Many mid-market companies invest a significant amount of money and effort in traditional advertising, direct mail, online advertising, or e-mail. 

Marketing Automation can include a wide variety of solutions, including:

• Data Cleansing - Marketers are constantly importing lists from sources like trade shows and list swaps. Sales reps may want to import lists of prospects from Outlook, or external databases like Hoovers or industry-specific databases like MMD. Unfortunately all of these imports can lead to duplicate records and poor contact information. Technologies that cleanse and update addresses, provide automatic updates of forwarding addresses, and providing the ability to merge new data with existing data to reduce duplicates can ensure more manageable data and can reduce marketing campaign costs. 
  
• Query Tools - Once the data is loaded, marketers want to be able to segment their data. This is not as simple as creating one or two complex queries; typically marketers will want to perform custom queries of the data - for example, examining the impact of a specific demographics to campaign respondents. The best solutions will allow marketers to easily select data from any field or table and segment results, while shielding users from the need to learn SQL or other advanced query languages.
  
• Campaign Management - Once the list has been pulled, the marketer needs a way to send and manage the campaign. Initially this includes tracking the costs and expected results (response and conversion rates, expected revenue, etc.); overtime, actual responses, opportunities, and orders can be tied back to the campaign to determine actual performance metrics. Campaign management also includes the means for tracking individual marketing preferences (no mail, do not call, etc.), campaign frequency (how often is the prospect receiving campaigns), campaign responses (interested), and fulfillment (sending literature to creating a sales lead).
  
• Analytic Reporting - Once the results are in, marketers need a way to measure their performance. An analytical reporting tool can enable marketers to track campaign performance, and drill down through specific demographic populations to determine campaign effectiveness. Some Analytical Reporting tools also provide querying capabilities, and may be able to perform both tasks.