A lot of marketers I know dismiss marketing automation outright. It sounds expensive, complicated and – frankly – like it will put them out of a job. However, it is the opposite. If anything, it can improve a marketer’s life if they know how to use it.

What is marketing automation? By definition, marketing automation allows you to streamline, automate and measure your marketing workflows. This technology can be implemented within your website workflows and CRM. It also offers you a range of tools, from lead nurturing to remarketing campaigns.

79% of top performing businesses use marketing automation

Get in contact with every lead

With this technology, you lose the risk that a lead is never contacted. Emails are automated based on visitors behaviour and interactions on your website, or it could be based on their lead score. This way, marketing automation makes sure each identified lead on your website is “touched” immediately, even if your sales team have not made contact with them.

71% of qualified leads are not chased

These automated emails can be used to nurture leads who need a bit more information or sales-ready leads who just need an email to push them to the next stage of the sales process. Marketing automation also allows you to customise the content of each email, allowing you to provide every lead on your website with the relevant content at the relevant time.

Take control of lead nurturing

With sales focusing on converting and closing high-quality leads in 2016, marketing can focus on developing a lead nurturing strategy thanks to marketing automation. The software allows you to take this one step further and market to each individual lead on your website, without having to write out several one-to-one painstaking emails. This gives you – the marketer – the time to work on more important aspects of your marketing campaigns and leave the details of the emails to the software.

With this technology, it’s clear to see that marketing automation can actually make your email marketing strategy a hell of a lot easier. If you’re willing to give it a try, that is.