What Are the Important Features of Marketing Automation Platform

January 12, 2023 Sahil

Marketing automation has become more than just a trend; it is the name of the game in marketing. According to ReportLinker, the marketing automation market size is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12.8% from 2022 to 2027. No wonder it’s now a system marketers swear by. Some features of a marketing automation platform help marketers make the most of this technology. Hence, organizations must choose the right software suited to their needs.

Let’s discuss the importance of marketing automation software and then discuss some must-have features for such a platform.

Why is Marketing Automation Software so in Demand?

Marketing automation software can help streamline your marketing efforts and make for a more efficient process. It plays a crucial role in aligning marketing efforts with sales, leading to a more cohesive approach toward lead generation and nurturing.

According to a Nucleus Research report, for each dollar spent on marketing automation software, organizations realized $5.44, on average, in benefits over the first three years post-deployment, with a payback period under six months.

Here are some of the benefits marketing automation software offers:

It helps get quality leads.
It provides marketing with actionable insights into their users’ personas.
It gives sales personnel useful information to nurture leads based on the context.
It helps increase conversion rates.
It enables a smooth customer journey and leverages the same to send a unified message.

What Are the Important Features of a Marketing Automation Platform that You Should Look For?
While marketers must understand their marketing automation requirements to choose the best software for their organizations, some basic features must be in their platform –

1. Visitor Tracking: A must-have feature of a marketing automation platform, Visitor tracking is a feature that notes and keeps track of your business website visitors and their behavior and activities. This gives valuable information and actionable insights on the type of content your visitors engage with and the time they spend on the website, amongst other insights.

2. Lead Generation, Grading, and Management: It enables marketers to capture leads, understand their requirements, and qualify and grade them as per their needs.

This involves setting up a landing page that helps gain information about the visitors in exchange for a reward. This reward could be a downloadable e-book or white paper, a promotional coupon, etc. The purpose is to use this interaction to capture information and turn the visitors into leads.
After capturing the leads, they can be separated and graded based on demographic and behavioral data. The idea is to identify the most promising leads at a given time and separate them from the less promising ones. Among the methods used to accomplish this are analyzing prospect behavior on the website-for instance, watching a demo video or filling out a contact form. This information is further shared to marketing and sales.
Marketing and sales then know who the hot leads are and who are not and can adapt their efforts and sales pitch based on what stage of the buying decision the visitor is in and whether they need nurturing or are ready to purchase.

3. Campaign Management: A marketing automation platform should be able to manage a range of campaign types across various channels. From qualifying leads and managing campaigns to analyzing ROI data across multiple channels, marketing automation systems should allow you to design, deploy, and monitor marketing activities without having to tend to every step in the process manually.

4. Email Marketing: Email marketing is an important feature of a marketing automation platform. It helps increase customer outreach, enhance relations, and acquire new customers by communicating with them in a personalized manner. A marketing automation system must have an email marketing tool with the following capabilities:

Emails based on occasions
Scheduled and triggered emails
Progressive lead profiling
Dynamic content

5. CRM Integration: The marketing automation tool must be integrated with CRM. CRM is the bible for sales. If the marketing automation platform is in sync, it becomes easy to feed lead history and other crucial data from the software to your CRM. This helps keep information handy for your teams.

6. Every time a lead is generated and then assigned to a salesperson for follow-up, they can know when that lead last visited the website, what they looked at, and if they requested any other information. This enables salespeople better to understand their leads’ preferences and customer journeys, allowing them to personalize their interactions and increase marketing efficiency.

7. Analytics and Reporting: One of the features of marketing platforms is that they generate tons of data. Raw data must be processed and analyzed to generate insights from it. Thus, your marketing automation platform should have the following analytics features to make sense of the voluptuous data that occurs in the system:

Web analytics and reporting
Email analytics
Keyword analytics
ROI analytics

8. Security: Security is one of the looming concerns in this cyber-active world. Cyber risk affects every aspect of business, and marketers must be aware of these dangers. Marketing automation platforms should have end-to-end data encryption, role-based access, and high-grade 2048-bit certificates. This feature is the last piece in choosing marketing automation software for your organization.

Conclusion

Marketing automation platforms have proven ROIs and marketing alignment benefits, making them the need of the hour for organizations. Organizations must understand the features of a marketing automation platform and choose the right kind of platform accordingly.

HCL Unica is an integrated, cloud-native marketing automation platform that enables organizations to do precision marketing at scale. Contact us to learn more and schedule a demo today.