Five Factors to Consider before Choosing Marketing Automation Software

There are five factors to consider before choosing marketing automation software. Those five factors are your marketing department’s capabilities, your marketing needs, your software requirements, transition time and budget.

Your Marketing Department’s Capabilities

This is by far one of the most important factors to consider in choosing marketing automation software. Before actually making a purchase, assess your business’ marketing department. Is your marketing team tech savvy? Are they able to use new software with comfort? If they are used to using complex software, will simpler software make them feel like work is too mundane? Since there are so many choices of marketing automation software out there, an honest assessment of your marketing department significantly narrow down the choices.

What Are Your Marketing Needs?

Lead management or lead acquisition? Fully integrated software to simple marketing software? Discuss your marketing needs in a meeting with your marketing department during the assessment. Compile a list of these needs to find the marketing automation software that’s right for you.

What are Your Software Requirements?

What exactly is it that you need the software to provide? What do you expect out of it? What results are you looking for? These are questions you should be asking yourself in order to narrow down the choices for the best marketing automation software.

Key features to analyze include:

● Landing page management
● Customer segmentation
● Web site activity tracking
● Email distributions
● Real-time notifications
● Form tools
● Survey tools

There are many more features offered by marketing automation software providers, these are just some of the more important features to consider.

Transition Time

Transitioning from your current method of lead management may take some time. Some businesses that use marketing agencies assume that obtaining this software will totally replace all of what the agency does immediately. This is not true. Marketing automation software like any other software has a learning curve, so it will take some time to actually gain full benefit from it.

Budget

How much can your company afford to spend on marketing automation software? Keep in mind that you will need to factor in the cost of the software as well as the cost for training and support. Once you decide what your company needs the software for, make an assessment of how much you can spend on it.