Marketing automation solutions allow business owners to streamline their sales and marketing activities effectively.

They automate key activities like lead generation, lead scoring, email campaigns, among others, helping you complete them in the shortest time possible and at the lowest costs.

Since automation systems are key to marketing and sales operations, you must choose the right platforms.

To make the best choice, you must analyze your business's specific needs. There are several marketing automation solutions in the market today, each with different value offerings.

Regardless of which system you choose, these are some critical features your provider must have.

The One Key Requirement

1. Additional Marketing Services

Our experience with FunnelBud clients have shown us most businesses use only a fraction of features. Why is this so?

Complex tools: Often, the tools are too complex for businesses to use without any help. Their teams cannot easily adopt the system or even take too long to learn them.

Integrations and best practices: Even when marketing and sales staff have some knowledge of the software, they may not know how best to utilize its additional features, integrations, and tools.

The effect of these scenarios is that they are essentially paying for stuff you don't use. Therefore, they most likely won't realize a good return on investment.

So, add-on marketing services should be at the top of your list as you choose. Your vendor should offer expert consultancy to help you set up and use the tool, plus design strategies that would help you get maximum returns for your investment.

Some specialized services include:

Software integration: They should help you identify and install all the necessary integrations your business will need. Since these vary according to the company, they must provide customized solutions for you.

Marketing strategy: Your vendor must be able to assign a team/ personnel to help you design and implement appropriate marketing strategies to suit your new system.

For instance, when purchasing automation software, you may need experts to help you design appropriate marketing funnels as well.

Customer after-sales support: Good old customer support is a necessary factor in case you run into any issues when operating your software.

Marketing services are essential in helping you fully maximize your automation solution to meet your marketing goals.

Other Critical Requirements

2. Dynamic Content Capabilities

Your automation solution of choice must allow you multiple content features. For instance, it should be able to help you design landing pages, draft emails, create templates, etc.

These save you time and resources in using third-party tools and extra personnel. Plus, you will likely not need any integrations to run them.

This feature thus makes your processes more efficient and encourages seamless collaboration between your marketing and sales teams.

Such uniformed capabilities also create a centralized hub of content and features that your entire team can access. It therefore boosts the nurturing and conversion process across departments.

3. Campaign Tracking And Reporting

An ideal marketing automation solution must have tracking and reporting capabilities embedded in the system. You will need this information to make strategic and tactical marketing decisions.

Campaign tracking features show you how your tactics are performing. For instance, you can access data like the number of leads, conversions, engagements per campaign, etc.

Such metrics show you which elements need readjusting and which ones you should maintain.

Tracking metrics also help you in the A/B testing of campaign tactics. You may, for instance, experiment with different funnels to see which one generates more signups.

However, even when most marketing automation systems come with inbuilt analytics, you also must consider those with the best user experience.

Data must be easy to read, analyze and customize. Like with SharpSpring automation tools, you can access personalized data by channel, over time, specific leads, etc.

4. Contact Management and Lead Engagement Capabilities

An ideal marketing automation solution must provide you with superior lead management capabilities. It is not enough to draw as many leads as possible. You also need to nurture them and work towards high conversions for them to be profitable.

Since doing this manually is ineffective, your marketing automation system of choice must deliver on this front. It should be able to collect all major contact details and accurately segment your leads.

Leads' details are critical when communicating with them. They provide adequate information that your teams can use to encourage purchase decision-making.

It must also provide lead scoring capabilities. These help you group leads according to their conversion potential, based on their previous behavior.

5. Future-proof

Your marketing automation solution ought to be continuously updated to be effective. Updates apply to additional features, improvements, Fixing system issues, and bugs, etc.

One way to guarantee constant updates is to find "future-proof" solutions. Such systems should be adopted and actively used by a significant share of the market.

Consider one that is used by at least 10000 companies worldwide or backed by a company that has been in business for more than 20 years and growing.

Such a large user base can guarantee that the system is still operational and improving, at least for the near future. Also, it would often have new updates every year, in addition to continuous smaller improvements.

For instance, FunnelBud is a reliable marketing automation vendor backed by several years of experience and adopted by over 200,000 organizations worldwide.

Such a solution would provide your business a degree of security for subsequent years.

Final Thoughts

Like any other business system, choosing the right marketing automation tool takes time and careful consideration.

Additional marketing services are a vital requirement that many businesses often ignore and end up regretting. It is useless to have an advanced comprehensive system that you can't use or cannot help you achieve your goals.

The other key factors mentioned above are also critical to your decision since they greatly influence your return on marketing automation investment.

FunnelBud offers you the full package: an all-in-one marketing automation solution, along with marketing services at affordable costs. These include building marketing funnels, content strategy, among others.

Get a free demo today for more information on how SharpSpring’s automation solutions work.