Marketing Automation is the utilization of the software to automate the marketing processes like customer segmentation, customer data integration, campaign management etc. All such manual processes are made easier and more efficient by the marketing automation. This is an integral component of customer relationship management. The main key to any growing business is the effective marketing to the existing customers. The marketing automation provides the tools to automate, track and report on a business man’s marketing effort including the key word marketing, email, direct mail, print activities etc. The business people are also made able to target campaigns which are based on the customer’s purchase records, support cases and more. The marketing automation also helps the business man to optimize the campaigns on fly by providing the real time return of investment and performance reports on the business man’s personalized dash boards.

Some of the marketing features include campaign management tool helps the business man to track all the on-line, off line and direct campaigns. The promotion codes are provided to use if required to apply the limited time pricing or referral offers. They are also used just to identify a particular campaign. We can track the multi-tiered campaigns through different offers and media by setting up such tools.

Marketing automation also features the email campaign tracking and management. The tools allow the business people to create the HTML templates and the email groups. This can be based on the histories of purchase, support or payment. They can also view the responses to the campaigns from the each customer records.

Marketing automation also includes the key word marketing modules through which the key word marketing is made much more profitable. It will provide the complete tracking and management for the search engine marketing campaigns. It may also include creation of keyword campaign wizard, a pack of pre built reports and keyword campaign management abilities etc which will make the search engine acquire more efficiently and effectively.

Marketing automation will help to improve the search engine rankings of a website. It helps the business man to customize the search engine information for the websites easily. This includes some page titles for every item given in the website and separate meta tag submission.

The advanced customer segmentation is another facility provided by the marketing automation. Some target group creating tools will enable the business people to study or analyze the customer purchase, case records, opportunity histories and transaction records in order to create the target groups. It can be used later to conduct up-sell and cross-sell campaigns.

Marketing automation also provides the real time return on investment and performance management to the business organizations. The tools will track the starting of the campaign to the ending of the campaign which results in some sale of the products. The performance reports may also include the key metrics like ‘click-through’, ‘unsubscribe’ etc. It will also support the saved searches which reveal the new leads by the sales representative, source or region.

In total the marketing automation provides the marketing encyclopedia for the business people. They are able to post all the sales tools or campaign information to the intranet so that the sales teams or partners can access this anywhere, anytime.