Enterprise marketing automation platforms automatically unify and manage marketing processes and campaigns, across multiple channels.

Using drip campaigns, marketers can guide customers through a cross-channel customer journey that’s customized to their individual needs, without having to manually decide which person gets which emails/content. In a time of tight budgets, staffs and timelines, it’s a lifesaver.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is technology that automatically manages marketing processes and campaigns, across multiple channels. Using drip campaigns, marketers can guide customers through a cross-channel customer journey that’s customized to their individual needs, without having to manually decide which person gets which emails/content. In a time of tight budgets, staffs and timelines, it’s a lifesaver.

TLDR: Marketing automation is an absolute must-have for enterprise marketers. In this guide, we’ll go over marketing automation, the biggest benefits of enterprise marketing automation, and essential features of enterprise marketing automation platforms.

What are the benefits of using enterprise marketing automation platforms?

Increase productivity by automating repetitive tasks

Efficiency is the name of the game for enterprise organizations. The less time you can spend recreating welcome series or drip campaigns, the more energy you have to create compelling content (i.e., the stuff that makes you stand out).

Create customized audience journeys in less time

Drip campaigns are evolving from a glorified series of emails to highly orchestrated, long term campaigns that span multiple channels. Now, marketers can serve paid ads to people who have opened an email or target them with personalized content on their websites.

While that gives marketers more opportunities to engage prospects, it also requires increasingly scarce time and resources. With marketing automation, you can create drip campaigns targeted at different segments of customers, then run it on autopilot for weeks. (Just be sure to check in periodically to ensure there’s not a bottleneck or an underperforming nexus.)

Engage and convert website visitors

Through website behavior tracking, you can see how your leads are engaging with your site and adapt your strategy in response. Over time, your website “learns” more about the visitor’s preferences and directs them to pages that will encourage them to make a purchase. Besides generating revenue for the organization, this also improves the user experience and increases the likelihood that they’ll return for another purchase.

Personalize customer experiences

By now, you probably know that customers demand personalized content and offers. But if you’ve got thousands or millions of customers in your data set, it’s really hard to execute this in practice.

With enterprise marketing automation solutions, you can create more precise marketing segments and customized automated campaigns to each one.

Say you’re remarketing to people who attended your latest event. If you tried to customize communications to all 5,000 people in your audience, you’re not going to reach them in time to make an impact. But by automating, you can quickly create different follow-up email series for current customers, as well as prospects with varying lead scores, industries, etc. — and do it in time to get their business.

Increase ROI

The cardinal rule of marketing is to get the right message to the right people at the time. Marketing automation helps you do this without excess manual labor.

And that yields serious ROI: According to recent studies, marketing automation on average drives up to 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads using marketing automation software, and 77% had an increase in conversions.

Improve email performance and relevance

Email marketers don’t try to annoy their audience with irrelevant communications. But if your list is in the millions, it’s nearly impossible to monitor each person’s level of engagement and respond in real time.

In marketing automation campaigns, people are programmed out of receiving subsequent emails if they haven’t engaged with the first message. These contacts are also suppressed from future use, making it less likely that you’ll annoy or spam them.

What to look for in enterprise marketing automation platforms

Scalability

First things first: Make sure that your enterprise marketing automation platform will accommodate bulk sends to thousands or millions of users at once. Ask your vendors how they can handle large volumes of data and how they can scale up or down depending on your business needs.

Integration capabilities

Imagine: Your latest ad just generated thousands of leads. You’re about to reach out to your new contacts with a welcome campaign. But then you realize you can’t get your contacts from your online form builder to your marketing automation tool without exporting, manipulating, re-uploading and cleaning your entire contact list. Now you’re days behind your original timeline — and you’ll lose many of those leads in the meantime.

It’s a marketing ops nightmare that can easily be avoided. Look for enterprise marketing automation platforms that integrate with the rest of your tech stack, including your CDP or CRM, your online form builder, your email service provider, form builder, etc. For ease of use and speed of onboarding, look for a marketing automation platform that’s part of a broader enterprise marketing solution.

For instance, Omeda’s marketing automation platform is part of an end-to-end audience management platform with a native CDP, email service provider, form builder, and subscription management tool. So clients can easily query their audience, create a marketing automation campaign for that list, and connect the results and engagement data back to their database.

Personalization capabilities

Back in 2012, addressing someone by name in a subject line counted as “personalization.” Today, customers expect a much more sophisticated level of targeting, with communications, offers, and messages customized to their needs. Ensure you’re meeting your audience where they’re at by choosing enterprise marketing automation platforms with the following capabilities:

dynamic content, which shows different content and images to different members of your recipient list, depending on their specific demographic or behavioral filters, etc.
behavioral triggers, in which people receive a series of emails after they complete a specific action, like download an eBook or register for an event.
fatigue filters and pathfinder filters, which remove people from a campaign if they have not engaged after a predetermined number of messages
goal elements, which automatically remove people from a campaign if they’ve already taken the desired action (registered for an event, requested a demo, etc.)

Cross-channel capabilities

If you’re limiting your automated campaigns to email, you’re missing opportunities to engage your audience across other channels. Prioritize enterprise marketing automation platforms that allow you to target your users across other channels, like display ads, social media, etc. (On Omeda, you can retarget your recipients with Google Ad Manager, Facebook Ads, etc.).

Reporting and analytics

Any email service provider can give you open, click and click-through rates. The best enterprise marketing automation platforms will go beyond vanity metrics to tell you which individual links, UTM codes, CTA messages, etc., are driving the most success for your business.