Top 10 Most Important Features of Marketing Automation

As the world becomes more dependent on technology, new software is developed for different industries, and marketing is no exception! The main goal for marketers is to increase efficiency, leading to the creation of marketing automation and its software. In this article, you will learn about 10 of the most important marketing automation features you need to know to succeed.

Table of Contents

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation is an inventive set of software services that can help you with different kinds of marketing tasks. Notably, these different marketing automation features can help generate market leads, create budgets, and monitor your customers. Additionally, they automatically create and deliver high-quality advertisements (and campaigns) to many different channels. When business leaders and marketers do this, they increase the productivity of campaigns as well as decrease the marketing budget and time.

Enterprise Marketing Automation

Enterprise marketing automation is the management and planning of an entire development of an enterprise. This kind of marketing automation software consists of various tools to coordinate and distribute business activities within marketing, sales, partners, IT, and operations. There are many diverse features of enterprise marketing automation such as integration, lead management, email marketing, social media marketing, and many more.

Top 10 Most Important Features of Marketing Automation

Now that you know what marketing automation is, it is time to get into the highlights! While there are many features in marketing automation, you will learn about the 10 most important features for your automated marketing systems and management!

A/B Testing

A/B testing is automatically performed through marketing automation programs. This testing consists of research to determine which content appeals more to audiences and increases engagement. They would often do side-by-side comparisons of similar versions of ads or other marketing tools to judge which one performs better. Through this marketing automation feature, your A/B testing optimizes your campaign or understands the content that attracts consumers. A/B testing can also be used for sending emails and designing websites. The marketing automation system will accordingly display all information gathered from each of the versions you are testing.

Analytics

When it comes to analytics, the automated marketing system will instantly scan through observations from diverse databases. This helps decrease the time marketers spend researching and helps them make decisions faster. This is probably the most important marketing tool since it also includes detailed information collection and analysis, customized summaries from different shareholders, advice for campaigns, and calculation of their performances. Ultimately, whether your marketing campaign is on social media or your own website, the analytics feature makes studying your achievements, finding improvements, and creating suggestions much faster!

Customer Support

Customer support is a powerful tool to assist you when helping your consumers. Most services come with a devoted phone line or chat service. This helps software users directly, so you do not always have to be interrupted by consumer questions. Other forms of customer support are user forums and contact forms. This information can be easily accessible and help you find contact details.

Leads

Leads, in terms of marketing automation, are potential customers. There are many important features of leads that appear in marketing automation features, including monitor leads, lead nurturing, and lead scoring and grading.

Monitor Leads

When you have reached your target audience, based on interest and needs, you can monitor leads to determine when a customer will carry out the desired action. This helps guide customers down a sales funnel, a consumer’s journey in purchasing a good. This is done through customer engagement on social media or through email conversations.

Lead Nurturing

Once you have a lead, lead nurturing lets you continue a lasting relationship between you and your customers. This can be done through strategies by analyzing behaviors and studying stages and demographics. All this information is accordingly compiled through marketing automation which saves time and energy.

Lead Scoring and Grading

Lead scoring allows you to rank which leads are most valuable compared to others. Once again, marketing automation tools can easily create scores based on interest, demographics, and engagements. Another use of lead scoring is to trigger alerts to team members or email campaigns when you have certain score levels. This way, it is easier to rank scores and base judgment on what grades you give them. By doing this, you will know if you need more engagement, campaigns, or team support for clients.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a strategy that tests customer outreach. When you have a marketing automation management system around emails, it makes email marketing so much more convenient and sustainable. The automation feature will categorize, track, and record communications within your emails. When it comes to email marketing, most email campaigns fall into two groups, and marketing automation can help you with both:

Event-Based Trigger Emails: These emails send reminders based on a customer’s behavior. They are often subscription welcomes, milestone reminders, birthday wishes, and can include coupons and special deals.
Drip-Feed Email Content: Send emails through a schedule with the marketing automation software. This includes special limited deals, exclusive content, or a 14-day free trial-related message. They are personalized based on each consumer to gain more trust and attract more participation.

Another thing about email marketing is the use of targeted campaigns. They can filter through your contact list to find the best targets for your campaign. This way you are not spamming your audience and will see better click-through rates if you target specific people who were interested in your campaign.

Social Media Automation and Management

Social media campaigns for marketing are becoming more and more popular. However, it takes time and effort to keep up with postings and track audience feedback. This is where social media automation and management come into play! It helps automatically track when to post, where to post, and what to post. With this automation, you can schedule your posts and share them at appropriate times. Some advanced features of social media marketing automation include providing optimizations for different social media platforms such as having specific designs geared towards maximizing each post.

Additionally, ways to use the social media feature include keeping your accounts active, constant, and updated for your audience. This includes responding to comments and questions quickly. Also, you can track your campaigns and schedule posts on a single console. Finally, you can have targeted advertisements and collect client feedback and social media mentions.

Tracking

When it comes to tracking, the most notable thing marketing automation does is remember who visited your website, how long they stayed, and what content they engaged with. This is also called visitor tracking. Visitor tracking allows you to know who your visitors are and what contents interest them. Another way of tracking visitors or the traffic on your website is through tracking your marketing content automatically. Instead of seeing who is coming to your website, you can see how your content performs by tracking the number of people who visit certain pages. This is an alternative to tracking visitors, but it is just as powerful.

Automation Integration

An important feature of enterprise marketing automation is its ability to support integration with hardware and products to make your marketing progress easier. Your marketing automation software would not be much use if it could not work with all your other plans and goals. Through integration, marketers will have excess data sets to help them. This includes understanding the customer journey, identifying customer needs, providing leads to the sales team, creating appropriate content for customers, and gathering feedback from clients.

Some commonly used integrations are:

Webinar and Video Connectors
Social Media
Paid Advertising
URL Shorteners
Customer Success Tools
Messaging Tools (ChatBot, SMS, Text)
E-Commerce
Optimization Tools

Progressive Profiling

When it comes to lead capturing, forms are a fantastic way to achieve this! However, forms are often long and can result in futile lead generations. That is where progressive profiling, or shortening forms, come in! Progressive profiling shortens forms to use only fields that are necessary. When the basic forms are filled out, you can also have follow-ups in the future, so you can build detail over time and not get overwhelmed at the start. The feature of progressive profiling is something you can automatically set up throughout your website. By doing this, you can segment information in a better way, which can lead to targeted marketing campaigns.

Dynamic Content

Last but not least, when you finally get visitors onto your website, how do you make them stay? How can you make personal connections with them? This is where dynamic content comes in! This marketing automation feature has been shown to drastically influence website traffic and engagement. Dynamic content also works well for landing pages, emails, and forms. Also, you can create templates focused on customers with certain interests to create a better connection.

You and Automated Marketing

With more work involved in marketing, it is vital to automate as many areas as possible so your marketing team can focus on more essential things. To best utilize marketing automation, you need to first understand its various features and how it applies to you. While not every feature will help you, it is important to do research on automation geared towards you. The earlier you start understanding enterprise marketing automation, the better the productivity of your campaigns!