What is Marketing Automation? Some think it is an extension of CRM, others a form of evolved email marketing. Some think it is only for B2B, others think it is a way to do retargeting. Let’s try to clarify.
Definition of Marketing Automation
- Data Driven
- Customization
- User Experience
The benefits of Marketing Automation
- Customer Insight
- ROI and Accountability
- Scalable Execution
- Real Time Marketing
What a Marketing Automation Platform Must Do
What is meant by Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a data-driven process that aims to bring as much personalization as possible to the user experience, while minimizing the company’s effort in achieving that result.
This sentence contains several concepts that we are going to explain:
Data driven
Marketing automation is driven by data, by information. Collecting and normalizing it is the very first step in that process. Evolved marketing automation solutions are able to track data from all available sources (website, crm, loyalty systems, social, erp etc.) and are able to aggregate them in order to process more or less complex segmentations.
Customization
The goal is the delivery of content closer and closer to people’s needs. This is possible thanks to the implementation of artificial intelligence algorithms, which can not only analyze the user’s history, but also predict their possible needs. We have also discussed this here.
User Experience.
The user experience is composed of all opportunities for people to interact with the brand, at every stage of the customer journey. Marketing automation goes to work in all B2B, B2C, eCommerce and retail business models, enabling the personalization of that experience across all channels available for each touchpoint (from onsite browsing to the physical store). Marketing automation is therefore not just software, but a set of processes for contact management, with the goal of creating the best customer experience with minimal effort.
What are the benefits of marketing automation?
The benefits of Marketing Automation are now undeniable, and there are plenty of statistics on the web confirming its trends and opportunities. What are the main ones? According to a survey conducted by Redeye and TFM&A Insights, “The Marketing Automation Report” (2014) in the UK market, the first effect among adopters is a reduction in time spent on operations, followed by a real improvement in the ability to direct the right content to the right target audience.
The advantages of marketing automation are in general:
Customer Insight.
By understanding what works and what doesn’t, through continuous data learning logic, we can learn more and more about the consumer and offer them the best experience.
ROI E Accountability.
With marketing automation you sell more and better, because you can optimize the cost of customized management, thus making the whole process more profitable
Scalable Execution
The ability to automatically handle repetitive actions makes marketing automation a scalable project in volume and across all channels.
RealTime Marketing.
Marketing automation platforms make it possible to do what was once only a pipe dream, intervene early by anticipating people’s desires.
What features should a marketing automation platform have?
Let’s first look at how the marketing automation market is composed. A large part of the market today partners on these types of solutions, and the boundaries on the value proposition between one player and another are as blurry as ever, yet most often ignoring the substantial differences between the types of products and services offered. Let us therefore try to untangle this often unclear landscape.
A marketing automation platform must, in summary, be able to:
- Tracking users and their online and offline behavior
- Recognize users through different available technologies (cookies, finger print, S2S)
- Dynamically segment users
- Intervene promptly when certain conditions occur
- Customize the content or the proposed product/service according to the segment, thanks to different selectable algorithms
- Communicating on the different channels available to us, i.e., sending emails, text messages, social media posts, etc.
- Automatically handle repetitive actions and triggers
- Tracking user transitions, constantly updating a big data system
- Return analyzable reporting by segments and objectives
