How can you use multiple marketing technologies together to effectively reach your target audience and streamline your business for optimal results?
The answer is marketing automation.
Salesforce recently reported that last year marketing automation was amongst the most piloted marketing technologies, and 77% of CMOs at top performing companies indicated to Gleanster Research that their most compelling reason for implementing this technology was to drive revenue.
But where do you start?
There are a near countless number of marketing automation software providers. There is advertising and promotion software focusing specifically on display and programmatic selling available at a click of your mouse. There are also sales management programs specializing in marketing automation ready to enable your brand to manage all of your efforts in one place. We can go into each type of technology, but instead we can show you this chart from chiefmartec.com that more accurately depicts the magnitude and enormity of the marketing technology landscape.
That fact of the matter is that the marketing technology landscape is growing as quickly as technology itself grows. With every new marketing channel comes new challenges, and with every new challenge comes new technology to solve it.
It is often recommended to use this to your advantage and work with multiple technologies at once to optimize your marketing efforts and customize to your particular organization’s needs.
Email has long been the most effective channel
Ascend2 and its research partners on marketingcharts.com continue to rate email marketing as not only the most effective, but also the least difficult digital marketing tactics to execute.
Automated email campaigns account for 21% of email marketing revenue, yet over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns. Which makes you think, how can you use a set of multiple technologies to combine, automate and execute a personalized email marketing campaign to increase efficiency and drive sales? Savvy marketers can now use customer relationship management (CRM) technology together with email automation to send these personalized campaigns to interested customers.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration
Brand integration has soared to new heights. In fact, 91% of companies with more than 11 employees now use CRM software. Gartner forecasts that the CRM market will rise to $37 billion by 2017 and will continue its growth in the future.
Proper use of a CRM to drive and personalize your marketing campaigns can effectively create more user engagement and increase sales.
We now know that personalized email subject lines increase open rates for consumer products and services companies by 41.8 percent. Better together, CRM integration with email marketing automation can link the customer data you have gathered in your CRM platform to personalize the marketing message around the unique interests of your customers. Once integrated, you can then use marketing automation to schedule and send subsequent marketing assets to your prospects to nurture and engage with them accordingly until, ultimately, they are ready to make a purchase.
Evolve with technology
Automated emails and CRM is just a start. Analytics, social media listening and digital customer engagement tools are just a few other technologies to add to the mix depending on your brand’s marketing needs.
The marketers who will have the most success will be able to adjust, adopt and merge multiple marketing technologies as they develop to engineer the most optimal results. After all, technology will never stop evolving, and neither should your brand’s marketing efforts.
About the Author
Alex Navarro comes to Distribion with a background in developing and executing national brand awareness campaigns. His passion is creating personalized marketing strategies and watching them come to life. Alex studied advertising and marketing at Pepperdine University and has enjoyed working in the field ever since. He also loves meeting new people – connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.