5 Advantages of Marketing Automation Software

Marketing Automation Software helps companies streamline, automate, and measure their marketing activities, for increasing their efficiency and growing business faster. Read to know the advantages of this latest technological advancement.

The advancement in the field of Information Technology in the last one decade has impacted every aspect of our lives in one way or the other. It has provided immense benefits to manufacturers, marketers as well as consumers. With an increased access to information, the buyers have been empowered to search online, read reviews, and seek social referrals before buying a product or service. It is in this regard that marketers go in for Marketing Automation Software to strike a chord 

with the prospective buyers.

A few years ago, the marketing of a company was generally managed by simple tools like E-mails, Word, Excel etc, but as the businesses grew it was no more possible to conduct marketing activities with these tools. Hence, came into existence Marketing Automation Software, which streamlined marketing right from lead generation to nurturing to closure, along with measuring the ROI of a business. Many companies have come up with software for marketing automation, by offering various time and cost saving solutions. A good marketing software benefits the enterprise in the following ways:

Creating and Managing Campaigns

Through the automation software, marketing campaigns can be created and managed across all channels. Such campaigns help build stronger relationships with the audience, resulting in a better brand building with prospective customers. Each communication can be made personal and the prospects can be reached through every major channel.

Running E-mail Campaigns

E-mails have emerged as one of the most effective mediums to reach prospective customers. With marketing automation system, one can seamlessly create and send mails to existing as well as potential customers. The e-mails can be scheduled to be sent at various time intervals. The software also provides intelligence reports on open rates, bounces, click rates, etc.

SalezShark's Co-founder @ajay_chauhan on how the Relationship Cloud will disrupt the traditional #CRM space! pic.twitter.com/wqIW8rUbEW

— SalezShark (@SalezShark) July 31, 2015

Lead Capture and Management

In response to the various campaigns, leads are received through a number of channels and platforms like the website, social media, web forms, chat, e-mail, phone calls etc. The automation systems integrate all the incoming leads directly into your CRM, ensuring that no leads are missed out. The leads are stored in the database with all information relating to their mode of enquiry, time and date of lead, and the information sought by the customer. Auto generated responses can also be managed by the system through an in-built auto responder.

Effective Social Media  Campaigns

Social media campaigns on Facebook, twitter etc can be conducted effectively to reach prospective customers, as well as generate leads through these channels. All such campaigns can be launched through a common platform, eliminating the hassle of running these campaigns through individual accounts, thus saving a lot of time and efforts.

Getting Insights on Marketing Efforts

Since all marketing activities are managed through a single platform, and the results are also delivered to the same platform, the marketing team gets an accurate idea of performance of various marketing campaigns. These intelligence reports can be used to measure the efficacy of campaigns and tweak them wherever needed.

Besides the above advantages, Marketing Automation Software has many other benefits, resulting in interacting with potential buyers and current customers in meaningful ways, to deliver them high value in terms of products and services.

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Marketing Intelligence Gets A Cloud Makeover

Stronger the marketing intelligence, more effective will be the business strategy and efficacy of a marketing strategy is proportional to success of the product in the market. Accuracy and amount of information determines the effect of decision making, which in return determines market prospects of the product. To roll out a product in the market, an enterprise has to ensure its success and evaluate the best possible RoIe. The idea is followed by careful development of business strategies comprising of methodologies to acquire the market through innovative marketing ideas. To devise such strategic marketing ideas, the enterprise would have to rely on accurate market information and data. Herein emerges the prospects of Marketing Intelligence as one of the most important facets of business.

Marketing intelligence has moved beyond the paradigms of physical market surveys and analysis. Internet being the mainstream has become the prime source of new market data and information. This transition from the spheres of physical surveys to internet-based researches has materialized the Cloud Makeover of marketing Intelligence. The underlining idea is, market research is now internet based and online platforms are the dependable source of market intelligence.

Market information can be obtained from various sources. Big Data plays a major role in the current landscape of business analytics. Big Data is complicated and an exclusive branch has protruded to deal with it. However, data can be obtained from simpler sources such as Social Media. Social Media Monitoring involves collecting data from post on popular social media platform such as Facebook and ‘tweets’ on Twitter. It can offer the company an insight of customer’s review and their viewpoints on any product or service.

Cloud Based CRMs offers a new perspective to this renovated model of research. New CRM technologies are enabled to offer comprehensive sets of information about customers. For instance, the breakthrough technology introduced by CRM developer such as SaleShark , not only offer information about a single customer, but also comprehensive data on related customers and potential business leads forming an integrated network of information. Such technologies are synonymous with the ‘Cloud’ that is inclusive for marketing and sales management.

Customer database or the CRM is among the primary sources of market information. Analyzing data from customer databases assist in understanding cross sales and up sale opportunities. This helps to understand the behavior of consumers over long durations. Integrated CRMs offer complete profile view or a 360-degree view of any customer providing comprehensive insights on their purchasing and expense behavior. Additionally, purchasing frequency, recent purchases and value of purchases can be traced out from CRM databases. Therefore, purchasing pattern of the consumers can be extracted from CRM.

Cloud-backed technologies are necessary to substantiate the one stop solution to businesses. The Cloud Makeover of CRMs has substantiated them as single windows to gather market intelligence.  Augmenting the capabilities of traditional CRMs, these new Relationship Management Applications are offering amicable avenues to obtain market intelligence. Hence, new possibilities of business analysis and market data are unlocked. Enterprises can now leverage CRMs as an inclusive tool for business intelligence achieving more than just mining customer purchase information. These applications can be imperatives in cost cutting by reducing extra investments to obtain market intelligence. CRM being used as a market intelligence tool is not a new idea. However, a new range of CRMs is offering better edges to this particular aspect of business, that is, market intelligence. The cloud makeover of market information is backed up by new this next gen CRM Technology.

There is a growing need to understand people first; before making any initiatives to build seemingly promising relationships. In other words, humanizing technology is the real focus for salespeople to authentically connect and engage with their prospects. Not just customer intelligence, but even sales intelligence is the essence to formulate effective new business strategies. However, obtaining real-time and relevant customer information has been a challenge for any enterprise.

The market dynamics has grown such that, brands and enterprises will have to catch up with customers to gain advantage over their businesses. Against this backdrop, Market Intelligence materialized to be more sophisticated as well as have grown more crucial for businesses. MI is the set of everyday information related to the business arena of an enterprise. Mushrooming businesses, startups and enterprises have incurred fuzziness in the present market scenario with piled up products and services.

The arena of market information is complicated and vast. Moreover, aspects such as Big Data make the domain more convoluted. It is certain that there are no limits to data utilization or to the extents of market intelligence. Technology is meant to develop and new solutions will overlap the old ones. The transformation of CRM technology has been offering better advantages to business. The technology will keep on evolving and offering new avenues for business adding up the profits.

Ref :- http://www.businessworld.in/tech-enterprise-tech-tech-trends/marketing-intelligence-gets-cloud-makeover

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