11 Benefits of Marketing Automation Backed By Data
The benefits of marketing automation, from saving time to boosting profits, have grown by the day as marketing technology continues to advance.
And it's not surprising when you consider that the earliest marketing automation software hit the market in 1992. And in 30+ years, we now have 76% of companies using marketing automation, and there are thousands of martech tools to choose from (HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing).
This article explores 11 data-backed marketing automation benefits, from improving lead management to facilitating omnichannel campaigns. Whether your marketing team is fully automated or just getting started, you’ll find insights to make automation even more indispensable for your business and customers.
What Does Marketing Automation Mean?
Marketing automation refers to using marketing software to automatically create workflows that take care of repetitive tasks.
Popular marketing automation examples include triggering emails, nurturing leads, tracking user activity, personalizing content, segmenting audiences, and A/B testing marketing campaigns. The end result? By letting automations take care of routine tasks, marketers get more done and can free up their time for higher-level work.
11 Data-Backed Benefits Of Marketing Automation
Businesses are adopting marketing automation faster than ever—these data-backed benefits explain why.
1. Improve Team Productivity and Save Time
Marketing leaders agree that saving time is the biggest benefit of marketing automation:
Just as important are the productivity gains when you rely on automations rather than manual processes, which are prone to delays and errors. One study found that marketing automation boosts sales productivity by 14%.
Not everything can (or should) be automated.
Be strategic: look at the elements of your marketing operating model that suck up your team’s bandwidth and cause bottlenecks. Automate approval processes, task delegation, email campaigns, reporting, and similarly time-intensive, repetitive activities. Use the extra time to allow your team to expand their focus on marketing strategy and 1:1 interactions that nurture customer relationships.
Takeaway: Look for opportunities to streamline internal and external marketing processes using automation. You’ll want to be as well-versed as possible in marketing automation tools to do this well.
Get started with a resource like How to Choose Marketing Automation Software.
2. Align Marketing and Sales Teams
Historically, marketing and sales teams operated in silos without much-shared data (and even sometimes with separate strategies).
Unfortunately, that’s still the case in many organizations today: 37% of sales and marketing teams use different systems to manage customer data and 34% struggle with routine tasks like account handovers.
The cost of this inefficiency is high: if your company has strong alignment between its marketing and sales teams, you’re likely to have 36% higher retention rates and to be 67% more effective at closing deals.
What used to be known as the “marketing funnel” and the “sales funnel” have merged into the same customer journey.
Marketing teams have data that can help sales teams personalize their outreach; sales teams have an intimate understanding of customer challenges that can make marketing campaigns more effective. Marketing automation can bridge this gap by helping sales and marketing teams operate with the same dataset, streamlining the lead handoff process, and integrating intent data into the sales process.
Takeaway: If your organization is one of the 37% still struggling with a bifurcated marketing and sales operation, the time for action is now. 98% of marketing leaders say the relationship between marketing and sales will only strengthen in the coming years.
Start by looking for costly gaps between marketing and sales, like inefficient account handoffs; then, get to work on the bigger task of unifying your teams’ data, strategy, and marketing workflows.
3. Personalize Your Marketing Process and Strategy
It’s long been clear that customers like personalization: 71% of customers expect personalized experiences, and a growing percentage are willing to part with some of their personal data in exchange for personalization.
Some of the most popular personalization activities are driven by marketing automation, like A/B testing, customer journey mapping, personalized web pages, and personalized content marketing.
If you overlook your personalization strategy, what are the costs? Since customers now expect tailored content, boilerplate content will feel generic and fail to resonate, resulting in poor customer experiences, lower conversion rates, and a weaker connection with your brand.
Takeaway: According to Adobe, 64% of high-performing marketing leaders (Adobe’s 2023 State of Marketing Automation) have a high degree of personalization; laggards are much more likely (55%) to have low personalization.
Choose marketing automation software to help you with essential personalization tasks like data collection, A/B testing, and customizing content based on customer preferences.
4. Improve the Customer Journey
More activity exists across more channels than ever before, from LinkedIn to paid ads to organic search results. That means there’s a big payoff from automating as much of the journey as possible.
A growing number of marketing leaders are taking advantage of this: 79% of businesses have their customer journey at least partially automated, and 10% have the process entirely automated.
When users experience a disjointed customer journey, their experience of your brand is negatively impacted, resulting in decreased sales, lower satisfaction, and diminished retention rates.
Marketing automation can streamline customer journeys with personalized content, behavior-based triggers, customer segmentation, automated follow-ups, and targeted messages.
Takeaway: Despite the impact that automation can have on managing customer journeys, only 22% of marketers say that their marketing automation platform makes it easy to build customer journeys. One way to make your life easier is by picking a marketing automation platform with comprehensive features.
Still, no matter what platform you use, you must also nail the basics: make sure to map out your customer journeys, carefully noting places where automation can boost the experience and provide relevant interactions.
5. Improve the Lead Generation and Nurturing Process
By nurturing leads, you create a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared with leads that aren’t nurtured. It makes sense that so many companies focus on converting leads to customers: 74% of companies say it’s their top marketing priority (HubSpot 2020 State of Marketing Report).
However, generating and nurturing leads manually is time-intensive. All sorts of activities are involved: data collection, prospecting, sending emails, tracking engagement, personalizing messaging, segmentation, and lead scoring. Automation can streamline this complex web of marketing activity, avoiding missed opportunities and ensuring qualified leads are nudged toward conversion.
Takeaway: Investing in automation and make it a lead nurturing best practice, as this boosts your chances of converting prospects into customers. Start with low-hanging fruit: send automated email sequences based on your leads’ segments, then send relevant follow-ups based on customer behavior.
6. Improve ROI
Marketing automation helps businesses save time by streamlining repetitive processes. It also scales up processes—like personalizing messaging for each customer—that would be impossible to do manually. And automation generates additional value by freeing up staff to do higher-value activities, like spending more time building relationships and strategizing.
All these benefits add up to a return on investment (ROI) of more than 5x (Nucleus Research, 2021). In fact, a majority of marketing leaders say marketing automation has a stronger ROI than any other marketing investment.
Takeaway: If you need to justify your investment in marketing automation, here’s some good news: more than 75% of marketers see a positive ROI on their marketing automation investment within the first year. To maximize your ROI, choose automation tools with robust analytics so you can closely monitor your results and tweak your strategy accordingly.
7. Reduce Marketing Program Costs
Marketing automation isn’t cheap. Martech software can cost hundreds of dollars a month, and enterprise-level automation tools can cost thousands per month (sometimes with tens of thousands of dollars in setup costs).
Considering all that, it’s impressive that a majority of users say marketing automation software is either fairly priced or underpriced.
The implication? Marketing automation software generates a substantial reduction in costs. Common cost-reduction wins include increased campaign management efficiency, reduced manual labor, better targeting, improved lead qualification, lower customer acquisition costs, greater scalability, and more data-driven decision-making.
Takeaway: Marketing automation can reduce your costs; the bigger question is where to start looking for cost-reduction opportunities. Do an audit of your current marketing processes to see where your budget is going. Then, look at ways to automate the things you’re allocating the most resources toward.
8. Improve Data Collection and Insights Generated
Want to boost your marketing automation results? Apart from optimizing your strategy, marketing leaders say there’s one thing you should do first: improve your data quality.
Marketing automation makes collecting vast quantities of demographic, behavioral, and interaction data easier. (You can even set up automated workflows that centralize data from multiple sources into a single platform).
Once you’ve collected and centralized your data, you can analyze it and take action—for example, by segmenting customers and personalizing their experiences.
Data quality makes or breaks this process. Relevant data improves customer experiences and outcomes; patchy or poor-quality data causes the level of personalization and relevance to suffer.
Takeaway: Collecting data is a great first step, and marketing automation tools can help. Tools that organize and analyze data to help you take action are even more important. But automation alone isn’t enough—for real impact, you’ll also need to focus on cultivating a culture of data-driven decision-making within your team.
9. Improve Email Marketing Performance
When the earliest digital marketing automation platforms were released in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they focused on automating email communication.
Despite automation’s expansion into social media, SMS, ads, and more, email is still the most popular use case for marketing automation (2023 Ascend2 State of Marketing Automation).
What can marketing automation do to support your email marketing performance? An important first step is to boost the relevance of your messaging by segmenting customers; later, you can send them through personalized automation journeys based on their behavior and interests.
Ensure you also set up messages triggered as the direct result of your users’ actions, like when they abandon a purchase or view a specific sales page. (Triggered messages have a 76% higher open rate than other types of emails).
Takeaway: Email is more relevant than ever, but it needs to be personalized, or it’s likely to be lost in the chaos of modern inboxes.
Invest in email marketing automation tools that enable personalized, data-driven campaigns. Make sure the platform you choose has robust and easy-to-understand analytics so you can monitor performance and adjust your strategy to boost ROI.
10. Create Seamless Omnichannel Campaigns
According to a 2022 consumer survey, omnichannel engagement is now a baseline expectation for customers. If that wasn’t enough motivation to go “full omnichannel,” Omnisend found that omnichannel purchase rates are nearly quadruple those of single-channel campaigns.
Depending on your market and audience, some channels may be especially lucrative: push messages have a 614% higher purchase rate than single-channel campaigns, while SMS campaigns are 429% more likely to end in a sale.
Marketing automation can seamlessly coordinate your activities across multiple channels, letting customers engage with your brand on whichever platform they prefer. For example, you might create a cross-platform workflow that includes follow-up email, SMS, and mobile push notifications, each with platform-specific messaging and formatting.
Takeaway: Creating an omnichannel automation campaign requires serious resources. Now, even non-enterprise marketing automation platforms are capable of sophisticated omnichannel coordination. (Klaviyo is a good example: its “Email and SMS” plan starts at $60/month and syncs with mobile push notifications across multiple platforms).
Picking a marketing automation platform that simplifies cross-platform workflows will make it easier for your team to create memorable, high-converting user experiences.
11. Improve the Lead Scoring Process
Your business is likely managing hundreds or thousands of leads at any given time. Chasing low-quality leads wastes everyone’s time; following up with high-potential leads, on the other hand, can drive a massive surge in sales.
Lead scoring can help you distinguish low-quality leads from high-quality leads so you can direct your attention where it’s most likely to have an impact.
Years ago, many marketing and sales organizations scored leads manually; now, marketing automation can help, using predefined criteria and incorporating real-time data to adjust lead scores.
One automated lead scoring feature you might consider incorporating into your model is “time decay,” which stipulates that when potential customers have no engagement, their lead scores will decline over time.
Another is predictive lead scoring, which is offered by the best marketing software, such as HubSpot and Salesforce. It predicts high-potential leads by crunching large quantities of CRM data.
Takeaway: If you want to amplify your team’s marketing efforts, lead scoring is one of the best tools available to you. Even entry-level lead scoring systems can help you boost outcomes by focusing your attention on the prospects most likely to convert; advanced systems with predictive AI features can improve your results even more.
Join For More Marketing Automation Insights
Marketing automation has revolutionized marketing in just a few short decades—and its impact is only growing. Whether you’re personalizing your customer journey, generating and nurturing leads, launching omnichannel campaigns, or simply looking to boost productivity and ROI, marketing automation can have a massive impact on your business.
There are challenges, like choosing the right automation software to add to your martech stack or deciding which tasks to automate (and which are better off remaining human-powered). Even so, marketing automation tools are only getting more accessible and easier to work with, leveling the playing field for marketers everywhere.
Looking for more articles covering the latest in marketing automation? Check out our guide on the size of the marketing automation industry. And don’t forget to subscribe to The CMO newsletter for regular updates, marketing strategies, and leadership insights.
