The last 3-4 years have seen a lot of buzz around marketing automation tools and software as CRM technology also advance. Products such as Eloqua, Marketo, Soffront and Marketbright are just some of the names that come to mind when you talk about marketing automation software. I recently read a post which mentioned that most large enterprises over the last year have spent a significant portion of their budget and attention towards marketing automation and adding on marketing automation capabilities to their CRM to batch process activities like campaign management, lead scoring, nurturing, email campaigns and more. While many associate these wil larger marketing organizations and software for larger companies who handle larger volumes of data, this is not entirely an accurate view.
Here at DirectContact we have been using marketing automation tools simply because we are a smaller team of marketing and inside sales people and it just helps us do more with less. A combination of available software and internally developed automation tools helps us execute on everday tasks like assigning leads to the appropriate people, campaign setup and management, email campaigns, reports and follow ups a lot more efficiently. Running campaigns and lead nurturing for example become a lot more streamlined when you manage data using automation tools. Once you have identified which parts of your process you can use automation for and narrowed down on the best software for it you will find that you can do more with less. Isn’t that what its about?