Marketing automation platforms software system that enables a company to manage and enhance the experience of the customer over online channels. Bettering the experience of the customer ensures more sales and customer loyalty. The platform integrates various marketing tools, social media, CRM, and other platforms for creating a customer-centric approach to marketing, where viewing a single customer would be the key element.
Even though some consider marketing automation platform as a part of CRM, this may not be entirely true, since the platform is now being offered as a software service model. In fact, now many experts feel that CRM is a component of marketing automation, since the platform provides a proactive approach.
The evolution of the platform has been quite important to keep up with the increasing digital trends, and for saving work force and time through automation. Initially these platforms were mainly used by large organizations, but it is now increasingly used by small and medium businesses as well.
The Human Element
In today’s connected online world, it is difficult for any marketer to ignore automation of marketing functions that are customer centric. However, even though, marketing automation platform has a high degree of automation; it does not ignore the human element, and allows various offline touch points and physical interactions with service agents and customers. The functions and features of a typical platform would include the following:
- The platform integrates advance email marketing, which is driven by situations and triggered by customer responses
- Provides lead generation, lead nurturing, lead handoff, lead scoring, and tools for lead management
- Provides connectors with various components of CRM system and different applications present in the cloud
- Integrates with social media and other channels such as offline, mobile and so on
- Automates workflows that are driven by scenarios and triggers, with relation to the customer
- Easy management of multi-channel campaigns
- Provides tools for creating forms and landing pages depending on profile and results of different tests
- Provides features for team collaboration and marketing resource management
- Provides features for advanced personalized dynamic content
- Provides tools for testing, segmentation, and profiling
- Provides tools for calculating ROI at various levels such as of customers, prospects, conversions, campaigns and so on
- Provides tools for conducting advanced marketing analytics based on different parameters
- Enables management of marketing resources and facilitates collaboration of teams
- Focused data on single customers including life cycle, value analytics, and various dashboards
- Provides different dashboards and monitoring features depending on the requirements of different users of the platform
Size does not Matter
Majority of customers now conduct online research, see reviews, interact on social media, watch videos, and perform other online activities to find out more about a company or product. Therefore, it is in the marketer’s best interests to find the ideal digital channels to source their targeted customers, optimize such channels, and provide the customer with the best shopping experience. Whatever may be the size of your business, check out the best marketing automation platform today.