By Will Scully-Power, Managing Director of Datarati.

As we start the New Year in the Australian Direct Marketing Industry, here are 4 key steps to generate revenue for your organisation.

1.)    Evaluate – Having access to a marketing automation database will allow you to automate trigger-based acquisition and retention campaigns. It is no longer cost-effective to launch campaigns manually every time.

2.)    Integrate – To measure your true return on marketing investment (ROMI) you will need to integrate your marketing automation database (which houses your email, web, search and social data) with your CRM database (which houses your sales/transactional, customer service and  support data).

3.)    Automate – Think about your top 5 manually produced campaigns and automate them. By using a marketing automation database, you can monitor a customer or prospects email, web, search or social behaviour and use that data to trigger off targeted, anticipated, relevant and personalised one-to-one communications in an effort to drive them further down the marketing funnel.

4.)    Mandate – Senior level executive sponsorship, buy-in and support. For marketers to earn a seat at the revenue table, they need to firstly align their marketing and sales teams, define metrics that matter to executives and prove marketing’s contribution to the organisations revenue generation.

Marketing Automation is a journey. Start with the end goal first which is generally: “Sales needs to hit X target this month, this quarter, this year”, then work your marketing funnel numbers backwards. Here is an example calculator to help you get started: http://www.datarati.com.au/index.php/resources/roi-calculator/

Good luck and enjoy the ride!

Will Scully-Power is the Managing Director of Datarati, which deals with Marketing Automation, Revenue Performance Management (RPM), Analytics and Optimisation.

Hear more from Will at the upcoming ADMA B2B Marketing Seminar – Melbourne 28 February and Sydney 1 March.