Kristin Hambelton, Vice President of Marketing, Neolane shares her insight on:
Why Do I Need Marketing Automation If I Already Have Salesforce Automation and Email Marketing?

Today, the three different functional tools for engaging with customers across sales, service and marketing is defined as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Often SFA and customer service tools are integrated to try to create a holistic record of customer interactions over time. But what about the third pillar under the CRM umbrella—marketing? Where is the tool to manage and act on this data?

An emerging class of marketing technology has been developed to fill this critical void in CRM datamarts: marketing automation. Marketing automation technologies typically include email marketing, campaign workflow, web analytics, content management, a marketing datamart, and robust integration with SFA tools. However, because marketing automation technology is still emerging, a few common misconceptions stunt adoption.

For example, consider this common question: We use salesforce automation to store prospect activity and we have an enterprise class email marketing tool. Why do we still need marketing automation?

The first question to ask is how deeply your existing salesforce automation and email marketing tools integrate. To be successful, there must be deep integration across email, web analytics, social media, telesales, and field sales. Marketing automation tools have built in workflow triggers and deep integration with salesforce automation tools so prospects can be handed off to sales at just the right time.

Also: We have an enterprise class web analytics tool. Are the web analytics capabilities in marketing automation tools redundant?

Marketing automation tools don’t replace web analytics, instead they provide a completely different set of tools for sales and marketing. For example, marketing automation integrated to web analytics and email provides visibility to clicks and tracking of the link and corresponding web activity and behavior. Marketing automation makes this web analytics data actionable.

To be effective, marketing automation must integrate tightly with the salesforce automation tool, email marketing, and web analytics to prioritize leads and provide a window into the prospect’s intentions. By increasing efficiencies through better qualifying leads and increasing effectiveness by ensuring sales efforts are more personalized and relevant, marketing automation enables sales teams to do what they do best – SELL.

If you’d like to learn more, please download Neolane’s complimentary whitepaper on the subject: “Why Do I Need Marketing Automation If I Already Have Salesforce Automation and Email Marketing.”

Bio: Kristin Hambelton is vice president of marketing at conversational marketing technology provider Neolane, Inc. (www.neolane.com). She is responsible for Neolane’s market and brand strategy and operations including corporate communications, demand generation, product and partner marketing, and digital marketing including search and social media. Follow Kristin on Twitter @KMHambelton.

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