While the marketing experts at emfluence fully endorse those often repeated marketing mantras, who can forget the classic “email marketing is not dead“? That doesn’t mean we are not ready to embrace change. That change is increasingly facilitated by making the switch from standalone and often loosely integrated marketing software to more robust and powerful marketing automation technology. The question is: Are you ready for change?
Why Marketers Need to Invest in Change
As marketers, we all need to fully embrace change because, in the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape (get ready for another cliché); change is the only constant.
If we are not constantly adapting to that change, we risk losing the one thing that keeps our marketing campaigns delivering on their objectives — relevancy.
Marketing relevancy is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. That means engaging with subscribers and prospects on their terms, using their preferred timescales and channels. While email marketing is a long way from dead, if it is going to thrive, it must productively coexist with many other marketing channels. Those channels include social media, content marketing, search, SMS and CRM.
You can, of course, manage all of these marketing channels in their own silos. However, when you do this, your marketing organization risks losing any real focus and efficiency, as your various marketing silos actively compete against each other. When this happens, marketers often overspend on “top of the funnel” marketing strategies like paid search or SEO and undervalue more strategic “mid-funnel” activities like email and content marketing. Remember, if you are throwing leads into the top of your marketing funnel without further finessing those contacts, you are playing a numbers game. Marketing isn’t a numbers game — it’s far more sophisticated and important than that.
It’s also important to remember that marketing efficiency is about more than just saving money. When you have dialed greater efficiencies into your marketing strategies, you can find the confidence to spend more money on your top-of-funnel activities, knowing that it will reap greater returns further down the funnel.
Developing a More Strategic Future with Marketing Automation
An investment in marketing automation will help you build a more strategic future for your business.
Marketing automation technology, like the emfluence Marketing Platform, breaks marketers out of their silos and brings them together to build a more cohesive plan. But it doesn’t stop there. When your marketing automation platform is integrated with your CRM system, it helps to tear down even more of those historic barriers between your sales, marketing and customer service teams and work towards the same objectives.
This investment doesn’t mean that a marketing automation strategy has to encompass every channel and every department from the get-go. In fact, it’s often best to start small and build on your success. Building simple email marketing drip campaigns based on quickly created workflows is an excellent place to start. It won’t take long before you want to incorporate all of your paid search, landing pages, and online forms into your strategy. But then, why not try something new, like SMS?
Marketing Automation Data Migration Made Easy
One of the many considerations for breaking your marketing department out of its historical silos and bringing everything together via your marketing automation platform and CRM system is the ability to manage all of your marketing data in one place. This approach creates a single view of the truth and minimizes the risks associated with managing multiple data sources (essentially sending the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time).
For businesses that have struggled to integrate their marketing channels in the past, an investment in marketing automation is a good excuse to finally get their marketing data in good shape.
For marketers who have juggled data across multiple MarTech platforms, the thought of migrating data into a central repository will be both appealing and challenging — and, we’ll be honest, it can be a laborious task. But don’t let this put you off. The benefits of clean, stable, and accurate data far outweigh the risks and potential chaos of the alternative.
To ease the process, we recently shared this simple marketing automation data migration guide. And if the thought of all that data being brought together still sends shivers down your spine, our in-house team of marketing automation data experts isn’t so easily scared.
Living, Breathing Big Data
Once your data is in good shape and hosted in a central, constantly updated repository, you can start doing amazing things with it. When you view every customer touchpoint as an opportunity for further engagement, your data becomes much more valuable. It’s incredible how a little bit of data, like an email address, can quickly grow into a living, breathing piece of data that creates tremendous opportunities to build future engagement around.
In this respect, big data isn’t the sole preserve of those bigger marketing organizations. Instead, marketing automation technology is the great leveler, helping you do more with less and then some.
Are You Ready to Take Control of Your Marketing Data?
To learn more about how the emfluence Marketing Platform can help you take control of your marketing data, and drive greater efficiencies across your entire marketing strategy, contact us today at expert@emfluence.com.
