Marketing is costly. In the case of local businesses, at least 5-10% of the budget is earmarked for digital marketing.
The average CPA is $53.52 for all industries.
But that’s just in terms of money. Digital marketing can be time-consuming. It can take at least a month to set up a PPC campaign.
And even longer to optimize it. You get the drift.
The question is: Is there a reliable way of cutting down on marketing expenses?
Thankfully, the answer is Yes. Marketo’s automation platform can help you cut back on digital marketing costs.
Marketo is part of our CRM expertise. As with other platforms, our Marketo experts follow the six-tier framework of email marketing (see below.) Let’s roll!
Reducing Marketing Costs with Marketo: Strategies for Efficiency and ROI Optimization
Marketo: Overview
Marketo is a comprehensive marketing automation software platform designed to help businesses manage and optimize their marketing campaigns across multiple channels. It offers tools for email marketing, lead generation, customer relationship management (CRM), social media integration, analytics, and more.
Marketo enables organizations to deliver personalized marketing experiences, streamline workflows, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, ultimately driving customer engagement, lead nurturing, and revenue growth.
With its robust automation capabilities, Marketo is widely used by enterprises to enhance marketing productivity and align sales and marketing efforts.
Marketo for email marketing
Marketo provides a powerful suite of email marketing tools that allow businesses to design, automate, and optimize personalized email campaigns.
With its drag-and-drop email builder, advanced segmentation capabilities, and A/B testing features, Marketo helps marketers create targeted, relevant content for different audience segments. The platform also includes robust automation features, enabling the creation of triggered and nurture email sequences based on user behavior, engagement, or lifecycle stages.
Marketo also offers detailed analytics to track email performance, open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, providing valuable insights for continuous optimization of email marketing strategies.
Reducing marketing costs with Marketo: Strategies for efficiency and ROI optimization
Marketo, as a powerful marketing automation platform, can help reduce marketing costs in several ways.By streamlining processes, improving targeting, and enhancing efficiency, Marketo enables marketers to get more value from their budgets. Here are some ways Marketo can help you reduce marketing costs.
1. Automating repetitive tasks
Marketo’s automation tools help eliminate manual, repetitive tasks in marketing processes, reducing operational costs and human resource dependency.
Consider email marketing. Instead of manually sending emails to customers every time a new promotion is launched, Marketo allows you to create automated email campaigns that trigger based on user actions or timelines.
With automated campaigns, you reduce the need for manual labor or additional staff, leading to savings in time and personnel costs.
Scenario:
A company can automate its welcome email series for new leads.
By automating this process, they avoid having to manually write and send each email to new subscribers, saving at least 10 hours per week for a marketing team.
2. Lead scoring & nurturing
Marketo uses algorithms to score leads based on their engagement and behaviors.
This helps prioritize the most promising leads, automating the lead nurturing process. By focusing efforts on high-potential leads, companies can improve conversion rates and reduce spending on cold leads or ineffective campaigns.
Scenario:
One of our clients used lead scoring in Marketo to automatically route leads to the sales team based on behavior. By focusing only on qualified leads, the sales team reported an increase in productivity.
3. Social media scheduling
Marketo can automate the scheduling and publishing of social media posts across multiple platforms.
This minimizes the need for social media managers to manually schedule and post, freeing up time to focus on strategy and other higher-value tasks.
Scenario:
A retail company that uses Marketo’s social automation saw a 15% reduction in time spent on social media tasks, reducing operational costs.
4. Optimizing marketing campaigns
By optimizing campaign targeting and segmentation, Marketo ensures that marketing resources are spent efficiently on the right audience, maximizing ROI.
Marketo allows marketers to create detailed customer segments based on behaviors, demographics, and purchase history.
This ensures that marketing messages are delivered only to the most relevant segments, which reduces wasted ad spend on irrelevant audiences.
Scenario:
A B2B company reduced its ad spend by 25% by segmenting its email list based on customer interests and sending tailored messages, resulting in higher engagement and reduced cost per lead (CPL).
5. A/B testing
Marketo enables A/B testing on emails, landing pages, and other digital assets to identify which version performs best.
By optimizing creative elements for higher conversion rates, companies reduce the need for multiple iterations or testing cycles outside of the platform.
Scenario:
A financial services firm used A/B testing on email subject lines and achieved a 12% increase in open rates, leading to more leads without increasing the marketing budget.
6. Personalized campaigns
Marketo’s ability to personalize content based on customer behavior or data (e.g., browsing history, previous purchases) means that marketing messages are more relevant and engaging.
Personalized marketing boosts conversion rates, leading to more sales without the need to increase marketing spend.
Scenario:
An e-commerce business used dynamic content in emails to personalize product recommendations. Personalization led to a 20% increase in conversions and a reduction in reliance on paid media campaigns for driving sales.
7. Analytics & reporting
Marketo’s analytics tools help track marketing performance and identify areas of waste, enabling smarter budgeting decisions and more effective campaign adjustments.
Marketo provides real-time dashboards that show key performance indicators (KPIs) such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
With continuous performance monitoring, marketing teams can quickly optimize or pause underperforming campaigns, minimizing wasted spend.
Scenario:
A technology company used Marketo’s reporting tools to identify underperforming ads and reallocated the budget to higher-performing campaigns, saving 15% on overall ad spend.
8. Attribution modeling
Marketo’s multi-touch attribution models allow businesses to track how each marketing touchpoint contributes to a sale.
By understanding the impact of each channel, marketers can reallocate budgets to the most cost-effective channels, reducing inefficient spend on low-performing ones.
Scenario:
A travel agency implemented Marketo’s attribution model and discovered that email campaigns drove 50% of all conversions, so they shifted more budget from paid search to email marketing, reducing their CPL by 20%.
9. MarTech integration
Marketo offers a broad range of features in one platform, which reduces the need for marketers to invest in and manage multiple software tools.
Marketo provides tools for lead management, email automation, social media marketing, content management, and analytics all within a single platform.
Scenario:
A mid-sized business saved $30,000 annually by consolidating email automation, CRM, and analytics into Marketo, eliminating the need for separate tools like Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Google Analytics.
10. CRM integration
Marketo integrates directly with popular CRM systems like Salesforce, which helps to synchronize lead and customer data between sales and marketing.
This reduces the need for separate CRM systems and the labor associated with managing multiple systems.
Scenario:
A B2B company integrated Marketo with Salesforce and reduced its CRM costs by 18%, while improving the alignment between sales and marketing.
11. Improved customer retention & lifetime value
Retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Marketo helps optimize retention strategies to maximize customer lifetime value (CLV).Marketo allows for automated customer engagement campaigns, including thank-you emails, loyalty offers, and feedback surveys.
Automated retention efforts reduce the need for high-cost customer service interventions and re-engagement campaigns.
Scenario:
A subscription-based company used Marketo to automate renewal reminders and retention campaigns, which led to a 15% reduction in churn rate and a 25% increase in lifetime value per customer.
12. Upselling & cross-selling
Marketo’s segmentation and automation tools allow businesses to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities based on customer purchase history.
This strategy increases revenue from existing customers, reducing the need for new customer acquisition campaigns.
Scenario:
An online retailer used Marketo’s behavior tracking to send personalized product recommendations, leading to a 30% increase in average order value (AOV) with no additional spend on new customer acquisition.
13. Event marketing
Marketo offers tools for automating event marketing, making it easier and cheaper to manage webinars, in-person events, or hybrid experiences. Marketo automates event registration, confirmation emails, and follow-up sequences for webinars or conferences. Automating these tasks reduces the need for staff to handle these processes manually, freeing up time for higher-value activities.
Scenario:
A software company used Marketo to automate email campaigns for a series of product webinars, reducing event management costs by 20%.
14. Virtual event integration
Marketo integrates with platforms like Zoom or GoToWebinar, enabling marketers to track event registrations, attendance, and engagement. Integration minimizes the need for manual tracking and follow-up, improving efficiency and saving time.
Scenario:
A consulting firm used Marketo to integrate virtual events with its CRM, leading to a 25% increase in lead conversions after webinars with minimal additional investment.
Wrapping up!
By leveraging Marketo’s marketing automation, segmentation, reporting, and integration capabilities, companies can streamline their marketing efforts, reduce manual workloads, and optimize campaigns for greater efficiency. These cost-saving strategies not only improve ROI but also allow businesses to reallocate resources to high-performing activities, further reducing expenditure.
Next up, catch our overview of marketing automation best practices.
Pallavi Jain
Pallavi is a Campaign Manager at Mavlers with over three years of experience, specializing in email marketing strategies using Marketo. Pallavi helps clients optimize their marketing efforts for impactful results.
Susmit Panda
A realist at heart and an idealist at head, Susmit is a content writer at Mavlers. He has been in the digital marketing industry for half a decade. When not writing, he can be seen squinting at his Kindle, awestruck.
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