When we look at the common challenges faced by businesses, we know that generating leads and keeping customers engaged throughout their journey remain top of mind. Along with these goals, businesses face an explosion of data being collected, but struggle to put it to use.

Marketing automation software can help overcome these challenges by putting data to work by streamlining our workflows.

Most businesses consider marketing automation a middle-of-the-funnel tool, ideal for nurturing leads through automated email sequences. And while email marketing is a great use for marketing automation, this approach can lead to a disjointed experience for prospects and customers as they move from marketing, to sales, to customer service.

Prospects are forced through an imaginary sales funnel with arbitrary touchpoints and irrelevant content. Instead of reacting to individual customer needs, businesses serve up the same playbook on repeat.

However, automated marketing strategies should be deployed across the customer lifecycle. When marketing automation is thoughtfully integrated, it creates a fertile ground for healthy, long-term relationships with your customers. When done well, marketing automation delivers three main benefits to your business:

Personalized workflows

Each of your prospects’ actions is an added data point for your marketing strategy, telling you what customers are looking for, immediately in the moment. As helpful as this information is, manually tracking these behaviors is impossible. However, with marketing automation software, businesses can use these inputs across multiple channels to deeply understand their customers’ needs and deliver the right content at the right time.

These workflows help drive qualified prospects to helpful content, resulting in warm leads that can then be nurtured thoughtfully into customers. Marketing automation doesn’t stop there though. With the customer at the center of the flywheel, businesses can continue to engage customers with personalized workflows that lead to loyal, repeat customers who refer their friends and family. 

Streamlined processes

Bring your whole company together with streamlined processes that keep your customers at the center of it all. Build processes that work across different functional teams so you can reduce customer effort at every stage of the journey. Break through silos and work together to provide a unified customer experience right from the very first touch, all the way beyond the customer purchase.

With effective marketing automation, there’s no need for complicated hand-off procedures, because everything is automatically saved in your central data storage, and internal workflows can help you prioritize tasks as they’re needed.