When you are in on a long term business, you will have to think more than once before investing on software platforms. This decision will influence a lot of parameters in the way you run your business. When you are talking about marketing automation software, you need to be extra careful. There are so many options on the market, but only a handful of them are the good ones.

Marketing automation tech isn’t custom made to specifically fit your business workflow, so if you are going with the wrong choice, then it could seriously affect your marketing. The critical process is to list out your specific criteria and then filter out the available options against it. We’ve listed the most important criteria to consider in your selection process.

1. Lead Scoring Possibilities

When you spend a lot your time and money on marketing automation, you better get results. The best parameter to evaluate that would be the ability to find out the true prospects. Lead scoring is considered as a good way to do this. While there are softwares to automate a part of the process – you’ll still be required to do some base work and put in the right kind of profile attributes/behaviors for evaluation.

A good solution that has some neat lead scoring features baked into it will enable your sales and marketing team to make educated guesses on potential leads.

2. Lead Nurturing Options

Lead nurturing is quite different from lead scoring, though many people use these as if they are interchangeable. Lead nurturing is different in the sense that it involves actively pushing the generated leads through the sales funnel, which were generated in the first place through lead scoring.

Though parts of the process can be automated for efficiency, it will take some manual work on to develop an effective lead nurturing campaign. However, once everything is set, this will go a long way in creating more opportunities for you. This will also help you to reduce the gross volume of missed leads. Make the effort to compare the lead nurturing features available in different marketing software in order to come to an informed conclusion in the end..

3. Integration Potential

There are very few all purpose softwares when it comes to marketing. Your marketing automation software will be required to cooperate with other solutions that you and your team are already using. This might include CRM solutions, social media, and advertising tools. If your tool of choice exhibits any friction, than you can better avoid it in the first place. .

4. Usability Criteria

It’ll all fail, if your final selection of an all purpose software is considered difficult to use by your team. The intuitiveness parameter of the marketing automation software is quite important. Though this can be considered is something that’s subjective, ample thought has to be put on this. Before finalising a tool, give your department a chance to work with a demo. Most providers will be more than happy to provide a no-strings attached demo, so make use of these. It’s good to know what your team likes for a better overall result.

5. Reporting and Analytics for Further Actionables

Detailed reporting is very important and it is something that is required of every solution out there. It could be considered as a vital feature. Though many new platforms provide some sort of analytics features baked into their solutions, make sure what you’re getting will be useful to your workflow and will actually help you to make better decisions. Analysis of the reports generated from these will help you frame the next set of actionables in your campaign.

While finalising on the marketing automation software for your firm, make sure you consider all the parameters mentioned above. The choice you make on your marketing automation software will have a tangible impact on your company’s productivity and you should take your best efforts to make sure that it’s the right decision.

I hope this article was useful for you to learn about the features to look for in a marketing automation software. If you have any doubts regarding the topic, let us know through the comments and we will be glad to help you out. Let us know your suggestions as well for us to improve.