Marketing Automation-How to effectively automate marketing processes?

We can safely say that marketers recently spend too much time on new, unverified channels. Over the past few years, many people have dealt with 3D printing, VR, AR, and even a blockchain, not having much to show for their efforts.

At the same time, most retailers are still focusing on old, unsexsed channels that “just work” and constantly looking for optimisation techniques to squeeze the most out of them.

One mature channel, in particular marketing automation, is a constant topic of discussion among marketers, and those who use it, are always looking for new tips to improve the performance of marketing activities.

What problems are now facing marketers with marketing automation?

To find out, Econsultancy has recently conducted discussions at the round table on marketing automation at Digital Cream Singapore in collaboration with Emarsys. The host of the Faith Chen table, the regional leader in B2B Marketing (APAC), the Financial Times spoke with dozens of B2C and B2B retailers throughout the day and gathered obstacles in marketing automation with which people are currently struggling, as well as trends and best Practices that can help marketers. The most important discussions are summarised below.

Deploy enterprise-wide marketing Automation

One of the first problems that emerged was that marketers struggled to spread marketing automation in their businesses. While most of them considered it relatively easy to implement a marketing automation system in one department, many of them have difficulty deploying automation in different business units.

Some participants who successfully did so said that the success of the whole enterprise program depends on the “maturity of the digital” organization. Marketers, whose companies survived the digital transformation, found it easier than those who worked in companies that were still in “digital Dark Ages”.

Manage Shopping Cycles

To get support for deploying marketing automation across the enterprise, one participant said that marketers need to engage a business team, including sales, in their planning. Marketers should also understand the priorities of different business units, which often differ from marketing.

Finally, they should induce pain points for companies. This helps marketers identify “fast wins” that can be delivered to business units without extensive integration. Then, armed with visible successes, a higher probability of obtaining a higher buy-in from the business is much larger.

Limited data access

Another problem that the participants mentioned was that they did not have access to the data needed to optimise their marketing automation. Participants agreed that “data silos” still exist in many organizations, and data owners are often unwilling to provide marketing access to customer data.

Advice to marketers who suffer from this problem is that they need to give the teams Products and technologies know why they need data and what marketing automation will be used for. This may require-noticed one participant-the delimitation of data usage and common goals, so that other departments can participate in the success of the Marketing Automation initiative.

It also helps others added if the Marketing Automation project has a business owner, as well as a marketing leader, to help you adjust your requirements and goals to all business teams.

In any case, marketers should, by adding another, strive for “completeness of data” when they are striving for greater access to data, including experience and offline activity.

Ensure consistent and seamless operation

Some participants, who had extensive experience in marketing automation, claimed to have trouble maintaining a consistent user experience. They were usually under pressure to deliver e-mails and micro-sites for different departments, each of which had different purposes.

One of the helpful solutions to this problem was that marketers could get a greater impact on the Automation channel thanks to a better understanding of the client. To do this, they should conduct surveys with customers to find out what information they want and what is the optimal frequency of communication. With this particular marketers will feel more competent to control when to engage customers and how often.

Another suggestion was that marketers should ensure that data from all contact points affect the system so that they can dynamically segment the audience based on user behavior. This will help marketing automation communications to be more relevant to any customer and will make your experience more fluid.

Manage unpredictable shopping cycles

Delegates, especially those working for B2B companies, have pointed out that marketing automation is difficult when the consumer does not observe the traditional purchasing cycle. Visitors to the site, as they said, seemed to flow randomly through awareness, interest and action-oriented content.

Automating Marketing in the Enterprise

Participants who had similar problems said that the first thing marketers need to solve this problem is to ensure consistent communication and experience at all stages of the path. In addition, they should associate a clear user action with the goal for each stage of the path-i.e. A simple view of the site should not count towards “consciousness”. Instead, users should be asked to opt out of the information that will be considered “on the path.”

Participants agreed that in addition to encouraging customers to switch to the purchasing path, marketers should take a long-term view and leverage automation to create many potential sales channels. Perspectives, one participant pointed out, visit the site for many reasons and often have many requirements that can be addressed. Another added that marketing automation should not stop at the time of purchase; It should be used to preserve and cultivate the customer.

Attribution modelling and calculation of return on investment in Marketing automation (ROI)

Finally, the participants considered that marketing automation often has many tangency points, which makes attribution modelling and ROI calculation very difficult. Some have claimed that they still attribute effective conversions to the last click, but others felt dissatisfied with this approach.

Unfortunately, there was no “magic ball” to assign or return on investment. Instead, marketers claimed that those who lead leading marketing automation projects had to build a business case in advance and look for significant changes in site visitors, conversions and revenues to justify Expenditure.

Those who had experience in this field believed that having a marketing cloud or other ecosystem made it easier to assign conversions to automation. Others have said that it is important to calculate the customer’s life Time (CLV) value rather than focusing on ROI or attribution at the first stage of customer acquisition.

Regardless of the approach, participants agreed that no one reached 100% of automation and that they still regularly seek advice to help refine their marketing automation systems. Case Studies from eMarsys and other automation providers have helped many participants in new ideas and experiments.

Krzysztof Ginter | 1 November 2018

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