So, here’s a bit of background info on me: There was a time where I did not know what marketing automation was.
I KNOW. You’re probably thinking to yourself, “But Lexie, you’ve been our MA guru for nearly a year — surely you were born with this knowledge!”
Believe it or not, when I first heard about marketing automation software, I couldn’t stop thinking:
“Okay… but automating what exactly?”
I know I’m not alone in this, and even as a marketing automation software user, you yourself might occasionally wonder what all you can automate with marketing automation. Sure, the obvious comes to mind, but are you using this powerful software to the best of its abilities?
Let’s find out. Discover marketing automation’s full capabilities down below!
1. Reports
When it comes to reporting and analytics, marketing automation has your back.
Here at Net-Results, we offer a variety of tools such as:
- Dashboards
- Alerts
- Realtime Insight
- Scheduled Reports
Dashboards in the Net-Results platform are a quick way to see data visually. Jam-packed with tons of digestible graphs and charts, we’ve made data fun and easy to navigate. You’re able to quickly view graphs/charts that show you data on your contacts, asset downloads, conversation emails, and even compare different campaigns!
Alerts are notifications sent via email when a contact that qualifies for a particular segment visits a website that your account is tracking in Net-Results. For example, your Sales team will be able to see if a “cold” lead suddenly viewed your pricing page, if a warm lead clicked to schedule a demo — you get the picture.
Alerts are extremely helpful when it comes to timing (which we already know is the key function and purpose of marketing automation!).
If you’re new here (hi, welcome) don’t forget to take our complimentary crash-course on marketing automation! Click here to download our free Marketing Automation 101 Guide.
Realtime Insight is a great way to get a high-level glance at your website visitor stats. You can find out which of your web pages is the most popular, which traffic sources are generating the most visits, and view all of your website visitors using a specific date range.
Scheduled Reports can be emailed to you on a daily, weekly, monthly, or immediate (one-time) basis. Setting up a perpetual nurture campaign using our marketing automation platform? Set up a weekly scheduled report at the time of campaign launch and get stats delivered right to your inbox!
2. Campaigns
From nurture campaigns to one-off marketing campaigns (and FAR beyond), a marketing automation platform is able to automate almost every campaign within your marketing and sales funnel. Using some handy-dandy segments,
Seriously.
FULL TRANSPARENCY: It will initially take a ton of work upfront to create, implement, and schedule out these campaigns and flows, but it will ultimately save you an enormous amount of time in the long run once these campaigns have become fully automated.
Marketing automation is known for automating campaigns throughout each step of your Customer Journey. Don’t be afraid to use it to its full potential.
For the sake of your time (well, and mine), please check out this short and sweet explanation of how to automate your marketing workflows and create intelligent, persuasive campaigns using marketing automation.
Also, if that point up there had you scratching your head and thinking: “When’s the last time we explored our Customer Journey?”, feel free to download our FREE Customer Journey Worksheets.
3. All that “Sales Stuff”
To be clear, I don’t use quotes disparagingly here — we LOVE sales peeps here at Net-Results. Although I will be honest, every time I think of a salesperson, this pops into my head:
But I digress.
Marketing automation is a powerful tool not just for marketers, but for salespeople, too. In fact, I wrote a blog post not too long ago about the reasons why Sales LOVE marketing automation. It just might drive home my point here.
To sum it up, marketing automation automates many sales processes, including (but not limited to):
- Integration with CRMs (Net-Results offers a bi-directional sync which also helps build the bridge between marketing and sales operations)
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Qualification
For further explanation on these automated sales processes, please be sure to check out the blog post mentioned above ^^.
Marketing automation encompasses a wide array of marketing and sales processes — it’s easy to overlook which aspects can be automated using this complex and helpful software. I hope these points helped you discover new ways to use marketing automation and make it worth your while.
If you have any further questions about the solutions marketing automation software can provide you and your team, please don’t hesitate to schedule a call with us.
We love hearing from you!
Cheers to your success,
Lexie Robbins
Digital Marketing Specialist
