Marketing Automation ROI Calculator
Estimate what marketing automation is worth in your funnel. The model separates the two places value actually shows up: hours recovered from manual work, and revenue recovered from faster, more consistent lead follow-up.
Your inputs
Marketing-sourced leads entering the funnel each month
Current conversion from lead to closed deal
Average first-order or contract value
List building, data entry, routing, reporting, sending
Fully-loaded cost of the people doing that work
60% is a common outcome for reporting and routing heavy teams
From faster response, accurate routing and consistent follow-up
Set to 0 to see gross benefit only
Estimated impact
Monthly savings
$6,420
Annual savings
$77,040
First-year ROI
328%
- Labour recovered / mo
- $1,620
- Revenue recovered / mo
- $4,800
- Hours recovered / mo
- 36 h
- Payback period
- 2.8 months
Want these numbers pressure-tested against your actual stack? We review your funnel, routing logic and reporting before recommending anything.
Book a consultation Explore marketing automation servicesHow the model works
Most automation business cases fail review because they count only software licence savings. The two defensible components are labour and conversion. Labour is straightforward: measure the hours your team spends on repetitive execution, apply a fully-loaded rate, and take the portion a workflow can genuinely own end to end.
Conversion is where the larger number usually sits, but it needs a conservative assumption. Automation improves conversion mainly by shortening response time, routing leads to the right owner, and making follow-up happen every time instead of when someone remembers. That is a relative improvement on your existing rate — not a replacement for it.
For the full formula, a worked example and which costs and gains belong in the model, read how to calculate marketing automation ROI.
When a business should automate
- Lead volume is high enough that manual triage introduces delay or inconsistency.
- Reporting is rebuilt by hand each week or month.
- The same data is re-entered across marketing automation, CRM and spreadsheets.
- Lifecycle rules exist in people's heads rather than in a system.
If your data quality is the real constraint, start there instead — see our marketing analytics service and the n8n vs Zapier comparison for platform selection. You can also run the marketing automation readiness assessment to see whether your foundations support automation yet.
Already sending CRM conversions back to Google Ads by file? Check the upload with the offline conversion import validator before Google rejects rows.
Frequently asked questions
How is automation savings calculated?
Two components. Labour recovered: manual hours per month multiplied by your blended hourly cost, multiplied by the share of that work automation realistically removes. Revenue recovered: the additional deals you win when a higher share of leads is followed up quickly and consistently.
What is a realistic conversion lift from marketing automation?
Lift comes from response time, routing accuracy and consistent follow-up rather than from the software itself. Modelling a relative improvement of 5-15% on an existing conversion rate is defensible for most B2B funnels; anything far beyond that usually depends on changes to offer, targeting or sales capacity.
Which costs should be included in hourly cost?
Use a blended fully-loaded rate for the people doing the manual work — salary, employer costs and, if relevant, agency or contractor rates. Excluding overhead understates the saving.
Does this include implementation cost?
Yes. Enter your expected one-off build and licence spend for the first year and the calculator reports first-year ROI net of it. Leave it at zero to see gross benefit only.