For those on the marketing side of the house, one of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is that it frees you from depending on the IT department to launch marketing initiatives. Many times, especially in a smaller organization, the IT team can be stretched thin, and making sure the network is running smoothly and the office has its needs taken care of tends to be higher priority than uploading that new logo or creating a new landing page. The same struggles can take place when marketing tasks are outsourced to an agency, who likely will bill you for any small changes that need to be made to your digital marketing materials. In walks marketing automation, putting the power back in the hands of the marketing department.
Here are three ways a marketing automation solution can free you from IT hassles:
- Easy Email Campaigns
Marketing automation tools help simplify email creation – from start to send – while integrating the emails with the rest of your marketing efforts. Usually you have the option to use templates for guidance, create emails with a visual editor or, for the HTML whiz kids, drop in your own content. Besides easy email creation, you can generate lists, set up sending rules, link emails to forms and prospects actions and view your email statistics all within the same interface. Marketing automation tools will also manage your opt outs and sync up the information with your CRM system automatically. - Custom Landing Pages
Similar to the email features described above, with a marketing automation tool you can generate landing pages from templates or create your own branding with a visual editor. These pages are hosted within the marketing automation system and can have custom, branded URLs that are created within the system, so no more requests to IT for a new landing page from within your content management system. - Form Hosting
You can also easily create sophisticated, hosted forms from within the marketing automation system. Drag-and-drop builders and easy-to-create custom fields make launching a new form a snap. You can create custom before and after content for your forms, set up your autorepsonder emails and put in redirect information all within a simple, wizard environment. These forms can be used on a hosted landing page, or you can insert them on your website using an iframe (ok, you may need IT help here, but just think how grateful they will be that you’re bugging them much less often than you used to!).
An added benefit of marketing automation – which actually comes in handy for all three of the items discussed above – is the ability to host content in the system. You can upload all the graphics you need, plus key collateral items like white papers and case studies, within the marketing automation system. This puts all of the resources you need to create a well-rounded campaign right at your fingertips.
