Unlock your potential with marketing automation software

Imagine you’ve joined the marketing team of a fast-growing ecommerce business where customer interactions happen across multiple channels all at once, new products are released constantly, and customer journeys have become extraordinarily complex. While the company’s sophisticated enterprise software systems capture plenty of data from all these touchpoints, no one’s sure how to access and make sense of the information.

You immediately feel buried in an endless list of repetitive tasks: crafting email campaigns, analyzing website traffic, monitoring social media posts and landing pages, and managing ads. How will you ever get out from under this workload and find the headspace to make data-driven decisions that move the business forward?

Your first step is to make the case for bringing marketing automation software into the organization. Marketing automation software is a foundational tool that powers modern marketing strategies. It alleviates the manual work required to run and analyze campaigns, while also improving the results of your efforts.

This article explains how the power of marketing automation software enables big and small businesses to get ahead of the competition by scaling their marketing efforts and freeing the marketing department to focus on more impactful steps. Read on to discover how marketing automation works, the main business benefits of using marketing automation software, and what role Sitecore can play in a comprehensive marketing automation solution.

Marketing automation enables enterprises to streamline and automate a long list of familiar marketing tasks – from generating, nurturing, and qualifying leads to managing campaigns. With a marketing automation solution in place, marketers can:

• Automate repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up emails, managing contact lists, and scheduling content delivery across multiple channels
• Segment and target specific audiences to increase reach and engagement
• Deliver personalized content and experiences based on observed customer behavior and stated preferences
• Understand what’s working best as they experiment with different messages and approaches

The term marketing automation software is something of a catch-all that can take on different meanings in different places. At Sitecore, we define this category as a comprehensive suite of digital tools designed to automate, streamline, and optimize multiple parts of the marketing process.

Specific features and functionalities will vary across marketing automation platforms, but the best solutions provide the following capabilities:

• Automated workflows for two or more digital marketing channels
• Easy integration with other enterprise software systems, such as CRM software
• Support for analytics and reporting to understand campaign performance
• Intuitive user interface for widespread adoption within the company
• Advanced features such as target audience segmentation, A/B testing, and scheduling

Marketing automation software helps teams improve lead generation, nurture leads, and convert prospects. With customer data and histories always at the ready, it provides for a more consistent customer experience across channels.

It even benefits customers by helping them sift through available information faster to find what’s most relevant to their own searches. After implementing marketing automation software, you’re likely to notice some or all of these remarkable business benefits:

1. Operational efficiency
Marketing automation software streamlines repetitive tasks and workflows, allowing marketers to accomplish more in less time and with fewer resources, thus increasing overall productivity.

2. Enhanced lead management
With marketing automation software, businesses can capture, nurture, and qualify leads at scale, ensuring that the right inquiries get the best content at the right time, leading to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.

3. Increased personalization
Marketing automation software enables businesses to deliver highly personalized and targeted content to individual customers based on their preferences, behavior, and demographics, resulting in improved customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

4. Better campaign performance
By providing detailed analytics and reporting capabilities, marketing automation software empowers businesses to track and measure the performance of their marketing campaigns in real time, identify areas for improvement, and optimize strategies to maximize ROI and drive better results.

5. Enhanced customer experience
With marketing automation tools, businesses can deliver consistent and relevant messaging across multiple channels throughout the customer journey, providing a seamless and relevant experience that strengthens customer relationships and builds brand loyalty.

6. Cost savings
By automating manual processes and optimizing marketing campaigns, marketing automation software helps businesses reduce operational costs, eliminate inefficiencies, and achieve higher returns on their marketing spend.

7. Scalability and growth
Marketing automation software is scalable and adaptable to the evolving needs of the business, enabling it to expand marketing efforts, reach new audiences, and drive sustained growth without the need for significant additional resources or infrastructure.

8. Alignment between marketing and sales
Marketing automation software facilitates better alignment and collaboration between sales and marketing teams by providing shared valuable insights into lead behavior, enabling more effective lead management, nurturing, and handoff processes, at every stage of the sales funnel.

Sitecore Experience Platform is a leading digital experience platform (DXP) that provides advanced marketing automation capabilities for email marketing, personalization, and campaign management. Our solutions enable marketers to deliver hyper-personalized content and experiences across any number of channels, including web, mobile, email, and social media. In this way, we help businesses drive engagement, conversion, and loyalty by delivering relevant and timely messages to their audiences.

Personalization engine: Sitecore Personalize enables marketers to deliver targeted content to website visitors based on their past interactions and preferences. This helps in increasing engagement, conversions and customer retention.

Campaign automation: Sitecore's built-in powerful tools allow marketers to automate marketing campaigns across various channels, delivering consistent messaging and maximize reach.

If you’re ready to begin researching available solutions for your marketing automation strategy, keep these 5 guidelines in mind:

1. Take some time to learn about current use cases and marketing automation examples to support your proposal.
2. Carefully evaluate your marketing department’s needs and explore how automation could benefit sales, and other teams in the organization besides the marketing team.
3. Only consider tools that automate at least two of your primary marketing channels – point solutions that address a single channel will fall short in an omnichannel world.
4. Make sure the tool(s) you choose include support for automated workflows, audience segmentation, personalization, and performance metrics analysis and reporting.
5. Compare possible solutions in terms of ease of use, scalability, integration capabilities, price-to-value, and customer support.

Explore our resources and reach out anytime to learn more about unlocking your full potential with marketing automation capabilities we’ve designed into our digital experience platform.