• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 9, 2023

Email is the main use of marketing automation, and B2B firms are doing well at it, but that doesn’t mean they're happy with their tools overall, judging by The 2023 State Of Marketing Automation, a study from Insightly, conducted by Ascend2. 

Of the companies polled, 94% are satisfied with their marketing automation—to some extent. While a mere 6% say they are unsuccessful, only 29% feel their automation is very successful, or best in class. The remaining 65% feel they are somewhat successful.

Moreover, only 12% say their customer journey is fully automated. Another are mostly automated, and 48% partly so. And 13% are not automated. 

And, not all agree that their marketing automation platform makes it easy to build customer journeys:

• Strongly agree — 27%
• Somewhat agree—53% 
• Somewhat disagree — 15%
• Strongly disagree — 5%

The respondents use marketing automation in these areas, with the prior year’s totals in parenthesis:

• Email marketing — 62% (versus 53% in 2022) 
• Social media management — 44% (43%)
• Content management — 40% (30%) 
• Paid ads — 39% (23%)
• Landing pages — 32% (26%)
• Account-based marketing — 32% (25%) 
• Campaign tracking — 30% (23%) 
• SMS marketing — 27% (23%)
• Workflows/visualization — 26% (22%)
• Live chat — 23% (17%)
• Push notifications — 23% (20%) 
• Lead scoring — 20% (17%) 
• Dynamic web forms — 20% (17%)
• SEO efforts — 19% (22%)
• Sales funnel communications — 19% (18%) 

And the coming year? Companies plan to add marketing automation in these areas: 

• Social media management — 31% 
• Email marketing — 31%
• Paid ads — 28% 
• Landing pages — 26%
• SMS marketing — 26%
• Content management — 24% 
• Account-based marketing — 23% 
• Live chat — 22% 
• Push notifications — 22% 
• Campaign tracking — 21%
• Workflows/visualization — 21% 
• SEO efforts — 19% 
• Sales funnel communications — 18% 
• Dynamic web forms — 18% 
• Lead scoring — 12% 

Meanwhile, their automation budgets are:

• Increasing significantly — 12%
• Increasing moderately — 58% 
• Staying the same — 21% 
• Decreasing moderately — 5%
• Decreasing significantly — 4%

Their primary goals for automation? They are to: 

• Optimize overall strategy — 50% 
• Improve data quality — 42% 
• Identify ideal customers/prospects — 37% 
• Increase personalization — 29% 
• Optimize messaging/campaigns — 27% 
• Decrease costs/drive efficient growth — 22%
• Increase automation across customer journey — 21% 
• Integrate technologies/data — 20%
• Increase employee adoption/usage — 12%

Ascend2 surveyed 198 B2B marketing professionals in February 2023. Of these, 33% were in firms with more than 500 employees, 41% in companies with 50 to 100 and 26% in businesses with fewer than 50.