Do you ever wish you had a modern fairy godmother to take all of your email marketing troubles away?

As one of the best tools for companies to connect with target audience members, email marketing is important for just about any business. But in order to make lasting connections and get results, it takes a serious time commitment.

While we don’t know of any fairy godmothers willing to take over your email marketing responsibilities, we can fill you in on the next best thing—marketing automation.

Email marketing is time-consuming. Members of your subscriber list join at different times, are looking for solutions to different problems and are at different stages of the buying process, so trying to keep up with what campaign they should be receiving is often too much for any one person to handle.

This is where marketing automation tools come in, including those offered by Marketo.

The Complete Marketo Review

What Is Marketo?

Marketo is a software program that promises to provide solutions for every digital marketing need—and that’s a promise they definitely keep. While marketing automation is Marketo’s claim to fame, they actually offer a variety of other software services, including:

• Account-based marketing — With account-based marketing, you create uber-specific campaigns to reach clearly-defined target audience members.

• Mobile marketing — Use mobile marketing to tailor your campaigns to meet the needs, behaviors and locations of your target audience members.

• Digital marketing — Digital marketing allows you to create campaigns that reach your target audience online, including through social media, mobile apps and email.

• Predictive content — With predictive content, Marketo can recommend the most relevant information to individuals visiting your website, increasing their chances of finding the content they’re looking for.

• Marketing analytics — Marketo analytics allows you to see what’s working, what isn’t and how successful your campaigns and strategies are at attracting, converting and keeping customers.

Overall, Marketo helps B2B companies create, automate, track and analyze various digital marketing campaigns. By putting everything in one place and under one dashboard, Marketo users can get an overall picture of how their different campaigns are working together.

This big-picture idea allows users to see how their customers interact with advertisements and content. You’re able to get a better understanding of your target audience’s behavior so you can create a more refined marketing strategy.

How to Use Marketo to Automate Your Email Campaigns

Marketing automation can offer many different improvements to your marketing campaigns. Take a quick look at Marketo’s promotional video below to get a taste of the platform:

Let’s take a look at how three of the biggest areas of Marketo can make your email campaigns more efficient.

1. Streamline Your Email Process

In order for email marketing to successfully bring in new clients and customers, you need to be engaging with your subscriber list quite frequently. Sending out a few messages a week can help remind your target audience about your products and services and keep them informed about the latest deals or promotions you’re offering.

But if you’re not using marketing automation tools, this means someone at your company needs to physically send out an email every time you want to give your audience an update. Marketing automation allows you to streamline that process so you can schedule posts ahead of time or create campaigns to automatically send. Not only does this save your team time, but it ensures that newsletter subscribers are getting the right information at the right time.

To streamline your email marketing, you can use Marketo to set up pre-scheduled email marketing campaigns. This can include everything from timing an email to go out on a certain day to creating full campaigns that help transition leads into paying customers.

2. Provide Unique Customer Offers Through Personalization

While the members of our target audience all share similar problems, they aren’t all exactly the same. They may need different solutions to solve their problems or they may be at different stages of the purchasing process. If you’re sending each of them the same message, you’re probably not going to make very strong connections.

Marketing automation allows you to send each recipient a personalized message or offer. By setting up different lists, you can categorize your email subscribers based on their behavior. This means you can send individuals who purchased a certain item a specific message while sending new subscribers something different.

Personalization also helps you create a stronger relationship with your customers. When they see that you’re taking the time to identify their unique needs, they’ll trust your company more and be more likely to purchase from you time and time again.

3. Find Customers Who Are Ready to Buy

Not everyone who receives your emails is prepared to make a purchase. While some may be ready to pull out their credit cards, others may need a bit more information before they’re convinced. Knowing where your audience is in the buying process can help you refine your message to get more customers.

The Marketo marketing automation tools allow you to see how ready a customer is to purchase. By providing a “lead score,” you can see which audience members you should target the most. You can also identify how your content is influencing a customer to purchase. If the readiness score is going up, you know your content is working.

Use each lead’s readiness score to customize the content they receive. Individuals with lower lead scores should be given more generic and informative campaigns while those with higher lead scores should get more detailed content.

Fitting Marketing Automation Tools with Other Marketo Features

Marketing automation for email isn’t the only thing Marketo does. Their other tools and features work alongside your email marketing automation.

Marketo allows you to seamlessly create a cross-channel marketing plan that attracts new leads and converts them into customers no matter where they are.

Marketo works to provide you with a complete picture of what your target audience is doing online. Through allowing you to create mobile and digital ads, connect on social media and even provide content recommendations, Marketo helps you develop a better understanding of what your target audience is looking for. You can then use this information to create a stronger digital marketing campaign.

For example, using the social media software that Marketo offers can help you create conversations with target audience members. First, it helps you develop a better understanding of what your target audience is doing online. Not only can you use this software to engage your followers in conversations, polls and sweepstakes, but you can even create personalized social ads that increase your ROI.

Marketo also provides analytics tools that help you track and monitor how well your campaigns are doing. By finding the channels and campaigns that generate the most revenue or attention from your potential customers, you can better allocate your marketing resources. You can keep an eye on your customer’s behavior so you can better understand how your automation campaigns are working. And you can use these analytics tools to identify where you’re succeeding and where you may need a bit of an additional push.

With Marketo, you’ll no longer feel like you’re piecing your marketing campaigns together. By having everything you need right in one place, you can take a look at the big picture before determining the best strategies for achieving your overall goals. When you create a plan that works together seamlessly, you can attract ready-to-buy customers who are excited about your products and services.

Marketo Plans and Pricing

Marketo offers various plans and price points, depending on how large your company is and what solutions you’re looking for. They offer software bundles in five main categories, including lead management, email marketing, consumer marketing, customer base marketing and mobile marketing.

The prices of the plans for Marketo aren’t explicity displayed on their website. However, there are reports that Marketo offers three pricing tiers: Basic, Pro and Elite. Let’s break down what each of these plans cost and what you can expect to get out of each.

• Marketo Basic Plan – $895/month: Under Marketo’s Basic Plan, customers will get access to only a portion of their main features, including a marketing calendar, sales intelligence, social marketing and SEO.

• Marketo Pro Plan – $1,795/month: The Pro Plan offers the same features as the Basic Plan, plus digital ads, predictive content, and program and campaign analysis.

• Marketo Elite Plan – $3,195/month: The largest Marketo package offers all the features from both the Basic Plan and the Pro Plan, plus a revenue modeler, success path analyzer, anonymous retargeting and more.

As you can see, Marketo isn’t a budget software program. In order to get the full dashboard of features, you can expect to pay a few thousand dollars each month. This means that small businesses may not have the best experience with Marketo. Typically, larger, more established companies will want to purchase a software program within this price range.

That said, they do say that they have solutions for companies of all sizes—maybe you’ll be able to work something out with them. In order to find out how much Marketo will actually cost for your company, you’ll want to contact a sales representative.

 

While Marketo may not be the fairy godmother of your dreams, it’s pretty close.

As an easy way to alleviate some of the pressure that comes with email marketing, Marketo can help you build stronger customer relationships while giving you some much-needed extra time.