5 Reasons Why Your Startup Needs Marketing Automation Today
In the marketing world, trends, strategies, and technologies are evolving at a rapid pace. This is why, if you are a budding startup, it is important to stay abreast with the latest developments in the industry – to say the least, you do not want your company to fall behind while your competitors are ahead of the curve. Marketing automation has arrived and how!
Now the question arises: how can you keep up with the evolving landscape?
One of the best ways to stay informed about the latest market trends is to look out for marketing statistics.
In the current scenario, marketing automation is a hot trend that is making the headlines across the marketing world. Today, nearly 75% of all businesses have implemented some type of marketing automation [1].
When we talk about marketing, startups face their own share of challenges. These challenges primarily stem from the shoestring budget they are running on and the lack of manpower.
This is where marketing automation can help startups scale and fuel their growth.
Before we dive right into the advantages of automation for startups, let’s take a look at some interesting numbers.
Marketing Automation Stats You Should Know
- Companies that use marketing automation platforms have reported a 7% revenue growth through automation [2]
- Multiple companies have reported a return on investment (ROI) as high as 5-8 times than the initial investment [3]
- Nearly 63% of marketers are planning on increasing their marketing automation budget in the future [4]
If these statistics have not convinced you to take the plunge and invest in marketing automation, these benefits surely will.
Advantages of Marketing Automation
1. Time Savings
The wide range of tools in a marketing automation platform can benefit startups in many ways. As a budding entrepreneur, you should definitely be looking for business tools that can help your startup save time and become more efficient.
Marketing automation provides great assistance in this area. These tools enable you to create real-time routing, task creation and set up follow-up cross channels.
When startups create their own personalized workflows, online automation tools ensure you are working smarter.
2. List Segmentation
Another major advantage of marketing automation is its ability to segment and pull lists. These tools can pull out contracts that fit certain criteria based on data that you have set up in the database.
Regardless of the size of your database, automation in list pulling is essential for two main reasons; one to save time and two to ensure you are delivering the right message to the right audience.
It is interesting to note that nearly 39% of marketers who bifurcated their email lists saw an increase in open rates. [5]
3. Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is very important to bring your potential customers and prospects onboard. It is an important step to convert them into paying customers in the future.
The ultimate goal of lead nurturing is to create awareness about your products, services, build trust, and strengthen your ties with them.
How does an online marketing automation system help?
Automation platforms allow you to build lead nurturing campaigns that are also referred to as email drip campaigns. Email drip marketing is a systematic process whereby emails are delivered to your customers in a staggered manner based on their position in the buyer’s journey.
The entire point of lead nurturing is to ensure your potential customers move from the awareness stage to the consideration stage to the decision-making stage.
For each of these stages, you can craft and deliver different emails using marketing automation.
Keep in mind that although automation is the main part of this process, you should closely monitor the key metrics such as engagement, marketing attribution reports, email open rates, and more. When you keep track of these metrics, you will be able to determine what area of your workflow is a hit and what is not.
4. Team Collaboration
One of the benefits of marketing automation you may not have foreseen is the ability to improve collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Both, your sales and the marketing team can leverage automation to push leads through the sales funnel with ease.
The idea behind building automated processes is to increase leads, evaluate their willingness to buy, and direct them to a sales representative without any manual intervention.
Marketing automation also allows you to track the progress of each project, communicate important milestones and dates, and ensure all team members are up-to-date with the latest data.
5. Email Marketing
Email automation grabs the pole position when it comes to the popularity of different marketing automation tools.
Although social media marketing might seem the most obvious choice for automation, email automation continues to have an upper hand.
A report published in 2018 revealed that the top three marketing automation strategies include email automation (64%), profiling (26%), and customization via dynamic content (23%) [6].
What is email marketing doing so well? The answer is simple. Customers around the world still prefer being contacted by brands and companies via emails. Naturally, growing startups to large corporations continue to focus on their email marketing efforts to stay ahead in the curve.
Besides, the time savings provided by automation is unmatched. Creating and sending one email manually is a pretty straightforward task. However, when you have to get in touch with hundreds and thousands of customers, it is hard to imagine doing it manually.
This is where online email marketing and marketing automation tools come in. They enable you to deliver bulk emails within seconds. The best part about these tools is that you can send personalized emails to each customer segment based on their preferences, engagement history, and other key parameters.
Marketing Automation World – Recent Updates
With so much going on in the marketing automation world, it is easy to miss out on what the top vendors are doing. The launch of new products, mergers & acquisitions, new features, and more contribute to creating a robust automation landscape.
While some software vendors focus on mergers and acquisitions, a lot of them rely on introducing innovative features.
SugarCRM Modifies SugarPredict AI Engine to Enable Automated Lead Scoring
Most recently, SugarCRM made noteworthy changes to its SugarPredictAI to enable marketing teams with predictive and automation lead scoring. According to the company, the cloud-based marketing automation platform opens the doors to reliable and rapid prioritization and lead qualification.
The new and revamped smart scoring engine is designed to help marketing teams save time by automating the maintenance and creation of lead scoring logic.
Salesforce Announces New Innovations for Digital 360 Platform
On similar lines, Salesforce announced some new features for its Digital 360 platform. The innovations circle around consolidating Salesforce’s Experience Cloud, Marketing, and Commerce services onto a single platform. This recent update will allow Salesforce customers to accelerate their digital transformation. The company announced this news at its Connection 2021 digital event.
Simplified Raises $2.2 million to Introduce Automated Content Creation
Simplified, the marketing-oriented design software has successfully raised $2.2 million in seed funding. Simplified is primarily developed for marketers who are responsible for creating large volumes of content across multiple channels.
Simplified leverages machine learning to automate content creation in more ways than one. It also offers collaborative tools that allow teams to share assets and work together on creating compelling marketing content.
Marketing Automation is Important – Start Today
We can go on and on about why your startup needs marketing automation. If you break it down, it ultimately boils down to two things – cost and time savings.
Implementing a powerful marketing automation strategy will help you hop, skip, and jump past your competitors who do not have automation in place. These platforms can help your business stay competitive and remain a relevant alternative for customers.
Besides, marketing for startups is not an easy task. It involves tons of predictable and unforeseen tasks that can disrupt the rhythm of your business processes.
If you want to save time, effort on email marketing, generate and nurture leads, improve team collaboration and conversion rates, it is the right time to embrace automation.
Wondering where to start? You can go through our tool reviews of some of the best online marketing automation systems and make a decision.
Feature Image Source: rawpixel.com
Image 1 Source: rawpixel.com
Image 2 Source: Business photo created by ijeab – www.freepik.com
Image 3 Source: Technology vector created by upklyak – www.freepik.com
Sources:
[1] [4] [6] Moran. M (2021) “Marketing Automation Statistics: The Definitive List” Startup Bonsai [online] Available from: https://startupbonsai.com/marketing-automation-statistics/ [accessed June 2021]
[2] [3] Chrisos. M (2019) “How Successful Startups Use Marketing Automation” Tech Funnel [online] Available from: https://www.techfunnel.com/martech/how-successful-startups-use-marketing-automation/ [accessed June 2021]
[5] Vaughan. P (2021) “
