What are marketing automation tools? Benefits & key features

Marketing automation tools are the core technology driving contemporary marketing strategies. These software solutions automate routine tasks, enabling marketers to concentrate on strategic initiatives. These systems execute personalized email campaigns, manage social media engagement, and analyze website visitor behavior, while providing comprehensive performance analytics. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and AI agents is significantly advancing these capabilities.

These tools serve as a centralized platform for managing and executing marketing campaigns across diverse channels. They facilitate personalized customer journeys, targeted audience segmentation, and enhanced conversion rates. By automating workflows and delivering data-driven insights, marketing automation tools optimize marketing efforts and improve return on investment. AI enhances these functionalities through predictive analytics, dynamic content personalization, and intelligent lead scoring. AI agents now manage customer inquiries, optimize real-time ad campaigns, and generate personalized content, achieving unprecedented levels of automation and personalization.

What kinds of tools are we talking about when we talk about marketing automation? Table stakes for modern marketing automation software includes:

Email marketing — building and managing personalized email campaigns

Social media marketing — crafting social media personas and guiding user experiences
Mobile messaging — using SMS, MMS, and push notifications to engage customers
Managing ads — aligning advertising across every channel

Don’t expect marketing automation software to craft dazzling copy and eye-catching visuals to bring those campaigns to life for you: Human creativity and a little elbow grease still carry the day. What you should expect from a good set of automation marketing tools is the ability to manage individual campaigns, cross-channel campaigns, and personalized 1-to-1 customer journeys based on those campaigns.

Most marketing automation software is sold as a platform — an integrated suite of tools with a feature set. The automation tools, and the specific capabilities of each tool, of course vary from platform to platform. That said, you can expect most marketing automation platforms to have tools and features to assist or automate the management of the following:

• Lead capture
• Lead scoring and management
• Lead nurturing
• Campaign management
• Content management
• CRM integration
• Analytics and reporting

Get to know your prospects and what they’re looking for. Learn who they are, what role they play (for B2B marketers), what their pain points are, and how you can help. A common technique is to set up a lead capture page (that is, a landing page). Lead capture pages often ask visitors for something in exchange for a reward. For example, a user may be asked to enter her email address, zip code, and job title in exchange for a downloadable e-book or white paper, an entry to a sweepstakes raffle, or a promotional coupon or discount code.

Use demographics, behavioral data, and other prospect information to separate hot leads from “just browsing.” Route leads into nurture and drip campaigns based on their qualifications. Every company scores leads a little differently, but the main goal is to identify the most promising leads for your organization at a given time or for a given campaign. A lead score assesses the activities that a prospect has engaged with on your website, for example, downloaded a datasheet, watched a demo video, or filled out a contact form. A lead grade is assigned by demographic information, such as industry, title, company information, or market size. The combination of the lead score and grade will signal to marketing and sales who’s hot and ready to purchase, and who needs more nurturing via a drip campaign.

Sending one-off emails every two weeks is not the way to nurture leads, especially in the long sales cycles of the B2B world. Automated nurturing lets you track engagement with your emails, website, and other properties, and use that data to drip-feed the right content at the right times along each prospect’s journey.

From A/B testing of messages to SEO and social listening, automated campaign management handles the gathering and processing of marketing data, so you can focus on strategy. From qualifying leads and managing nurture campaigns, to analyzing ROI data across multiple channels, automated campaign management systems allow you to design, deploy, and monitor marketing activities without having to manually tend to every last step in the process.

One product sheet does not fit all. Draft copy, design emails and social media posts, and craft customized assets, all within your marketing automation platform. Content management systems also handle tagging and organizing of assets for repurposing across multiple formats and locations, so that you only need to upload an image or an asset once, and it runs everywhere. A content management system within your marketing automation platform also makes updating assets a breeze: Replacing the existing file with an updated one ensures that images and assets will be up to date across all campaigns, no matter how old or recent, so that links and images don’t render broken.

A hot prospect just signed up for your newsletter? Great! Now create a new lead for them in your CRM. Let the software guide them into the appropriate drip or nurture campaign, send a welcome message, and track engagement. While you’re at it, let the software also gather behavioral data and alert your sales team when the prospect is active on your channels. Marketing automation platforms that integrate with CRM do the grunt work for you.

When your marketing is automated, it’s easy to capture tons of data. Let your marketing automation platform take the next step and crunch the numbers for you, yielding insights and alerts to help you tweak active campaigns and more effectively plan new ones. If your marketing and CRM are integrated, it’s also a snap to tie ROI directly back to campaigns and other marketing activities using closed-loop reporting.

• Automate your email.
• Set a drip marketing automation program.
• Integrate marketing automation with CRM.

It’s one thing to be familiar with the tools found in marketing automation platforms. It’s another to actually use the tools to successfully grow your business. From freeing up time spent on grunt work to devote toward strategy and planning, to getting your marketing and sales teams on the same page, sharing the same data, and moving the needle together, marketing automation can work wonders for your business. Here’s how.

Automated email is a core component of marketing automation platforms, and with great reason. Automating your email is much more than scheduling messages to send when nobody’s at the computer. With email marketing automation, you can trigger workflows based on specific user actions ranging from signing up for your newsletter to abandoning an online shopping cart after putting items in it. Depending on the trigger action — and the user’s profile — anything from a simple email send to an adaptive content campaign can be set into motion.

As customers move through their buying journeys, your automated email tools move with them. Newly segmented mailing lists can be auto-generated based on new user data. The content and timing of email campaigns can be changed when users change their preferences, and as they pass through the marketing funnel.

This type of email automation is also called a drip campaign, or drip marketing. Sending your audience a series of messages over time nurtures them at a comfortable pace while growing their interest. It works, too: Research shows that automated emails get 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails, and emails with relevant content drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails.

Think of it as regular care for a garden, with each plant — or customer — getting exactly what they need to thrive over time.

Marketing automation platforms are awesome on their own. But integrating your automation with a CRM system takes everything to a new level.

A few of the many great reasons to connect your marketing automation and CRM tools together:

• Give your sales team the best leads. Marketing automation systems gather all kinds of data on prospects, and use that data to score and grade leads. Connect the system to CRM, and automatically pass the best-scoring leads on to your sales teams.
• Tailor your messaging. Speaking of data, flowing information from automated marketing to CRM lets you arm your sales teams with detailed behavioral profiles on prospects. Now they can tailor pitches and build the kind of individual relationships that win deals.
• Nurture leads throughout the journey. When marketing and sales work together, leads who aren’t yet ready to buy don’t slip through the cracks — they’re nurtured until they’re ready to make deals.
• Customize messages to grab their attention. That behavioral data we already talked about? It keeps coming in handy. Leverage what you learn about prospects to send targeted messages, personalized to what they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle.
• Highlight campaigns that move the needle. When you tie a marketing automation system to CRM, you can map closed deals back to the campaigns that created them. From there it’s a breeze to pinpoint the marketing campaigns that impact revenue, and plan future strategies and spends accordingly.

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