customer groups and you can serve them individually. Most importantly maintaining and developing these leads results in better performance.

• Marketing automation helps to get the maximum performance of the employees. By automating the activities an employee can perform more work than earlier and connect with more customers.

• This software will increase your sales revenue and generate high value in RIO. As this software bring a lot of customers and leads, markets get enlarged. And more customers can be served than before. That generates more revenue.

• Companies can get detailed reports about their performance. This software provides those details in a very user-friendly and an easily understandable manner. It will use statistics, graphical charts and other methods to display the information. This information will be useful for future planning and decision making.

• These solutions help in customer relationship management (CRM) by connecting with the customers and providing a better service. Also, it provides facilities to maintain customer profiles and databases.

• Automation will bring a lot of cost benefits to companies. All repetitive function costs are cut off because of automation. Not only that, automation software is a total package. Therefore it provides other analytical strategic and planning facilities in the same package.

• Using Marketing Automation Software solutions will bring you a great competitive advantage. This will result in capturing a huge audience and market share.

Misconceptions about Marketing Automation Software

Only e-mail marketing

Sometimes e-mail marketing is used as a buzzword for marketing automation. Even people think what Marketing Automation Software does is only e-mail marketing. But marketing automation is way beyond e-mail marketing. Email marketing is just a simple facility for marketing automation. Lead management, social marketing, landing pages, analytics and reporting, CRM, campaign management are some of the other facilities.

Only for giants

Most people think that marketing automation is only for big companies. That is a totally wrong idea. Any business of any size or any type can find various Marketing Automation Software for their needs. There are lots of service providers waiting to serve you.

High cost

As this is a new and fancy technology, it seems like this is a quite expensive service. But it is not the price you see. What is important here is not the cost but the outstanding benefits you will get through marketing automation. This is an investment rather than a cost. Any marketer can find best solutions according to their budget.

Spams and unwanted messages

This is not a platform to send spam messages or to send unwanted loads of business messages. What it actually does is understanding needs and wants of existing and potential customers. Then a customer database is created on the customer information. That helps in the future to provide a better service.

Only for Marketing

These solutions are not only designed for marketing departments. Any department can use the facilities included in these solutions to generate more profits. On top of that, all other departments, especially like sales, need to collaborate with the marketing department to do a better job.

Features make it Better

People think that the automation platform having a lot of features and option is the best. It might be and it will be more difficult to handle at the same time. Therefore the best thing is to select the automation platform considering your requirement or sometimes the budget. Having unwanted options and features will result in completing your work.