To automate customer marketing has been ongoing for several years, you and your company have a lot of different systems to help you in the process. By automating parts of the marketing activities, you will not only save time when you are communicating to your customer but the dialogue with your customer will also be improved.
Benefits of Marketing Automation (MA): • You are able to streamline and automate parts of your marketing efforts, giving you more time available for strategic work. • Helps you to easily measure ROI on your customer dialogues – what channels & what content is preferred by the customer? Be able to see what kind of historical offers the customer has been interested in and optimize your content for future activities. • You will get an overall picture of the customer. This allows you to personalize your content and take one step from large one-size fits all campaigns to moe individual and customized campaigns. • You will get the opportunity to work with real-time data - but make sure that your company does not start something that you can’t control. Start by creating small scale pilot campaigns, then do a follow up, modify the campaign and learn from your mistakes. Before you start your Marketing Automation journey there are a lot of things to keep in mind… 8 important things to consider: 1. Start thinking about your data & content! Customer information should drive the content – spend time here and prepare for this step! 2. Find out more about your customers, who are they? What kind of customer behavior do they have? What does the customer journey look like? Don’t send the same content in an email to everyone! Make clear customer selections based on customer data analysis. 3. Make sure that your data is structured, available, and reliable – this to be able to realize its full potential. Make sure your data is checked for consistency and quality. For example, how do you get your current customer data? When was it last updated? And what kind of control is done before the data is delivered? 4. Many marketers think that with the help of MA, you will only have to press a button and then the system takes care of everything else. This is obviously wrong. Marketing Automation requires organizations, processes, technology and data to interact with each other in ways they have not done in the past. 5. Once you have purchased an MA system – make a hard cut over from the old system, because you don’t want to waste time maintaining two different system environments that are doing roughly the same thing. Execute all the campaign from the new system but don’t forget to export contact history from the old system. 6. Dare to test new forms of campaigns and start to experiment. Trust knowledgeable super users of the system. If the person has new ideas on how to customize communication, make selections, choose channel etc, let him or her try it! 7. Many who integrate MA into their marketing strategy choose to automate large parts of their current customer communication. This is the right way to go but it doesn’t hurt to stop for a moment to re-think the basic purpose of the campaign and what kind of value it is for the end customer. Evaluate and optimize your campaigns on a regular basis. 8. Last but not least! – Do not forget your current customers! Many companies focus too much on just getting new customers and are forgetting the existing ones. With the help of an MA system you can also easily keep in touch with existing customers and create a relevant, value-adding and effective customer dialogue. We strongly recommend that you do your homework and gather insights before kicking-off your journey towards automation. If you would like further assistance in the area of Marketing Automation please contact us at info@recoordinate.com. Among other things we offer tailor-made courses in Marketing Automation.
