What's In It For You: The Pitch

Starting with the end in mind, you are going to need to sell Marketing Automation internally, so it's important to understand a high level view of what you are getting.

First, you are going to have more time for strategy, research, and analysis because you are going to cut down on hours manually setting up campaigns in your email marketing program. Next, you are going to be able to define and track your KPIs from one dashboard. Google Analytics may tell you whether your traffic is going up or down, but a Marketing Automation Program will tell you who is visiting your website and what actions they are taking once they are there. This leads to data-rich information about potential members, and current members that tells a story and informs strategic marketing decisions. Marketing Automation is great for this. Within those KPIs is a very important number and that is conversions. Knowing the percentage of conversions for a given campaign will calculate into your cost per contact acquisition - and that leads to real ROI. Because understanding the value of a member and how much it takes to acquire a new one puts you in a strategic position to make important decisions for growth. 

Now that you have the elevator pitch for your board of directors, or supervisor, we can delve back into what goes into budgeting for a Marketing Automation Platform. One benefit of partnering with an agency is access to the platform without owning the platform. HighRoad Solution can set up your campaign, gather data, and turn around results without the full investment of owning it. What we want to do is be transparent of what the start-up costs are of partnering with an agency to benefit from Marketing Automation. You are also going to benefit from not needing to hire full time staff when you only need a couple gaps filled - that's where an agency comes in. 

Next up is the start-up costs; a few things to think about. The size of your contact list matters more for Marketing Automation than the number of emails sent. In the beginning, we are going to clean up the data and append new information to that data where we can (information like social handles and more). Next, there is a cost per contact; are you working with ten thousand or a hundred thousand contacts? This may take some initial homework and looks something like the worksheet below. 

Also, you are trading out the cost of a full time employee for consulting fees - which is equivalent to hiring a unicorn since in return you get access to experienced digital marketing experts with the skills you need. A unicorn is someone who knows several elements of the marketing stack and can perform across disciplines - like the name implies they are hard to come by. Lastly, leave room for digital advertising. Putting marketing dollars behind your search engine strategy (Adwords), and your Facebook or LinkedIn posts (social advertising) can move your growth plan forward by casting a larger net and continually filling the top of the funnel. 

If all you are tracking now is web traffic, open-rates, and click-through-rates, and you have no digital advertising budget, but a need for growth, then you have some company with most every other association out there. The only problem, is you aren't doing everything you can to measure and grow your membership base and in the end revenue. Partnering with a outside source for automation can fill gaps in your marketing mix, provide valuable expert advice, all while nurturing your marketing funnel.