Everyone wants improved customer contact levels and increased overall sales. Marketing automation is a set of processes (or platforms) that use software to automate marketing and demand generation tasks. The use of a marketing automation tool streamlines the sales and marketing processes by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Marketing automation and automated lead nurturing are becoming foundational marketing activities for accelerating sales and reactivating dormant customers. In an environment where high-quality leads and customer loyalty are critical, marketers are seeking partners and solutions that can automate communications at the right time. Ideally, automated communications can be linked to transactions and can also help reactivate dormant accounts. Marketers of all sizes are seeking providers that can create automated programs to welcome new customers, cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers, nurture new leads, increase customer satisfaction, and win back customers. Fundamentally, these marketers want to add science to the art of marketing.

Examples of the types of services that can be enabled by automating the marketing process include:

Service providers and software solutions providers are beginning to aggressively approach automated marketing for businesses of all sizes. A number of companies are currently focused on driving marketing automation.