Email is an essential tool for marketing teams in sectors and industries. Most of these teams rely on delivery platforms by e-mail or marketing automation (MAP) to send emails. How do you decide which tool is suitable for your team?
To assess whether your marketing organization needs a complete marketing automation platform (MAP) or a delivery platform by e-mail, you must in-depth assess your business needs, personnel capacity, management support and financial resources.
Here is a step -by -step guide to help you do exactly this.
Evaluation of your need for a marketing automation platform
Evaluate the current marketing system
Start by determining if your organization has exceeded its current marketing system. Marketing automation is often a solution for rapidly growing businesses that need to develop their efforts.
If data in several databases cannot be consolidated or if the current messaging system cannot provide the necessary behavioral targeting level, it may be time for you to study the automation of marketing.
As part of this evaluation, consider how long the staff spends on repetitive tasks that a card could accelerate or eliminate.
Dig more deeply: Download the Martch buyer guide for marketing automation platforms (Recording required)
Identify critical marketing automation capacity
Then identify and prioritize your software requirements and key capacities.
Determine if your salespeople need real -time access to marketing data, which would require a native CRM integration.
Evaluate the importance of a sophisticated presence on social networks, making the management of social marketing and critical integration.
Determine the necessary type of card
Marketing automation is not a unique solution. Determine if incoming marketing (for example, social media, blogs, referencing) is more important for your organization than outgoing (e-mail, SMS).
Determine whether the reports and analyzes are key characteristics.
Evaluating whether prospects are rating is a crucial element of your marketing program and if more important capacities in segmentation and personalization of the audience are necessary.
Establish objectives
It is essential to know the objectives of the card if you decide to deploy it.
Determine whether the objective is to improve the quality of prospects given to sales or generate income by increasing conversion to the key stages of the purchase cycle.
Evaluate if the objective is to improve the visibility of purchase and sales cycles to optimize marketing commitment or to reach the growing part of mobile user prospects.
You will want to bring together the main stakeholders to establish the objectives of the organization.
Determine integration with the existing technological battery
Identify all the tools already in your Martech battery so that you can question the card supplier on the integrations. (Many suppliers offer application markets for faster access to participating systems.)
Almost all marketing automation providers offer APIs, but they can be a supplement to the price of the platform, and developers may be necessary to establish the necessary connections.
Evaluate the management medium
You will need an executive sponsor to obtain support at level C. This will require a convincing case that the advantages of new software largely prevail over costs, such as conversion of more prospects, making sales more effective and improving the return on investment of the campaign.
Consider sets of internal skills and staff
To maximize the return on investment of any marketing automation investment, your staff will need training and a desire to develop and execute new business processes.
If your marketing and sales organizations operate in silos, they will have to work more in cooperation on rating and routing systems of lead, lead qualification definitions and more efficient guarantees and communications.
It is always a good idea to identify someone who will use the system once it has been adopted to take the lead in the selection process.
Determine the measure of success
It is important to know why a card is adopted.
If your goal is to increase conversions, it is important to know the conversion rate before implementing automation to measure its impact. If it is a question of improving the efficiency of emails, prepare with measures on opening rates and clicks.
In addition to measuring marketing objectives, it is wise to measure the depth and extent of the use of the platform. Many marketing specialists only use basic messaging skills in their marketing automation platform, which means they pay for features that are not used.
Calculate the full cost
Some cards are all inclusive, while others have additional tools and services that can considerably increase costs.
Take into account the costs of current services and training and the indirect costs associated with the commissioning of your staff on the new system.
If there are no computer or design staff, be sure to ask questions about what these services cost every hour. If the platform offers design models, for example, find out how much and how much it costs to customize the design of the model.
If your assessment determines that the organization needs more than the development and execution of the basic electronic email campaign, lead capture, rating, development, centralized marketing databases and basic reports, a full card may be necessary.
A card offers more advanced features, such as the generation of dynamic content fueled by AI, e-mail deliverability tools, ABM features, mobile marketing, predictive analysis based on AI and social profile / lead integration.
Download the Martech intelligence report for marketing automation platforms.
This buyer’s guide includes profiles of 14 suppliers, price information, capacity comparisons and more. (Recording required.)
