Businesses are increasingly shifting towards automating their marketing efforts. A 2014 survey report published by SiriusDecisions found that the number of B2B organizations using marketing automation tools was nearly 11 times higher than what it was in 2011. This is a massive 1000% increase in adoption over a three year period. Today, automation is a vital component of marketing in not just B2B organizations, but also businesses that cater to the end customer.
Picking the right marketing tool for your business is a matter of priorities. There are a number of free marketing automation services in the market today. But these solutions can be unreliable and not suitable for a corporate business. Besides price, you should also look at the various other features that make marketing automation important for your business.
Look at the core features first
Marketing automation tools inevitably come with a lot of frills. As a marketer, the first thing you should look for however is the core product. The automation component of the product needs to be sufficiently flexible to work for your specific business requirements. The tool must let the user set rules and conditions at every stage of the marketing process. This way, the marketer may set hundreds of scenarios and set rules for how to react to these specific scenarios.
Email integration
Email marketing forms the core component of any automation strategy. No matter how you acquire your leads, you will still need to nourish these leads and generate interest through email communication. Companies like SquareSpace spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each month to capture leads who are then nourished over email marketing strategies. No matter how large your business is, pick a marketing automation provider who has strong foundations in email marketing. Failing this, you could be bleeding a lot of money in nourishing leads over email marketing platforms that don’t enjoy good reputation and thus have poor deliverability.
Ease of use
While marketers would require a software with advanced filter and rules based automation features, it is also important to pick a tool that is easy to set and deploy. GetResponse, a company that started off as an email marketing platform and which now has advanced marketing automation features is a good example of intuitive design. The service comes with a drag and drop workflow builder that lets marketers design powerful workflows with just click and drag functionalities. If you are an eCommerce business, a tool that easily integrates with third party platforms would come in handy. This way, you could set rules for specific use-cases like when a visitor abandons their cart or when they just made a purchase.
Scalable
Marketing automation is an extremely powerful strategy and could drive up the number of prospects in your sales funnel quite rapidly. It is hence important to pick a marketing automation tool that is scalable. This is not only important from an infrastructure perspective, but also from the pricing point of view. If you are a bootstrapped business that is starting out on marketing automation, you may want to know your outgoing expenses from automation when you have several thousand prospects in your sales funnel. The automation tool you pick should hence have a transparent billing process and needs to be affordable.