As marketing becomes more sophisticated, marketers are leveraging technology to streamline marketing tasks and improve service delivery. One way that technology has boosted marketing is through marketing automation, which basically involves optimizing marketing efforts to increase efficiency. This has helped marketers to save time on administrative tasks and dedicate more efforts toward delivering the right content to the right audience.
Although the market offers different automation software, there are key features that every reliable software must-have. Here we look at some features you need to consider for guaranteed conversion and increased revenue.
Email marketing
Email is a common communication tool that marketers use to reach out to existing and potential clients. The marketing automation platform you choose should have email capabilities such as;
- Personalized emails that allow you to promote customer engagement
- Scheduled messages
- Tracking email campaigns
- Recording customer behavior by the number of clicks
- Triggered emails
Typically, all crucial stages of marketing happen through emails. As such, you should employ technology that allows you to centralize communication and enhance the interaction process.
Lead management and scoring
Lead management directs marketers to the most promising leads depending on how potential clients react to a message or product. Sales representatives use these leads to identify customers who are likely to get involved with the business or purchase a product. Accordingly, they can use relevant data to customize messages, offer incentives, and perform other tasks that can increase the chances of converting the lead to a sale.
Reliable marketing automation software should support lead management and scoring to allow marketers to gain more leads and increase the lead to conversion ratio.
CRM integration
Automation software should have the ability to integrate data from existing tools such as customer relationship management (CRM), content management system (CMS), and customer data platform (CDP). This helps to improve organization of information and collaboration of all the solutions you use for your business, including event management programs and content management.
The importance of CRM integration lies in its ability to track customer journey, creation of relevant content, understanding customers’ requirements, and providing feedback on how employed processes are working towards boosting customer satisfaction.
A/B testing
Also known as split testing or bucket testing, A/B testing is a method that allows marketers to compare two or more applications or websites to determine which works best with the culture of a business. Essentially, this automation tool ensures you send the right content to your audience as it allows you to see which variant of your content resonates with them.
While sourcing for marketing automation software, consider its capability to carry out statistical analysis to help you pick the right variation. This goes a long way in boosting conversion, and hence more revenue.
Social marketing
Social media marketing and automation tools are indispensable in marketing automation. A complete automation software should be able to integrate with your social media accounts to track and analyze customers’ experiences and activities in regard to your business. This way, you can generate traffic to your websites, which translates to more sales and profits.
Social media has become a great way of collecting customer data, which is an asset in marketing. Therefore, marketing automation software with the capability to integrate social media can help to understand your customers better.
Usability and security
Obviously, nobody wants to use software that is difficult to operate and adopt. This is why you should consider usability by assessing how user-friendly it is, how much time and cost you will require to train staff, its value, and the hassle of setting it up.
Equally important a consideration is how secure the software is; customer information can be sensitive, and therefore should be protected at all times. Before deploying an automation platform, check how data is encrypted as well as the authentication processes involved. This will help to safeguard essential data from malicious access.
Regardless of the marketing automation agency you are dealing with, it is crucial to have a deeper understanding of automation software and the features that make them efficient. More importantly, make sure to test its suitability to see if it integrates well with the culture of your business.
As HubSpot marketing automation partner and the best agency for marketing automation out there, Kuware strives to help clients optimize digital marketing by offering actionable solutions to common marketing problems. Please reach out to us for guaranteed business growth and sales.
