Marketing Automation Data

One of the most important areas that needs regular attention and focus is Marketing Automation (“MA”), especially if you’re being serious about nurturing the relationships with your current and potential customers. Not to mention the immense effect a strong MA strategy and implementation can have on customer loyalty, brand affection & affinity, retention and improved lifetime value.

Sounds like something taken out of a sales pitch? It might. But it’s not the case here. MA is one of the few areas where you’re actually in complete control of your interactions with customers, while you’re at the mercy of platform policies when it comes to digital marketing on Facebook and Google, for example.

Without the right investment in data infrastructure, many organizations struggle to effectively use customer data to increase critical metrics, like LTV, retention, and average order value. Most lack a complete view of the customer journey and need to manually handle customer data to execute experimentation and engagement strategies.

When product data is siloed or requires technical skills to access, customer-facing teams struggle to get the information they need for their customer interactions. This hampers the ability of support teams to deliver best-in-class experiences which leads to dissatisfied customers, and can ultimately contribute to churn.

Here’s a couple of other examples and food of thought:

1. Email Marketing is consistently the most profitable yet most ignored marketing channel.
2. Social media platforms can hide your content, delete and cancel your ads. They “own” your content. Email marketing (Marketing Automation) is different – you’re in control of it and no one can touch it.
3. The price is never an issue if you target the right audience, if there’s a challenge with it – you work to increase the perceived value through stronger branding, copy, segmentation and creatives.

Now, for the juicy details and some of (the many, many) things that is possible to do with a strong Marketing Automation strategy, setup and data foundation:

Nurture relationships

• Lead nurturing (B2B), from filling in a form showing interest to becoming a qualified lead and book meeting
• Work with active customers (B2C and B2B) on how to communicate with them in regards to interesting content and what they’d like to see in the future
• Active communication with customers will ensure that they stay longer and are more likely to do repeat purchases and tell people about your brand

Customer journeys

• Gather data to customize the customer journey based on behaviour and engagement
• Always be on point in targeting with the right message at the right time

Top of mind

• Using data and strong customer journeys based on behavior to remain top of mind without being in the way, oh, and of course creatives that engage

Retention

• Upselling welcome email automation, with personal recommendations based on previous purchases
• Identify and prioritize high-value support tickets and send out emails
• Build a loyalty program for high-value customers through SMS and email
• Improve product and retention rates with targeted communication
• Encourage new signups to take high-value product actions

Multivariate testing

• Next level of A/B testing. Compare more than one variable type and how the multiple variables interact with each other. This type of experiment is very effective when optimizing subject lines, sender details, send time and creative elements. The best performing combination can be automatically determined based on your set KPIs

Predictive demographics and engagement

• Predictive analysis can help you refine your marketing strategy by segmenting on predicted age, gender or engagement of your audience