Building the Business Case for Investment in Marketing Automation

Investing in Marketing Automation software can yield a significant return, helping to increase revenues and decrease costs, while also improving customer experience.

Investing in a new marketing automation platform will typically require a business case to secure the necessary budget from your company’s finance department. The points below summarise some of the potential benefits of a marketing automation platform for your business. 

Increase sales

Reduce costs

Improve customer experience and loyalty

Better measurement and data intelligence

Brand relevance

Increased efficiency

​The key to marketing automation success is to apply these benefits to your own business objectives and processes as closely as possible, so you can estimate the potential upside in terms of increased sales and reduced costs in actual pounds, euros, dollars or any other currency. 

According to Adam Sharp, Managing Director and Co-Founder at specialist Marketing Automation consultancy CleverTouch: 

“The business benefits extend beyond marketing and sales alignment and better ROI etc. Increasingly, enterprise organisations are looking at re-skilling their marketing (and sales) organisations and, by doing so, are making them relevant for the digital economy.”

He adds: “This shouldn’t be about more technology, this should really be about better marketing and a better customer experience. Internally, it is about moving the dial from marketing’s perception as a cost centre to marketing as a profit centre. Externally is about being agile and relevant to your customers.”

Companies that have adopted marketing automation are out-performing those that haven’t.

​Marketers who have adopted marketing automation suggest that the biggest benefits are:

Taking repetitive tasks out of marketers’ hands, so they can work on other projects (36%)
etter targeting of their prospects and existing customers (30%)
Improving customer experience (10%)
Better email marketing (9%)
Reduction of human error (8%)
Lead management (4%)
Multichannel Marketing (3%)

(Lenskold and Pedowitz)

The value of marketing automation to the business varies according to how an organisation applies the technology.

Before you seek business investment in marketing automation it’s important to outline your goals:

To start to get a greater understanding of marketing automation and how it can benefit your business I recommend reading the ‘The Business Case for Marketing Automation’ Report.

The report covers all the features and benefits of marketing automation, clearly sets out the business case while detailing the points that the executive suite needs to understand or could be concerned about.​