Why Marketing Automation? Making a Business Case
February 25, 2013
Tips to writing a business case for marketing automation
Nobody really enjoys writing a business case. While the process in and of itself can be monotonous, there are ways of making it easier and more effective. Unlike other marketing investments like email service providers for batch and blast campaigns, a well-tuned marketing automation solution will be the result of alignment across functional stakeholders, users and decision makers.
If you’re beginning the process of evaluating a marketing automation tool and have been tapped to answer “why marketing automation?”, try avoiding generic business case templates found online or templates created solely by marketing automation vendors. While both of these can save you a bit of time, the business case should really speak to your organization’s goals, objectives and expected outcomes.
Start Simple
Most organizations look to marketing automation to do at least one of the following:
- Enable more effective digital marketing campaigns across the entire buying cycle
- Empower sales with higher volumes of qualified leads
- Efficiently manage prospect/customer relationships, data and marketing content
Define how marketing automation will help and then organize your research by how effectively a marketing automation solution could be in meeting those goals. The more specific the goals, the easier finding the right solution will be.
Set Clear Expectations
Since your business case supports a specific business need, it’s imperative to set clear expectations for how the system will be selected, deployed, managed, and measured. This sounds like a no-brainer but it’s an imperative step because marketing automation tool will shift the way you current run your marketing programs. So, defining how things will change will avoid any potential pushback and increase the likelihood that stakeholders and users will be prepared when those changes occur.
The most common areas a marketing automation will impact are:
- Technology stack: Email service provider, CRM, CMS, Web analytics
- Campaign planning & process: Channels, content, lead capture & scoring, timing and rhythm
- Resources: Expertise, roles, dependencies
- Communication: Sales and marketing alignment, tracking and measurement, executive reports
Build Use Cases
As a marketer, you know how effective story telling is. Citing specific examples of how the marketing automation system will be used within a current campaign can really help to highlight its value and return on investment.
Again, start simple and then get more sophisticated. A before and after campaign snapshot can be one effective way of making your point. Examples should include prospect behavior and quality of a lead, which should get sales excited and on-board. More sophisticated use cases could include reengaging campaigns with behavior-based email triggers that are timed to meet optimal open and click-through rates a cross-channel multi-wave campaign that includes A/B testing.
Explain ROI
Some organizations do not track cost per acquisition and some do. Both organization types could use the same marketing automation platform successfully. Regardless of how you measure marketing effectiveness, as marketing channels increase (channel fragmentation), you’ll need to clearly spot which channels are worth your time and which aren’t. Starting with basic ROI calculations using data in your CRM, can help round out what you’ll get for your investment.
It’s been said that most companies who deploy a marketing automation solution see improved metrics in the following areas:
- Email open rates
- Click-throughs
- Database size
- Web traffic
- Reduction in bounce rates
- Average conversion rates of contacts to leads
By looking at the current data points in these specific areas, you can also begin to explain ROI in these most basic marketing metrics.
Next Steps
There are many ways marketing automation can help execute marketing strategies which involve engaging with customers often. By understanding your business goals first, it will then be easier to frame your business case to help answer why marketing automation is worth the investment.
Creating use cases around those goals will also help you describe the ways in which you will start using a marketing automation solution, the changes it will have, and help forthcoming direct vendor demos.
In my next post, I’ll cover how to begin the vendor selection process.