Did you know that automated email marketing campaigns are among the top three tactics used by email marketers to improve performance? 

We know as school recruiters and communicators, getting your school front-and-center and seen as the best option for students is difficult. One of your job’s biggest demands is ensuring families are engaged and informed on what sets your institution apart. And it’s also one of the most challenging. 

But balancing that task with so many of the other items on your plate doesn’t have to be a struggle. In fact, marketing automation was created to make life easier for marketers, no matter what it is they’re marketing. So, if you haven’t fully embraced marketing automation, or you aren’t sure how using it can help you be better at your school recruitment efforts, keep reading. 

8 Benefits of Using Marketing Automation 

Your marketing automation tool doesn’t just help with your marketing efforts. It can enable various tasks on your to-do list. Here we’ve broken down exactly how having a marketing automation software can benefit you, making using one a no-brainer. 

1. Saves Time

Who has time to send individual emails to every prospect? The beauty of marketing automation is that you can easily create email templates that can be cloned and used again and again, saving you tons of time. You can also organize lead nurture campaigns so you can be sending emails without actually spending the time sending them. 

Also, with BenchmarkONE’s built-in CRM, your email recipients are organized for you with automatic tagging capabilities. So instead of going through each individual contact to determine what content and information you should send them, they’ll be organized into segments for you so you can designate the right content based on their needs.

2. Maintains Organization

Like most busy people, you probably find yourself doing a few projects or tasks at once. There are probably numerous times in which you’re working on one project, only to get interrupted with another. I’m a firm believer in doing whatever you have to do to get the job done; however, those kinds of interruptions are a nightmare for your organization. 

As I mentioned before, marketing automation organizes your contacts for you, so you don’t have to. But that’s just one aspect of organization it affords you. You can also create tasks for yourself and tie them to contacts, so the next time you get interrupted, you’ll still have a reminder about that follow-up email you need to send, or that promo campaign you need to create. 

3. Instills Accountability 

When you have access to performance metrics, you can easily decipher which tactics are working and which are falling flat. Your marketing automation software shows you what actions your contacts are taking so you can see which landing pages are converting and which emails you send are the most engaging. Having this kind of information will keep you and your marketing efforts accountable, so you can continue to be successful. 

And with BenchmarkONE’s task capabilities, you can make sure the right people are assigned the right duties. This keeps your outreach consistent, so your contacts are getting everything they need in a timely manner. 

4. Creates Polished Communication

Remember those email templates I mentioned? Instead of hiring a designer to create beautiful email designs, which is both time-consuming and costly, use a marketing automation tool that has pre-made HTML templates at your disposal. But just because they’re pre-designed doesn’t mean they aren’t customizable. You can adjust the designs, so they are on-brand, using the colors of your choice and swapping in your shool logo where needed. So, instead of starting from scratch with email design, you can use something beautiful and clean that’s already put together for you. 

It’s important that your emails look nice, as they are a form of representation for your educational institution. Having polished communication that is professional looking and appealing to the eye only builds up the school messaging, and can ultimately lead to increased responses.  

5. Provides a Clearer Marketing Process

Sometimes it takes a few tries to get your marketing process in a good place. The way you create emails, formulate, and organize your lists, and how you manage your campaigns all require a few tries before getting it right. 

However, with marketing automation, you’re able to have a clearer view of the customer journey your contacts are taking. You can see what pages of your website they’re engaging with the most and which emails they click-through on. With a clearer understanding of the process they’re taking, your campaigns will be more informed and provide better nurture. 

6. Enables Personalization 

When you more fully understand the journey your customers are taking, you become more and more aware that not every person who visits your website has the same level of knowledge. It’s important that if you want to effectively market your school to your prospects, that you not only know where they are in their journey but also how much they know about your institution. Knowing this information helps you personalize your outreach so you can show them you understand their needs and questions, and that you have what they need to break down those barriers.

Personalization leads to more engagement from your prospects. In 2019, 72 percent of consumers engaged more with content that was personalized to them. And since marketing automation makes personalization super easy, you don’t have to do a ton of digging on your prospects to understand who they are and what they need. 

7. Achieves Goals

Be creating efficiencies in your lead organization and nurture strategies, you’re able to increase the volume of those efforts. Not only that, but you’re also gaining more perspective on what actually makes your leads respond more and why. When you’re able to pull back the curtain and dive deeper into your prospects’ behavior patterns, you’re going to make better marketing and recruitment efforts. Pair this knowledge with consistent, automated outreach, and you’re bound to reach the various recruitment goals you’ve set for yourself. 

8. Offers Analytics and Reporting

What makes us better marketers is knowing what works and what doesn’t. Your marketing automation tool offers you tons of insight into the performance metrics of your outreach so you can determine which emails resonate and which need to be scraped for a new approach. 

With marketing automation, you can access things like open rates, click-through-rates unsubscribe rates, and bounce rates. If numbers aren’t where you want them to be, you can try A/B testing to switch up your CTAs, subject lines, and other components of your emails to see what works better and leads to improvements. Bottom line: having access to your analytics uncovers potential problems so you can make adjustments quickly. 

There’s no doubt about it, marketing automation offers you insight into your prospects, the tools to better nurture them, and it can enable you to get more tasks done quicker. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a tool that fits your needs today.