With all its powerful tools, Marketo helps you execute a holistic marketing approach and generate higher revenue with faster growth. Several companies do not have the necessary resources, technology, and processes to accomplish their goals and investing in Marketo automation tool can be a great idea for you.
This raises the most basic question – “Why automate”?
So let’s start by addressing the reason why marketing automation is a rage right now.
Importance of Automation
Marketing automation is fundamentally a technology with the help of which companies can streamline, automate, and measure their marketing tasks and workflows, thereby increasing operational efficiency and driving better profit for the business. However, it is important to realize that it will bring results only if it is used for “good” marketing.
There has been a drastic change in the buying behavior of the customers. While customers did not have too many options to get purchase information in the past, today’s digital era has made the customers more powerful than they used to be. The seller does not have control over the buying process like they used to have.
Let’s say, you want to buy a refrigerator. You would not make the purchase unless you have searched for the best model, gone through the customer ratings, and made up your mind about which brand or model is most suitable for you.
Owing to this shift in the customer behavior, marketing has become so important as it helps to nurture relationships and persuade the prospects into making a purchase. However, the problem with this solution is lack of scalability. Every customer expects personalized and relevant communications from the brand and if they do not stand true to this demand, they would opt out of receiving the communications or simply ghost you by not engaging.
Except marketing automation, there is nothing else that can keep up with the demands of today’s customer.
Before we jump on to how Marketo can be an ideal automation tool, we shall discuss the differences between CRM and Marketing Automation.
Many professionals use these terms interchangeably and get confused about the functionalities. So, first of all, let’s clear the confusion around the two technologies.
CRM Versus Automation
- While CRM helps to track down opportunities and pipeline, manage contact and account information, marketing automation works on building strong customer relationships, automating marketing programs, and analyzing their performance.
- CRM deals with sales and sales management with some aspects of marketing. With marketing automation, the focus is marketing and marketing management with a bit of sales.
- Marketing automation helps you to communicate with groups and segments by sending personalized messages triggered according to their action. CRM on the other hand, is more useful to send individual communications from the sales executive to the prospects or customers.
- The foundation of CRM software is database and transactional queries. Marketing automation is workflow-oriented with insights into behavioral data and analytical queries.
- Pricing of CRM is based on the user seats while marketing automation is based on the number of contacts.
Marketo makes for the perfect choice when you are looking for an automation tool to streamline all your marketing processes and generate higher business revenue.
Let’s take a look at the features that it has to offer to understand how.
Features of Marketo Marketing Automation Tool
1. Segmentation
The automation tool segments the list of prospects based on different variables set by you. It eliminates the need for any manual intervention and helps you to save time and resources.
2. Email Marketing
Marketo allows you to send triggered emails that are more relevant for the target audience and personalized according to their previous interaction. Such automation workflows help to drive faster conversions and higher revenue.
3. Deep CRM Integration
Marketo allows you to integrate the CRM with automation to get better data-driven insights automatically. It will enhance your team productivity and help to create, dispatch, and engage new leads.
4. Lead Nurturing with a Multi-dimensional Lead Scoring Model
Marketo marketing automation comes with a lead scoring model that allows you to set rules and build personalized emails for different segments, based on demographic, behavioral, and social parameters.
5. Social Media Marketing
Besides email marketing, Marketo automation tool lets you execute social media marketing and get subscribers to sign up to your email list through different channels. It will ultimately get you better brand visibility and reach a larger audience.
6. Online and Offline Event Marketing
The tool helps to integrate with the online meeting providers to generate registrations and get maximum footfall for the online as well as offline events.
7. Drag-and-drop Editor
With the Marketo automation tool, you get a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop editor for the creation of Marketo email templates, landing pages, and forms. It makes the life of the marketer a breeze as it does not require any technical expertise.
8. Multi-step Workflows
According to the filters and real-time triggers, you can create multi-step workflows that would engage the prospects better. For instance: If you are an ecommerce store and a customer has just abandoned the cart, you can send out an instant push notification to remind him or her about the product in the cart. You can even set an automation workflow of a series of cart abandonment emails to recover the customer and encourage them to make the purchase.
9. A/B Testing
A/B testing is a feature that enables you to optimize your emails, landing pages, and forms to get the best results out of your efforts. For example: You can test two variations of the landing page with different hero images or headline to determine what brings the best conversions or sign ups. For emails, you can test elements like the subject line, placement of the CTA, or usage of visuals to name a few.
Summing it up
In addition to all these extremely useful automation features, Marketo is a complete automation tool because of its flexibility, ease of use, and scalability. Whether you are a startup or a large enterprise, it can cater to all your needs. You can easily connect it with the business applications with the help of extensive API. What stands above all these facts is that it is an award-winning community of 20,000+ users with innovative features and it gives you access to an ecosystem of partners, Marketo certified experts, and consultants who can help to build successful businesses.