CMS – Marketing Automation Reviewed – Part 2
So you are wanting your marketing to be on the conveyor belt to success. You are thinking of investing in a CMS with marketing automation for your most mundane marketing tasks like sending out response emails, collecting form submissions and adding them onto a list that then activates a task.
Training set-up for Marketing Automation
How long will it take your company to implement the marketing automation software, and at what cost? Is there an onboarding cost on top of the cost of the software platform? Will you need to train face-to-face or can this be done remotely? What are other inclusions like creating branded templates for your company to use or are these add-on services extra?
CRM / sales capabilities
Some marketing automation tools have in-built Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) with lead scoring, and advanced tagging capabilities, building a better profile of your opportunities. Some CMS have no in-built CRM, as they expect you to connect the software with your existing CRM. The question is whether you will end up with two silos of related information and with no way of digitally integrating this data or being able to view the information in one place. There are tools like Zapier that have the ability to export/import data between systems so it would more likely be an inconvenience than a deal-breaker when taking into consideration CMS software package costs.
Content proficiencies
Do you need to create web landing pages, video webinars, and subscriber forms on pages that will send out your content to your contacts via email? While most marketing automation tools enable this, some are easier to use and far more extensive than others.
CMS Email capabilities
While all marketing automation tools enable email marketing in some capacity, some are better than others. Most allow personal branding and subscriber information to appear on the emails. The cheaper CMS systems like MailChimp are perfectly suited for simple newsletter subscription emails without much contact segmentation. Do you need drip campaigns? Subject line A/B testing? Demographic segmentation? Some like Hubspot even allow emails with embedded personalised video clips to be sent.
eCommerce capabilities
Do you sell products online? Some marketing automation tools, such as Ontraport, can act as your product database. These tools usually offer features like coupon codes and affiliate programs and can show you in detail which campaigns bring the most traffic and which convert to sales.
Social media capabilities
Some marketing automation tools integrate with Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter, enabling you to control social advertising or build social apps from within the platform. Some also offer social media monitoring, to pull comments made on social media platforms into your CRM against that contact. These features are usually nice to haves, but it might be worth considering whether or not they would be useful for you or not.
Surveys and Polls Marketing Automation
Wanting to know who are your detractors, passives and promoters can be valuable when asking for reviews or remarketing based on their previous experience. Some platforms have no capability to house valuable information about external activities like a customer satisfaction survey or the result of a Facebook poll. While some of the more extensive CMS systems can build a profile based on this data and kick off a workflow that is reliant on answers to a specific survey question or poll outcome and makes for better contact with context for that subscriber.
If you would like to know more about CMS or discuss an automation system, make contact and we will gladly take the time to discuss with you the best system for your situation.