Whether you’re growing a medium-sized business or scaling an enterprise, a company expansion means adjusting your team processes to support more teams, offerings, and marketing activities.

But with limited resources and budgets, implementing your ideal marketing campaign is challenging, especially when employees constantly juggle ongoing projects and day-to-day activities.

That’s where enterprise marketing automation (EMA) comes in to reduce manual labor and repetitive tasks. By optimizing EMA systems’ main components and functions, you can focus your efforts on scaling your company — rather than managing tedious manual tasks.

What’s enterprise marketing automation?

Enterprise marketing automation (EMA) is a technology-oriented approach to streamlining and automating marketing activities within enterprises and large-scale organizations.

It aims to improve the effectiveness of marketers’ activities by reducing reliance on manual labor. Integrating and automating tasks across multiple channels grants teams time for creative work, such as innovation and strategy, and enables them to create cohesive, brand-specific campaigns at scale.

Marketing automation vs. enterprise marketing automation

Large companies or smaller startups can use automation systems to streamline and accelerate marketing and project processes. However, enterprise marketing automation typically caters to larger businesses with broader and more diverse target audiences.

With more leads and clientele, enterprises typically work with longer customer journeys and sales funnels. Additionally, they demand cross-functional collaboration with larger teams and more resources.

EMA systems expedite these processes by automating labor-intensive tasks, enabling cross-team communication, and simplifying large databases to save time and provide in-depth reports. Marketing automation offers the same benefits at a smaller scale, but enterprises need EMA to fulfill their requirements.

Enterprise marketing automation benefits

Automating routine processes does more than reduce manual labor and human error. Whether it’s applied to internal projects or customer-facing processes, EMA provides multiple benefits, including:

Aligning customer data

Enterprise marketing automation consolidates customer data in one location, allowing you to understand consumer behavior, preferences, and interactions using in-depth insights.

Suppose a customer interacts with your business through your website, social media, and email. EMA gathers and presents user data from these platforms, which allows you to set triggers for marketing actions. For example, if the customer views a specific product on social media, the EMA system automatically sends the user targeted ads related to that product to encourage purchases.

Accelerating project and sales lifecycles

EMA accelerates your project lifecycles and delivery times by automating repetitive tasks, such as maintaining spreadsheet data or scheduling social media posts. It also guides potential customers through the sales funnel to drive purchase decisions.

For example, an EMA system assigns scores or ratings to leads based on engagement and interactions with marketing touchpoints — like clicks on a social media ad or taps on a notification. When a lead reaches a preestablished score range, the system automatically notifies the sales team, letting them follow up and attempt to convert the user into a paying customer.

Engaging potential customers

Enterprise marketing automation promotes customer engagement by delivering personalized, timely content based on individual preferences and behaviors. More than half of all customers who receive personalized experiences from a service or business say they’re likely to return. That means using EMA to personalize content can increase your customer retention rate and repeat purchases.

Automating email marketing

Enterprise marketing platforms can schedule email marketing campaigns and deliver personalized content to engage potential customers based on user interactions.

For instance, when customers buy a product or subscribe to a service, the EMA automatically sends them an enterprise email with related product recommendations, discount coupons, or a personalized welcome message. These gestures improve the buying experience and encourage consumers to explore your brand further.

Managing multichannel campaigns

EMA tools let marketing teams coordinate campaigns through email, social media, and company websites to ensure a cohesive branding and messaging approach across all channels.

Say a business-to-business (B2B) company launches a new digital product online. They can use an EMA tool to manage the launch and use the platform as a central data hub to monitor B2B marketing campaign metrics in real time.

Providing analytical insights

Enterprise marketing automation systems typically have built-in analytics and reporting features that highlight campaign performance patterns, customer behavior, and return on investment (ROI).

Analytic functions help identify channels generating the most leads and conversions by interpreting data from marketing campaigns and EMA reports. These insights direct your focus to strategies and trends that deliver optimal results so you can maximize your organization’s marketing efforts.

Safeguarding data and privacy

Many EMA platforms prioritize data protection and privacy regulations by including ample security measures like access control and encrypted data storage. These help keep sensitive company and customer information safe in data transfers and transactions.

Maintaining high protection standards also fosters trust with your consumer base. For example, an ecommerce website may require two forms of identification, such as an email address and a phone number, to sign into a customer account. This provides assurance by demonstrating an effort to protect your consumers’ banking information and contact details.

The 5 essential components of enterprise marketing automation

While each EMA tool offers its own set of features, all available systems share some fundamental components. Here are the five essentials of enterprise marketing automation systems.

1. Market segmentation

Enterprises rely on EMA systems to categorize a broad group of customers into specific market segments based on criteria such as demographics, online behavior, purchasing patterns, preferences, and interests. This component of EMA systems triggers personalized and targeted communication that ensures marketing efforts resonate with the relevant segments.

2. Retargeting

Retargeted marketing involves reengaging with potential customers who showed an interest in a product or service but didn’t take action, such as buying or subscribing. With enterprise marketing automation, you can follow up with leads by sending personalized content and ads that encourage customers to return and complete the sales funnel.

3. Customer support and call center management

Enterprise marketing automation supports integration of customer service and call center management by centralizing consumer interactions, feedback, and issue resolution.

You can comprehensively understand your customers’ pain points by organizing all consumer queries and issues in one location. This allows for data-driven marketing strategies, personalized communication, and informed problem-solving across customer touchpoints.

Additionally, EMA reports are useful for training call center representatives to better tend to potential and existing customers.

4. Event marketing

Large businesses often plan, promote, and manage conferences, webinars, workshops, and product launches.

While many events require human involvement, EMA allows you to seamlessly include event-related activities into your broader marketing strategy by ensuring automated promotions align with your marketing.

Additionally, EMA provides participant-related data so you can analyze crucial metrics like attendance, feedback, and engagement post-event.

5. Promotions

This component focuses on creating and managing promotional campaigns — such as discounts, special offers, holiday sales, and loyalty programs — to encourage leads and customers to take action.

With EMA software, you can automate delivery, target relevant audiences, and schedule promotions based on customer behavior, preferences, and browsing history.

How to choose the best enterprise marketing automation tool

Finding the right EMA tool for your enterprise can be challenging, especially if your company is transitioning or scaling. Here are a few factors to consider when selecting an enterprise marketing automation system:

• Cross-platform integrations. Evaluate an EMA software’s compatibility with your existing systems, including customer relationship management (CRM) tools, content management systems (CMS), and other established workflow resources. Seamless integration ensures a unified marketing ecosystem that allows data to flow freely between team members and platforms.
• User-friendliness and usability. Consider how user-friendly a platform’s interface is before subscribing to its services. This involves aspects like simple navigation, intuitive design, and user learning curves. Evaluating a tool’s usability in advance helps streamline training and maximizes productivity so your team can use EMA features to their full potential.
• Data analytics and reporting. Look for an EMA system that provides comprehensive reports into campaign performance and customer behavior with data visualization for simple reference. These reports allow your team to make data-driven decisions efficiently and optimize strategies to improve marketing content.
• Customer support. Reliable customer support — including availability, responsiveness, and channels (email, phone, live chat) — ensures your consumers feel heard and valued. When choosing an EMA provider, look for a service with a positive track record of satisfying customers.
• Scalability. A scalable EMA system will continue to meet your organization’s needs as it grows. Consider how many accounts the platform can accommodate, the features for cross-functional collaboration, and pricing models within your budget.

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