Embracing technology is an absolute must for the modern marketer. In today’s digital landscape, marketing automation has become a fundamental building block of productivity and efficiency – two factors that are essential for sustained success. Furthermore, marketing automation can be the key that enables small startups to compete right alongside larger organizations. If you haven’t yet jumped on the automation bandwagon, here are 5 reasons why this should be the year you do.

Save and optimize your time.

Entrepreneur recently published an eye-opening infographic highlighting how marketing automation can save a ton of time. Specifically, the findings indicate that using an automation tool could potentially save 80% of the time spent on tasks like content scheduling and workforce management. Furthermore, automating social media tasks could save more than 6 hours per week. That is all time that could (and should) be better spent on more meaningful tasks, like strategic planning and problem-solving.

Maximize your ROI.

When you utilize a robust tool that combines a CRM system with marketing automation, all of your sales and marketing related activities will be available in one centralized place. Every business owner knows that customer relationships are the key to retention. By automating your lead nurturing activities, you’ll be able to develop and foster those important relationships, achieving maximum ROI without having to increase your output of work.

Get valuable insight into customer behavior.

Marketing automation enables you to collect data from a wide variety of sources and channels and use that data to gain a deeper understanding of your customers. For instance, email automation allows you to track things such as open rates, responses and even how well a certain subject line or layout worked. You can then tweak your approach to maximize conversions. The more you can optimize, the better and more sustainable your marketing performance will be.

Achieve greater consistency.

When it comes to effective customer engagement, consistency is key. Delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time and via the right channel can dramatically increase the likelihood of both conversion as well as retention. Marketing automation can help you accomplish this by enabling you to create micro strategies for each stage of the customer journey. And when you achieve consistency with your messaging, it’ll also become easier to predict and allocate future marketing spend.

Personalize at scale.

It may seem like an oxymoron, but it is possible to deliver personalized experiences to your customers without having to do so on an individual basis. Marketing automation enables you to create and automatically distribute messages that resonate with the unique needs of each customer based on their behavior. More targeted messaging means an increased chance of conversion, whether it’s a new lead or a long-time customer.

If you are a business that could use more leads, improve on your conversions, increase your retention rate and generate more consistent revenue, then the answer to your needs is simple. Marketing automation is the way to go. Why not let 2020 be the year that you bring your business to the next level?