How a Marketing Automation Strategy Boosts Business ROI

Today, marketing automation isn’t just about convenience — it’s the default standard for executing marketing strategies and plans. In fact, a well-structured marketing automation strategy can be the difference between wasted effort and measurable revenue impact.

Let’s start with the basics. Marketing automation is using software and technology to simplify and automate as much of the marketing process as technologically pragmatic. It streamlines marketing efforts by aggregating and simplifying workflows, automating tasks, and running quicker and better experiments, thus optimizing resources and ultimately maximizing ROI on marketing spend.

This article will explore how marketing automation solutions can increase profitability and scale operations and help you understand common pitfalls, best practices, and strategies to generate higher ROI.

The importance of marketing automation in business

Consider the inputs driving your marketing efforts. These inputs typically include ideas, people, time, and money. Modern marketing campaigns have so many moving parts that they can strain these inputs. Thus, it is imperative to shift to a smarter, automated, data-driven approach that improves efficiency and allows budget reallocation to more strategic areas.

The ability to set up and automate marketing communication ensures a consistent and timely customer experience. Instead of manually sending emails and follow-ups, marketers can schedule and deliver consistent experiences that adapt to customer behavior in real time.

For example, an e-commerce brand can set up a sequence where new customers receive a welcome email and a push notification with a contextual and personalized discount if they haven’t made a transaction within a week. A reminder SMS or email can be triggered if the customer has left an item in the cart. The best part is that with a marketing automation tool, all of this can be automated once and then set to run for all new customers who enter this flow.

This automated sequence reduces repetitive tasks, improves customer experience, decreases errors and duplications, consolidates all customer data, and helps increase conversions without requiring constant manual intervention. Companies that used marketing automation saw a huge increase in leads and conversion, 80% and 77%, respectively.

Improving the efficiency of these processes allows businesses to scale without a proportionate increase in resources required.

The analytics capabilities of marketing automation platforms allow for more data-driven decision-making to guide growth plans. With this approach, marketers can create better lead segmentation and nurture leads to increase customer lifetime value (CLV).

According to Statista, the revenue for the global marketing automation industry is projected to cross $21 billion by 2032, more than double the $8.23 billion projected in 2024.

Why marketing automation matters for business ROI

To understand why marketing automation matters for business ROI, one number stands out: 5.44.

For every dollar spent, marketing automation returns $5.44 within the first three years. Let’s explore in more detail how automation can benefit your business.

Increased efficiency

As mentioned earlier, sales and marketing efforts involve many necessary but repetitive tasks. Streamlining workflows by automating hygiene processes, such as scheduling social media posts, email campaigns, and triggers based on customer behavior, frees up the bandwidth of your marketing team.

This allows a paradigm shift from execution to strategic initiatives, course correction, and long-term planning.

Enhanced lead management

With customers interacting with brands across multiple channels, identifying, organizing, and tracking leads throughout their multi-channel journey becomes a challenge for marketers. Marketing automation can provide a more single, consolidated, holistic view of the customer by consolidating touch points and providing better context to where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Lead scoring can also be automated, with values assigned to prospects based on their behavior — how long they stayed on the website, filled out a form, interacted with a chatbot, ignored an email, and more — and, thus, on how likely they are to convert. This allows sales teams to focus on these high-value opportunities, ultimately driving better results.

Personalized customer engagement

73% of customers expect better personalization as technology improves. Marketing automation can find deeper insights from consolidated data of customer touchpoints across multiple channels. This makes it much easier to send the right message at the right time, meeting the customer in the channel they prefer, at the time they want — no one wants a sale announcement at 3 am.

These personalized customer journeys can more effectively nurture the customer through the sales funnel with precisely targeted content.

Marketing automation strategies for higher ROI

Now that we understand marketing automation’s impact on ROI, let’s explore some practical applications that help businesses drive measurable results while aligning them with business objectives and audience needs.

Streamlining marketing campaigns

One of marketing automation’s more immediate and impactful uses is streamlining email and social media campaign workflows. Automation tools can segment email lists based on user demographics, funnel stage, and behavior and interaction with channel touchpoints. These tools also have personalization capabilities, which allow marketers to tailor subject lines and CTAs for better engagement and results.

With this in place, you can create trigger-based workflows, such as a welcome email sequence, a festive sale campaign, an abandoned cart sequence, or re-engagement sequences.

Let’s take the example of a travel company. Once a user books a visit, they are identified as in the segment of users who’ve just purchased a ticket on a certain route and at a certain price point.

An email sequence is then triggered, first sending them confirmation, then hotel recommendations at a discounted rate, a list of recommended activities, a reminder email a few days ahead of their trip, and a follow up for review and feedback. This is all done without any manual intervention once this workflow is set up.

Source: CleverTap

In the case of social media management, automation tools simplify the management of different platforms. Marketers can schedule posts across different platforms at optimal times to maximize audience engagement. Workflows can be set up to monitor social media interactions such as mentions or comments and automatically respond.

Negative feedback on social platforms can impact brand image. A quick and empathetic response to listen to the user’s feedback can mitigate some of the negative impact. While manually monitoring the company’s social feed is cumbersome, these automated messages can help create better user experiences.

Streamlining and setting up workflows can save time, ensure timely outreach, and deliver a consistent experience to the end user.

Optimizing customer journeys

Creating personalized customer journeys is the key to nurturing leads. Automation tools can deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. These tools also capture how the customer interacts with the content.

With this, you can run experiments like A/B testing to find answers to questions like what messaging is resonating with the audience, which customer journey is converting more, and which emails they are clicking on.

Let’s take the example of a SaaS company running a free trial to a paid campaign. During the email sequence talking about the features and benefits of the paid version, they A/B test two types of messaging. The first message is a limited-time discount, and the other emphasizes a premium feature that addresses a common pain point. The results of this experiment will then inform their messaging going forward.

Source: CleverTap

The data gathered from optimizing customer journeys not only informs a company’s messaging but can also be used to qualify leads on the marketing side before passing it on to sales.

Integrating multi-channel marketing efforts

Consistency is the key to building a brand image in the eyes of a customer.

A good marketing automation tool must also be a good cross-channel marketing hub that integrates key marketing channels like email, SMS, website, and social media. This way, brands can ensure consistent messaging and have access to the same brand copy and designs from a central hub.

Let’s take the example of a mobile phone company that’s launched a new flagship phone. A customer might’ve come across the product on social media, done their research on the website, which spoke about the new features, received emails with a discount for this product, and completed their purchase at the offline store that offers a flagship experience. At each step, they had a continuous experience of the brand, which was reinforced with each channel.

Source: CleverTap

By integrating multi-channel marketing efforts, businesses can create a consistent brand experience, reinforce messaging, and improve customer engagement.

Leveraging analytics for continuous improvement

One of the more powerful capabilities of marketing automation is to collect, track, and analyze data and provide actionable insight into performance. Interconnected data from web analytics to marketing automation, sales automation, and customer review creates a flywheel that improves ROI with each iteration. Different types of analysis uncover key insights, identify important users, and refine marketing efforts.

• Recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) analysis categorizes customers by purchase behavior, focusing on how they shop to identify the most valuable customers.
• Funnel analysis can help marketers understand how users interact with the brand and can help identify at which point in the funnel users are dropping off.
• Cohort analysis examines a group of users over time to see how their actions evolve. This method uncovers trends and strategies for user retention.

Let’s take the example of a product manager tasked with optimizing retention and churn ahead of the quarter. They would leverage the various analytics capabilities of the automation tools. Using funnel analysis to see where users are dropping off, RFM analysis to identify loyal users, and cohort analysis of users dropping off and loyal customers to understand the trends leading to dissatisfaction and what they’re doing right with the loyal user cohort.

Source: CleverTap

By optimizing processes with each iteration, marketers can use analytics to reduce wasted resources, increase efficiency, and boost ROI.

Measuring ROI from marketing automation

Marketing and sales only care about data. While implementing marketing automation is important, measuring its impact is just as critical. At the end of the day, no service is worth paying for if you can’t calculate its worth.

The fundamental step in measuring success is tracking certain key metrics that give some insight into campaign performance. These metrics include:

• Conversion rate will give an idea of the efficacy of marketing efforts to move prospects through the funnel and convert them into paying customers.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is another critical metric that shows the cost-effectiveness of acquiring new customers using marketing automation.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total anticipated revenue a company sees from its customers throughout the lifetime of their relationship. A good rule of thumb is your CAC must always be lower than your CLV.

Source: CleverTap

Additionally, analyzing the ROI of channel performance gives a good indication of which platforms are performing the best for your business. Also, consider channel mix and how that affects ROI. This allows you to focus and reallocate resources to the channels bringing in the most revenue.

Other engagement metrics help you understand how relevant your messaging is. For your email campaigns, this could include open rates and click-through rates; for social media, it could include impressions and impressions per lead. All these numbers offer clues on what is or isn’t working in your marketing campaigns.

So, finally, to calculate the ROI of marketing automation, subtract marketing costs from your sales growth. Then, take that number and divide it by your marketing cost to determine what sort of return you are getting from your investment in marketing automation.

Typically, automation services provide better ROI the longer you use them. This is because it takes a while to integrate properly and for your marketing team to understand the ins and outs of the platform fully. Six months is usually a good milestone. Studies show this is the payback period for your automation software and how long you should wait before calculating ROI.

Overcoming challenges in implementing marketing automation

Marketing automation offers immense potential to boost business ROI, but it does come with its challenges. Marketers have encountered issues with a mismatch between business needs and software capabilities, inadequate training and underutilizing features, and difficulty integrating into their current tech stack.

Common pitfalls

1. Over automation leads to generic messaging: It’s very easy to get carried away with the hype of automation. When overused, it can lead to generic messaging and a loss of human touch in customer interactions. Automated messages or responses feel impersonal and can alienate customers.
2. Inaccurate or incomplete data: Data plays a crucial role in properly functioning automation software. Even the simplest automation working with incomplete or inaccurate data can lead to ineffective targeting, missed opportunities, and even dissatisfied customers.
3. Siloed systems: Data siloes arise when there isn’t a central connected layer between data from different sources. This leads to inaccurate, incomplete data, which becomes poor fuel for marketing automation. A lack of synchronization can lead to missed marketing opportunities and decreased efficiency.

Best practices for successful implementation

1. Balance automation with human interaction: Automation must enhance, not replace, human effort. While it can handle repetitive tasks and streamline workflow, it should be balanced with human input, personalizing messaging, identifying unique customer needs, and responding empathetically.
2. Regular data quality checks: Ensuring clean and up-to-date data is critical. Regular audits and robust data management processes must be set up to ensure campaigns operate on reliable information. Consider using customer data platforms to create a centralized database and prepare data for automation. 
3. Start small and scale gradually: Automate for need, not for hype. Identifying key business challenges and optimizing high-impact workflows is a good place to start with marketing automation. Regularly monitor the data and gradually expand functionalities with this data-driven approach.
4. Invest in training: To maximize the benefits of marketing automation, dedicate time to training your teams. Provide workshops and training resources and incentivize learning the functionalities of marketing automation to extract the most value.

By addressing these challenges gradually and proactively and keeping the best practices in mind, businesses can ensure their marketing automation strategy delivers the value it promises.

The future of marketing is automated

A well-thought-out marketing automation strategy is the difference between wasted efforts and measurable revenue impact.

More and more companies are realizing the value of marketing automation and its impact on ROI. It’s a good time to evaluate your current marketing practices and identify high-impact workflows that could benefit from marketing automation. Once you’ve identified areas and business challenges that could use optimization, explore solutions that provide quick value with easy integration.

Whether you’re automating email campaigns, personalizing messages, optimizing customer journeys, or creating consistent omnichannel experiences, each step will bring you closer to better marketing outcomes.

The customer interaction landscape is changing. With technologies like AI becoming commonplace, there is a need to create meaningful experiences with a higher level of efficiency. It calls for a better way to do marketing. It calls for marketing automation.

Explore in-depth reviews of G2’s 10 tried-and-tested best marketing automation tools to find the right fit for your business.

Edited by Jigmee Bhutia