The ROI of marketing automation

A solid marketing strategy can pave the road for future product development and scale the growth of any company. But without measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing initiatives, you might as well throw out a bunch of marketing initiatives and hope something sticks.

Ultimately, when it comes down to marketing, it’s all about the ROI. If you can’t show the benefits of your marketing strategy, you may need to re-think your approach and shift toward software that has proven results.

The first step in producing content that shines in the eyes of your customers is implementing marketing automation software (MAS) — one of the fastest growing martech solutions. With more than 330,000 websites relying on MAS to increase their ROI, tools like Autopilot are becoming a marketing essential (SmartInsights).

To get yourself up to speed on the benefits of MAS, we’ve broken down four ways you can accelerate ROI and business growth.

1. Improve the performance of marketing strategies

To put it simply, MAS automates traditionally labor-intensive marketing tasks like email scheduling, list segmentation, lead management, and customer journey mapping (just to name a few).

In looking at the companies that already use MAS, 77% of them report an increase in revenue and marketing performance (Salesforce).

On the whole, automating repetitive tasks saves time — and when time is money, every minute counts. With MAS, you don’t have to spend time scheduling every email and pondering which leads are cold, what customers are at-risk and how you can leverage your repeat buyers.

Instead, you can automate the customer journey and take the right action with every lead. Just configure your journey and watch it do all the hard work for you.

2. Increase conversion rates of leads into sales

When marketing and sales start arguing over what makes a quality lead, your whole marketing initiative becomes stunted. With a clear-cut view of the customer journey, MAS can place both teams on the same page.

Marketers and sales teams can use MAS to identify (based on a customer’s behaviors and actions), which leads are cold, warm, and hot. If a customer fails to open your emails for six months, it’s safe to say they’ve disengaged. In Autopilot, you can automatically identify at-risk contacts and send them on a journey that prevents them from churning.

The same goes for warm and hot leads. If a lead is opening your emails, submitting forms and has visited your pricing page, you can identify them as high-quality and create a journey that encourages them to make a purchase.

By identifying and segmenting customers based on their behavior, you can move all your efforts towards converting quality leads. A total of 53% of companies who use MAS see a higher conversion rate of quality leads into customers (Salesforce).

By automating the customer journey, MAS replaces labor-intensive tasks and produces high-quality leads that drive ROI.

3. Provide objective marketing data

When creating marketing journeys, it’s all about rinsing and repeating the ones that work, changing the ones that fall flat and experimenting with what you don’t know. With MAS you can measure the performance of every journey and discover what’s working and what’s not.

In the Marketing Automation for Agencies report by SharpSpring State, 42% of agencies use MAS to measure performance, while 45% use it to show ROI.

With Autopilot, you can measure the performance and ROI of each customer journey with an insights dashboard. Marketers rely on these dashboards to show them, in real-time how a customer is moving through the journey. In measuring the performance of customer journeys, 58% of agencies believe it helps them understand marketing ROI (SharpSpring State).

A dashboard takes the guesswork out of marketing and replacing assumptions with objective measurements, which all-in-all helps to measure the ROI of every marketing strategy.

4. Align sales and marketing teams

Even though it’s critical for sales and marketing teams to collaborate, often, both teams are left working in silos. Traditional marketing software has failed to facilitate the flow of inter-organizational communication, leading to a disconnection between data, strategy, and implementation.

Marketing automation provides a way for sales and marketing teams to collaborate on all customer journeys, essentially opening the lines of communication and information. By allowing both teams to collaborate, marketers can familiarize themselves with the sales pipeline and sales can understand the impact of every marketing activity. When sales and marketing use MAS, companies see a 65% increase in transparency (Salesforce).

With Autopilot’s Annotate and Collaborate feature, marketing and sales teams can simultaneously ideate, edit, review, explain, and publish journeys. You can invite any team member to see actions in real-time as you work together to create the best possible customer journey. This means no more team silos, a better way of working together, and more chance of producing content that boosts ROI.

Above all, MAS is designed to connect you closer to your customers, automate complex customer journeys and accelerate your ROI. By 2025, the marketing automation industry could be worth $7.63 billion (Grand View Research). With such intuitive marketing technology on offer, there’s no better time than now to use marketing automation software.