According to Raab Associates the marketing automation market is now well in excess of $1.2B in annual revenue (2014). That’s a lot of automation! From having working in the marketing automation space for close to 15-years now, or most companies that ROI on marketing automation can be elusive. Quite often people would be better sticking with MailChimp. It’s a lot more affordable but it gets the job done for basic email.
Your Marketing Automation Journey
For those of you that really want to get the true ROI on marketing automation, here’s a recommended approach for your journey:
- Target low hanging fruit – Go after those quick wins. Get some runs on the board. We recommend building out some easy lead nurturing campaigns around dead deals or deals stuck in the pipeline. If you can add impact here, sales will love it. Its always great to have an advocate in sales
- Think incremental. Remember this is a journey. Build a roadmap with timelines, goals and budget requirements.
- Build a business case. At the end of the day, marketing automation is fundamentally changing the way your company markets. You’re going to need a consensus from leadership to do this. This kind of change needs buy-in. Business buy-in requires a business case. Gartner and Forrester have some good numbers on Marketing Automation business impact. If you’re looking for an all-in-one resource, Marketo has a great whitepaper on building a business case. You can download the guide here.
- Measure, measure, measure. It can be a challenge to measure business impact. But if you really want to get the budget and buy-in to move the ball down the field you’re going to have to prove your impact. Document your results. Open rates and registrations won’t cut it. Use Salesforce.com campaign reports to measure the impact you’re having on campaigns. Get your hands dirty with the data.
Remember – much like CRM, marketing automation is a business tool. It takes planning and process to go on a journey. Get going!
