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When a new marketing trend arrives at the market, the majority of small business owners treat it with caution. They need to get some proof to justify their investment before integrating it into their company. And even though marketing automation is not quite a new trend in 2019, 25% of marketers still ignore it

They have a number of excuses for doing that. Those include claims like “marketing automation is too expensive for a small business”, “automated emails lack personalization and human touch”, “automation software is too hard to grasp”, and so on. 

That’s why we feel that the subject is not fully covered yet. People still google “what does CRM stand for in marketing”, while many marketers still generate leads using methods that were effective a decade ago, but ceased to be such. 

The reasons for not implementing marketing automation within a company may vary. But whatever they are, you should know which opportunities you lose by not including it in your strategy in 2019. And the best way to learn it is to check out how businesses perform with and without marketing automation today. 

Whether you are an established player who feels skeptical about marketing automation or a newbie interested in evidence of its effectiveness, welcome to our list of top marketing automation stats updated for 2019. Ready? Then let’s fire it away! 

 

1. “75% of marketers say they currently use at least one type of marketing automation tools.” — Social Media Today 

 

We haven’t just made up the number of 25% of marketers who don’t use marketing automation tools to date. This data was provided by Social Media Today in their State of Marketing Automation Survey Report. 58% of marketers from this group are planning to utilize the technology in the future. 

Not all of the marketing tasks are suitable for automating, the surveyed say. Those elements that can be safely delegated to the software are social media post scheduling (83% of marketers think so), email marketing (75%), social media advertising (58%), and messaging via chatbots (53%).

Users still doubt whether PR, content creation and engagement practices can be effectively automated, at least for now. They’re right, as those activities require a lion’s share of creativity and could be performed only by godlike AI. 

 

2. The most important benefits of marketing automation are improved customer experience (45.9%), improved quality of leads (37.7%) and an increased number of leads (34.9%), according to the surveyed by Liana Technologies 

 

WHY DO THEY THINK SO? 

Despite the widespread opinion, marketing automation improves brand-customer relationships rather than the reverse. What matters now is perfect timing, and software dealing with this much better than humans. You don’t make your customers wait anymore. A marketing automation platform instantly handles queries and follows up with the leads at the right moment, decreasing lead response time to almost zero

As for leads quality, most automation software has a lead scoring feature. Depending on their actions, the program automatically assigns each lead a rating. You always know who is on fire, and who needs some warming up. Now answer the question: how would you get these numbers without automation? Mission impossible. 

Timely responses = more captured leads. Using a fishing analogy, a marketer alone is a fisherman with a rod. And now let’s compare: how many fish will you able to catch with a rod and with a net? You got me. A marketer with automation software is a fisherman with a net. And while it’s harmful in nature to fish with a net, it’s quite fair in marketing. 

3. “74% of marketers see the ability to save time as a major benefit of marketing automation tools.” — Demand Gen Report 

Ironically, fishing nets don’t require your permanent presence. You just set the net and free to go. If you set it right, you’ll come back and return home with your bags full of prey.

The same happens with marketing software for small business. You create an automation and let it do the job. And while it still requires some efforts to learn the process, it’ll turn out as a smooth sailing later. 

4. “63% of companies realize the benefits of their marketing automation strategy within 6 months.” Ascend2

 

Success doesn’t come overnight. With marketing automation, you start saving time right away, but the rest of the edges come later. 

There is no one-size-fits-all automation template that works for all small businesses at once. You’ll test your campaigns, compare results, consult experts, and eventually find your perfect recipe for bringing hot leads to the table. This may take a couple of months, sometimes more. 

5. “Only 27% of marketing influencers find marketing automation/email/CRM difficult to utilize.” — Ascend2

 

And this marketing automation statistics makes it the easiest kind of software to master. CRMs and email automation platforms imply being used by non-techies. That’s why most of them are no more intimidating than a Facebook ad manager or Instagram post scheduling app. 

EXAMPLE: take a look at the dashboard of ActiveCampaign, one of the most user-friendly automation tools on the market: 

I bet you haven’t found anything difficult in this. Even if you’re a complete novice, you’ll intuitively understand how to create a new campaign, set an automation, create an email template with a drag-and-drop editor, etc. 

6. “63% of businesses that outgrow their competitors use marketing automation.” — The Lenskold Group

 

Ticketmaster, Trello, and especially Amazon are the leaders of their niches. They gave marketing automation a try and that’s what they get: 

WHY? Leaders don’t fear changes and innovation, therefore being more prone to utilizing new technologies. And conversely, users of the newest technologies outrun competitors due to being trendsetters. 

Not only the largest companies, however, can benefit from marketing automation. That’s the common stereotype that required software comes at exorbitant prices only top dogs can afford. 

While it’s true for some platforms like Pardot (this one really costs a fortune starting from 1,250 per month) but is not the case for most brands. If you compare Pardot with, let’s say, abovementioned ActiveCampaign, you’ll see this one coming at a minuscule $9 for the very beginners.  

Which exactly benefits? Let’s move on to marketing automation stats dedicated to average brand performance across all industries. 

 

7. “Marketing automation on average drives up to 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.” — Insvesp

 

We’ve learned that marketing automation saves your time. Yet nobody tells you that it saves money. The two are closely related, though. 

WHY? While you spend less time on some activity and achieve the same quality, you probably do it better and therefore are more productive. Most of the marketing expenses are tied to campaign duration and time required on their production. Marketing automation obviously saves this time, which results in higher sales productivity and less marketing overhead expenses. 

8.“77% of users reported increased conversion rates after adopting marketing automation.” — VB Insight

THE REASON? The intelligence of modern marketing automation tools. They help with gathering user data and making the most of it to deliver hyper-personalized emails to your customers. Automating the best digital marketing practices like email list segmentation, customer behavior tracking, post-purchase follow-ups, etc. you not only generate more leads but convert them better. 

9. “Automated emails have 1.4% higher open rates on mobile and 0.8% higher click-through rates.” — HigherLogic

 

This increase is indeed minuscule, but it’s still here. According to HigherLogic research, the reason for that is the same as in previous marketing automation statistics: the power of segmentation. Organizations that segmented their email lists and kept the number of recipients lower than 500 achieved the best results. 

The smaller was their marketing segment, the more relevant was their messages. As a result, they achieved much higher ORs and CTRs than their counterparts who used larger lists.

AUTOMATION’S ROLE. While only you define what content is relevant to your buyer persona, marketing automation tools do all the legwork. They track your lead’s behavior and assign them a tag. Users with the same tags form the list. You deliver the right message to the right person using this precise targeting for your emails. 

 

10. “Campaigns sent during the first 10 days of the months drive better results. The highest performing day for emails is Thursday. The highest open rate occurs at 8 AM.” — Omnisend 

 

Did you get a hint? If you want to meet and exceed your KPIs, it’s better to figure out the best times for sending emails. Fortunately, specialists at Omnisend have already done it for you, summarizing the key points in this report

8 AM. Thursday. First 10 days of the months. Well, 8 AM most marketers are not even at work. 

This is not quite a marketing automation stat, but now you got it. You use marketing software for small business to schedule and send those emails for you. That’s how it works. 

 

11. “Dynamic content is considered the most effective automation feature by a slight majority (51%) of B2B marketers. Customer experience mapping and landing page and form CTA are deemed effective by 45% and 43% respectively.”  — Ascend2 

 

Dynamic or conditional content is again all about personalization. Knowing the interests and past behavior of your visitor, your marketing automation platform adjusts content specifically for them. This means you have several variations of content to show up, and the user receives the most relevant to them. 

12. “Dynamic signup forms work best for conversion. In list building, the more dynamic the signup form, the better. Landing pages worked the best with nearly 25% success rate.” — Omnisend 

 

According to Impact, an average conversion rate of a landing page is as little as 2.35%. Even the best-performing websites rarely exceed a 12% threshold and peak at an average of 11.35%.

Things go completely different with landing pages with dynamic signup forms. This kind of forms analyzes user’s behavior and fills some fields with data automatically. It can also hide or show some fields that are irrelevant or relevant to this specific user. The content inside a form may change while you type info in real-time. 

Of course, dynamic sign-up forms are a huge step towards much easier lead generation in marketing. But I guess they should include live chats as the most sophisticated way to automate brand-customer communication, at least on the first stages of the customer journey. 

13. “Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or more bump in revenue in 6-9 months time.” — Gartner Research

 

When leads just start pouring in, you feel so excited. But don’t let this naive rapture confuse you: the massive influx of leads is nothing without nurturing. And if they keep coming, you’ll barely handle your lead management being armed merely with your eyes and hands. 

To categorize 1000 leads, you might need either 10 people or 1 marketing automation platform. Otherwise, you may end up with missed follow-ups, no lead engagement, and massive lead leakage. 

14.“Email marketing automation with CRM are the most effective technologies used for marketing purposes, according to 53% of marketing influencers.”— Ascend2 

 

SAD TRUTH: Untimely follow-ups were probably the major gap in marketing and sales activities before the automation era. Marketers failed to send relevant newsletters at the right time of the day, while sales reps missed the hottest leads by not calling them on time. 

According to Whyymedia, the average lead response time is 42 hours. You have only 5-10 minutes to qualify the lead after they made a request. As time passes by, your chances to do this drastically decrease. After 42 hours, they are, indeed, slim to none. 

Modern technologies fully resolve this issue, that’s why now we have this marketing automation statistics in 2019. You have nothing to worry about having autoresponders and automation workflows at your fingertips. The system is never late, it acts precisely within a designated time frame. 

15.“Content personalization driven by marketing automation is changing for the better for nearly all (99%) B2B marketers, with more than half of those (54%) describing the improvement as significant.” — Ascend2

 

If you bet on personalized marketing practices and want to improve them, consider marketing automation for facilitating your growth. While content creation can’t be automated by any program, you may increase its relevance by utilizing data gathered from your customers. Marketing automation platforms cope with this task well because of their faultless analysis of this data. 

 

16. Nearly 90% of agencies say their marketing automation strategy is successful, while only 2% count themselves as “worst in class.” — SharpSpring

 

This marketing automation industry stats signals the only one thing. The software they use is not that hard to harness, while ROI on marketing automation is usually high. This happens due to the overall effectiveness of the technology, which inevitably results in a flawless success rate

 

17. “Agencies struggle a lot more with finding the right marketing automation tools than with setting them up. Finding tools is the #1 marketing automation challenge for 20% of agencies.” — Automizy 

 

Other marketing automation stats that confirm my previous allegation. Automation tools are so easy to set up, that making the right choice becomes the toughest challenge. 

Probably the most confusing factor is that most of the automation platforms are specialized in doing one thing or offer all-in-all functionality for a very high price. Salesforce is primarily known for its CRM, Mailchimp works solely for email marketing automation, while Marketo is best for lead management. The best solution depends on your highest priority, but how you can do it if you’ve never tried marketing automation tools before? 

To avoid long delays on your side, I’d recommend you try ActiveCampaign. which is the most suitable for small businesses. The basic plan comes at as little as $9. That’s even cheaper than your Netflix subscription. 

ActiveCampaign is great for those who hesitate as it offers a variety of solutions for email marketing, lead management, sales, and even messaging. You start with a basic plan to give it a try, and then you can upgrade your account to get advanced features as your business grows. 

 

18. “86% pay attention to the “ease of use” as to the most important factor while choosing a long-term marketing automation solution for small business.” — Regalix 

 

Actually, the “ease of use” factor reigns the digital world. I personally abandoned WhatsApp since I found a more user-friendly alternative in Telegram Messenger, despite its lower popularity over the web. The same stuff here: people leave MailChimp for ActiveCampaign, favor Collect,chat over Landbot, etc. 

 

19. “In the answer to the open question: “What is your number 1 challenge when you use marketing automation?”, the most common marketing automation challenges are creating quality automations (16%) followed by integrations (14%) and crafting content (10%).” — Automizy

 

The software setup takes no more than 1 hour. But when it comes to automations, some marketers get stuck in there. Worth noting, 16% is far from the majority, but their struggles are quite clear. Like any other technology, marketing automation tools have a learning curve. 

 

20. “Businesses aren’t making the most of marketing automation. Less than 3 in 10 (28%) use many features.” — SmartInsights and Getresponse

 

Could you imagine how these marketing automation statistics would be changed for the better if they made the most? The sales would skyrocket, the leads would be pouring out of the funnel. In other words, that’s a dream of every single marketer in the world. 

How to make your dream come true? 

First, install some basic versions of a marketing automation platform. Since its price is only $9, ActiveCampaign is a perfect candidate for this trial role. Second, learn more about its features and what’s needed to create quality automation that helps your leads to convert. 

And while the installation is quite simple, the second one may take some extra time and effort. What about this 72 % of marketers who are still not aware of the “hidden” benefits of their software? That’s wrong. You don’t want to be like them. 

So, here is the third: 

Schedule a call and let us reveal those “hidden” benefits. Join the party of the proud minority who squeezes all juices from their automation solution and get 80% of the world’s revenue!