The need to operate with lean budgets can result in a reticence to spend on marketing. This can, however, hold a business back from reaching healthy growth. Investing in the right tools can increase your marketing effectiveness; helping to identify and segment your customers, deliver personalised lead nurturing, market across multiple channels and media, and offer great customer experience at scale.
Marketing automation has been established as a valued solution in larger organisations for several years. An expansion in the choice and availability of marketing solutions, has meant that adoption is now growing amongst small to medium businesses (SMEs). Marketing automation can offer benefits to SMEs because of its ability to extend and scale marketing and to reduce time spent on repetitive, systematic marketing actions.
Marketing Automation Uses
Email Automation
Most business recognise email as an effective marketing strategy. Automation allows you to segment and identify your customers and send more personalised messages. By identifying key events (for example, an abandoned shopping cart), automation can be used to send event-triggered emails at key points during customer journeys.
Lead Nurturing
Managing prospects and leads well is key to maximising end sales. Marketing automation can reduce the work involved in moving leads along the sales funnel, improving efficiency.
Relationship Management
Delivering great customer experience is about knowing what’s relevant to your customers, what channels they want to engage through and delivering what they expect, at every stage in their journey. Achieving this without marketing automation is virtually impossible.
Reporting and Analysis
Marketing automation provides reporting to uncover insight into key success factors; where do your best customers come from, what tactics work to increase conversions, what is your customer lifetime value? This data can be used to refine and improve marketing activity to improve effectiveness.
Aligning Sales and Marketing
One of the additional benefits of a marketing automation solution is the alignment it provides between sales and marketing teams, when it forms part of a unified CRM solution.
By combining Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM for Marketing and Sales, organisations can bring both functions together on one integrated platform. This alignment makes it possible to manage and improve each step of the customer journey, nurture and score more sales-ready leads, automate marketing and outreach, and collaborate using integrated Office 365 tools.
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The Benefits of Aligning Sales and Marketing
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Next Steps
- Find out more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing
- Learn more about the QGate CRM Implementation Approach
