ZHAW study: Marketing automation becomes more important for companies

Marketing and sales automation is clearly gaining relevance in practice. Three quarters of the companies surveyed, most of them in the business-to-business sector, consider marketing automation to be relevant. This puts it in fourth place among the most important marketing technologies, just behind customer relationship management (CRM), e-mail or newsletter marketing and search engine marketing. These are the results of the Marketing Automation Study, which was conducted for the third time by the E-Commerce Lab of the ZHAW Institute for Marketing Management on behalf of Pedalix. A total of 226 companies were surveyed.

More and better leads thanks to automation

Automation brings companies great benefits, especially in terms of time saved on repetitive tasks and the efficiency of marketing and sales processes. "Thanks to marketing automation, more leads of a higher quality can be generated," says Dr. Darius Zumstein, study leader and Head of the E-Commerce Lab. "Marketing automation also leads to more conversions, meaning more registrations, subscriptions and transactions." Thanks to personalized communication along the customer journey, the relevance of information for current or potential customers can also be increased and a positive identity created.

However, the introduction of automated processes in marketing also presents companies with challenges. Among the most important are a lack of resources, especially for content marketing and lead generation. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular lack the budget for automation. A lack of information about which contacts are ready to buy and undefined processes for the systematic nurturing of leads and existing customers also pose a challenge for the majority.

Application to social media and email marketing

When asked about specific use cases for marketing automation, automated content distribution on social media is the most frequently cited, followed by welcome email sequences for new customers. Using marketing automation tools for lead generation and lead nurturing, such as email campaigns with recommendations on "non-salesy" content, benefits the majority. For opt-ins, registrations, and customer profiling, communication processes are automated just as frequently as for administrative processes, such as appointment scheduling, support requests, or satisfaction surveys.

Overall, companies rate their maturity level in marketing automation better than in last year's survey. Companies with a lower maturity level complain about a lack of resources, know-how or understanding on the part of key people in the company, while those with a high maturity level benefit from a clear strategic focus and sufficient time resources.

New maturity model

To validate this self-assessment, the study developed a maturity model for automation, the Marketing Automation Maturity Index (MAMI). This makes cross-company and cross-industry comparisons possible for the first time. The index shows that large companies are more advanced than SMEs and that the sectors of finance, services or communications, IT, software and SaaS (software as a service) have the highest marketing automation maturity level. Classic industries such as manufacturing and construction have a lower level of automation.

The research partners Pedalix (Marc Gasser), Mayoris (Urs Thüring), webalyse (Klaus Völkl), atedo (Alexander Wiki) and Survalyzer (Christian Hyka) participated in the Marketing Automation Report.