On average, marketing automation boosts sales productivity by 14.5%

It’s a loose definition but essentially, marketing automation encompasses any solution, platform, or tool that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. A good example would be softwares like Boomerang on Gmail which allows you to schedule emails to mass amounts of addresses.

According to HubSpot, around 68% of businesses rely on marketing automation to reach their objectives. This leaves more room for better results because it’s easier to organize strategies and support growth. Let’s look at a few ways you can use marketing automation to help your business grow and prosper.

Marketing automation is useful for the following reasons; 

1. It can engage a high-volume pipeline of quality leads, working 24/7 every day of the year.
2. It aligns your sales and marketing efforts.
3. It makes your marketing more efficient, saving time and money and freeing up your sales and marketing team to do higher level work.
4. It can nurture leads to systematically produce hot leads for sales to close.
5. It enables you to clearly see how well your marketing campaigns are doing by tracking and scoring how prospects are engaging with your outreach. That helps you refine and optimise your marketing campaigns.
6. It gives you the reach and power you need to scale your sales and marketing without increasing the size of your team. 

When it comes to choosing which marketing automation platform, try to consider the following; 

• Pricing – upfront and subscription costs: make sure to check whether the upfront cost includes training as well as setup.
• Features and integrations: it’s important to know what features you need and ensure that the software will deliver. 
• Ease of use: Look at the interfaces, navigation, number of clicks needed to perform a task, and the user manual. A trial subscription is a great way to really find out if it’s a good fit with your business and staff.
• Fit with your business: different platforms suit different size companies. What you need depends on your size, marketing goals and existing technology. Check out the reviews of a number of platforms to see if any are particularly suited to your business type or sector.