marketing automation Archives

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Three trends that will have your marketing department humming

June 22, 2022 No Comments

By Liz Carter

As technology transforms and industries shift, important new marketing trends are beginning to emerge.

Change is in the air. Of course, most things are in a constant state of change, but technology and digital transformation are driving bigger changes at a faster pace. This is impacting marketing departments across every industry. In response, three exciting trends are emerging that will help your marketing team run like a well-oiled machine, even as circumstances shift.

TREND #1: RENEWED FOCUS ON AGILITY

Markets are experiencing disruption, business structures are changing, customer needs are evolving, and your competitor’s product features are advancing at breakneck speeds. Many organizations are struggling to keep up with the pace of business today.

Development teams faced this reality years ago and responded by implementing agile methodologies that dramatically accelerated product development. But doing so created challenges in other areas. If adjacent departments aren’t equally agile, they can create bottlenecks. Today, marketing organizations are looking to boost agility by building flexible teams that help organizations turn on a dime.

But an agile team isn’t built overnight. Two key components are required: a company culture that supports and embraces change, and technologies that support collaboration, enable communication, and help teams adapt to new situations. These technologies are widely available, and most organizations have implemented them.

At my company, we’ve experienced several structural changes over the years, including an acquisition followed by a spinout to private equity and a shift to virtual events and digital campaigns—exactly the types of changes that require a marketing team that’s ready to pivot at a moment’s notice.

When organizations experience structural changes, customers worry. Our biggest challenge was helping our customers understand how our new business structure would—or would not—impact them. Overnight, our focus shifted, and we realized how important flexibility really is.

A FEW POINTERS ON DEVELOPING AGILITY

Increased agility comes with experience, so practice working together as a team to address challenges. This is best done in times of relative calm and not during a crisis. Start by ensuring you can internally communicate the changes taking place and the reasons for them.

Secondly, focus on process. Help teams understand how the changes will impact the projects they’re working on and allow them to set a new course that realigns their efforts with the latest corporate strategy.

Finally, promote cross-functional collaboration by bringing teams together for regular meetings that ensure everyone knows what everyone else is working on.

Most of all, train your teams to anticipate change as a constant and to understand that through change comes opportunity.

TREND #2: MARKETING AUTOMATION 2.0

The introduction of automation transformed marketing. Data collection, analytics, and streamlined processes allowed us to approach potential customers with greater precision. But automation is no longer delivering the necessary results.

Modern marketing teams are now shifting to tools that provide data insights and metrics across entire accounts. Casting a wider net with a greater degree of personalization allows us to better understand the people we’re marketing to and helps elicit the desired response.

Today, my team and I are seeing more participants in the buying cycle. There may be 10 or more people from the same company visiting our website and becoming involved in the decision-making process. To capitalize, we’re shifting from a qualified lead to a qualified account made up of multiple individuals engaged in a buying cycle.

My team has also started moving to tools that offer more information about an organization’s combined journeys across our site to identify what they’re researching and why. And we’re rethinking how leads are scored and how entire teams should be approached with the most effective messages.

The more we understand engagement across an entire account, the more relevant the content we serve them will be—and the more context and data we can provide our sales teams.

TREND #3: THE RISE OF SHORT FORM VIDEO CONTENT

My team at ServiceMax recently performed a website analysis that showed two of the top three most viewed assets on our website are videos. Along with analyst reports, videos are driving the most downloads and the most form fills—important in building a healthy sales funnel.

It’s clear that as people get busier and attention spans shorten, videos are the answer. They are easier to consume, and people seem more willing to click on them versus long form articles where they tend to just scan headlines and subtitles. Videos also provide more control over the content, as it can be very challenging to get everything you want to convey into a subtitle.

CHANGE ISN’T LIMITED TO MARKETING

In many ways, the world seems to have entered a state of rapid evolution. While it’s difficult to see exactly when or how we will emerge from this process, it’s clear there will be some new form of normal. Until then, our focus is on identifying changing situations early, understanding the potential impact of those changes, and quickly and effectively adapting to them. It’s time to prepare ourselves, our teams, and our organizations to operate adeptly, even as the sands are shifting under our feet.

Feature Image Credit: Rawpixel.com / AdobeStock

By Liz Carter

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

12 Tips for Marketing Automation in 2022

June 1, 2022 No Comments

By Joe Martin

Many businesses are not taking advantage of technology that can improve marketing results. With marketing automation systems, they can send thoughtful communications at the right time to nurture leads and convert them.

Marketing automation is one of the best ways to run your business. It allows you to:

Create a definition to send personalized emails to your leads and customers.
Choose from thousands of templates for the one that works for your business.
Follow up with your prospects automatically and nurture them until they become customers.
Manage your entire list of subscribers from one place with ease.

The key is to start using it today and avoid most marketers’ mistakes. Here are 12 tips to get you going.

1. Develop a Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing automation has many benefits, but you can’t jump in without thinking. Don’t try to automate every part of your business — not all your processes are ripe for automation right away.

Plan ahead. Make sure you have a strategy in place. Ask yourself questions like:

How will I measure the effectiveness of my marketing automation?
What metrics will I use to determine success?
What do I want to achieve with marketing automation?

Take some time and write out your goals and objectives. Then, consider what activities you need to automate, the tools available to you, and how you want to start.

2. Implement Marketing Automation Gradually

Getting started with marketing automation can be intimidating for any company, especially those that are unfamiliar with the technology. While some companies dive into marketing automation at full speed and send out dozens of emails or publish countless social media posts immediately, it can be best to take a slower approach to the process.

Deciding how — and how quickly — to integrate marketing automation depends on your company’s size, available resources, and the type of tools you’re using.

The first step is to understand how you and your colleagues spend your time. Next, identify tasks that take the most time but don’t necessarily move prospects through the sales cycle. Marketing automation can take care of many of these tasks, freeing you up to focus on working with your best prospects and closing deals.

3. Start With Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most essential business processes to automate. It’s also one of the easiest to implement, so you should think about starting here. For example, sending emails regularly to your newsletter subscribers can be time-consuming. By automating instead, you could schedule emails to go out in advance and have them sent at the specified time without touching them again.

Another great way to automate your business processes is by setting up autoresponders for new leads and customers. For example, this will let you send automated messages to people who sign up for your mailing list.

4. Streamline Your Social Media Presence

Social media is a highly effective marketing channel, but you have to invest time and effort into it to get results. Luckily, automation can help you streamline many of the everyday tasks that marketers perform on these platforms, letting you work more efficiently and get better results for your efforts.

The key is to focus on the tasks that can be automated so your time can be spent on the ones that require a human touch. For instance:

Posting Content: You can schedule your posts in advance with almost every social platform. In addition, many offer native scheduling capabilities built right into their interface.
Monitoring Channels: Marketing automation can help you track key metrics like follower growth over time.
Link Tracking: Using unique links for each piece of content you create, you can track where your leads come from and how they interact with your site.

There are plenty of social media management tools that let you schedule posts in advance across multiple accounts at once. This means you can spend a few hours at the beginning of the week (or even just one session) creating all of your posts for the next several days or weeks.

5. Build Your List

A list is a powerful tool that can help you reach your audience and drive business growth. Marketing automation can help you grow your list organically without actually being too pushy about it.

Specifically, automation allows you to send emails with the right content and messaging at the right time. In addition, you can schedule emails for times when your audience is most likely to be receptive, allowing them to decide at their own pace.

6. Automate the Right Content for Your Market

The more relevant your content is, the higher the chance people will interact with it. And if they interact with it, it means they’re interested in what you have to say — and that translates into increased leads and conversions.

Marketing automation can track how people engage with your content, including how many times they click on a link, open an email, or fill out a form. You can then use this data to improve future communications.

The data you receive from automated tracking can also form part of your real-time web analytics. This enables you to see which parts of your website perform well and which ones need improvement.

7. Nurture Sales Leads

It’s possible to nurture sales leads with specific content, helping guide prospects through the sales funnel and move them closer to a sale. Marketing automation allows you to use the power of your content, landing pages, and social media to nurture your leads into customers.

Marketing automation is what will allow you to grow your business without adding more people or hours to your sales and marketing teams. And it’s one of the few tools that you can use for both inbound and outbound marketing, so it gives you the flexibility you need.

8. Personalize the Customer Experience

Personalization is a crucial aspect of any customer-facing business. It needs to be a focal point of your customer experience. Consumers are more likely to respond positively to brands with a strong understanding of their needs, preferences, and interests. However, while it is highly desirable in theory, it can also be challenging to execute on your own.

Marketing automation helps you cater to the customer experience by automatically collecting and managing data at scale. This creates better experiences for your customers, making it easier to retain and keep them happy.

9. Follow Up With Customers After Purchases

Retaining customers is one of the most critical factors in growing a sustainable business, and the best way to keep them coming back is to provide excellent service. But, are you following up after they make purchases? If not, you could be missing out on a significant opportunity to grow your business.

It turns out that one of the best ways to do this is through marketing automation. With it, you can set up campaigns that check-in with those who have bought from your business. These post-purchase emails allow you to send personalized messages at precisely the right time to increase revenue and build stronger relationships.

10. Generate Reports on Marketing Campaigns and Website Traffic

Analytics are critical to any company that wants to improve the performance of its marketing and sales teams. One of the best ways to collect data about your customers is with a comprehensive marketing automation platform that can track their activity across all channels.

These platforms can potentially let you automatically generate reports on website traffic, sales leads, and conversions from downloads as well as social media posts. You can also use analytics to track the effectiveness of your sales emails.

11. Don’t Make It Obvious That You’re Using Automation

Automation is an incredibly powerful tool for marketers, but it can also be dangerous and can reduce engagement if you aren’t careful. It’s important to remember that your subscribers are real people with real emotions. You have to speak to them as people would.

If you make it obvious you’re using automation; you run the risk of alienating your subscribers. They might not feel like you’re treating them as individuals, and they’re less likely to engage with your campaigns or buy from you again at that point. On the other hand, personalized subject lines can go a long way toward improving open rates or click-through rates (CTR).

12. Align Automation With Your Overall Business Goals

To achieve maximum return on investment (ROI), you need to align automation with your overall business goals. This means you need to outline what your business does and what it wants to achieve as a whole, then break that down for each department. Once you have, you can start designing your automation strategy to deliver your desired results.

This is not a silver bullet that will solve all of your marketing and sales problems. But when implemented correctly, it will help you streamline processes, generate more leads, and drive more revenue.

Hopefully, we’ve given you some ideas on how you might use marketing automation to your advantage. Avoid the mistake of thinking that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution, because it isn’t. Instead, by looking at what marketing automation can do for you and your needs, you can figure out how to fit it in and make the most of your ROI.

Image Credit: MART PRODUCTION; Pexels; Thank you!

By Joe Martin

VP of Marketing

Joe Martin is currently the VP of marketing at Scorpion, a leading provider of technology and marketing to help small businesses grow. Formerly he was CloudApp’s GM and CMO and a Head of Marketing at Adobe. With over 15 years of experience in the industry and tech that makes it run, he provides strategic guidance on how to build and use the right stack and marketing for businesses to grow. Joe believes marketers need smart training and leadership to scale company growth. Connect with Joe on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter @joeDmarti.

Sourced from readwrite

In News

A Guide To Leveraging Marketing Automation

December 8, 2020 No Comments

By Ekalavya Hansaj

Marketing automation can help a business make the most of their online marketing efforts. Today’s business owner is busy, and not every small business can afford an entire marketing department. Automation is designed to streamline the marketing process and provide a more hands-free experience.

With marketing automation, sales teams can focus more on nurturing customers and leads, and customer service people can follow up and make connections with new clients to help them find their way. From email campaigns to pop-up ads, business owners can automate just about every aspect of marketing.

With more than 10 years of experience in public relations, marketing, advertising and marketing automation solutions, and as the founder of Quarterly Global and various other marketing and advertising-focused enterprises, I believe this guide will help other business owners learn everything they need to know about marketing automation.

What is marketing automation?

Put simply, marketing automation is the process of putting various marketing tasks or efforts on an automated schedule or platform. Rather than implementing all marketing efforts manually, businesses can set schedules and deploy multiple tools to manage and monitor all marketing efforts. This can help make online marketing more straightforward and more efficient.

According to Salesforce, those who use automation can see conversion rates increase by 30% or more. Marketing automation can also help employees save time, increase productivity in sales by more than 14% and reduce marketing overhead by more than 12%.

And with scalable technology growing in availability, there are more solutions for small-business owners and entrepreneurs who don’t have a corporate budget or marketing department.

Working Smarter, Not Harder, With Automation

Marketing automation can make things easier for the business and its marketing department. Automation tools are available for landing pages, email marketing, lead management, analytics, social marketing, pop-up conversions and much more.

Through my company’s own automation strategies, I know there are a few common use-cases for automation you might consider, such as using automation to create dynamic content that is “smart” or “adaptive.” This type of strategy involves using content in ads, emails or websites that change based on user behavior or preferences. This creates a fully customized experience for the user on the spot.

A few other potential use cases for automation may include:

• Automating team collaborations: Some automation tools can aid in collaborative efforts by transmitting information in real-time, which helps departments communicate and keep everyone on the same page.

• Setting up automated nurturing: Not every user is ready to become an immediate customer. However, they might be prepared to learn more information, get a coupon or sign up for an email newsletter. Automated nurturing tools can help companies create a variety of conversions along the sales funnel based on a specific user’s behavior.

• Using email sequencing for follow-up: Creating a sequence that nurtures the lead and invites them to explore more can be especially helpful in a time when people are inundated by spam and junk newsletters.

• Automating list segmentation: Manual segmentation is possible, but it is time-consuming and can also result in errors, which is why some might choose to use automated tools for this task.

• Automating analytics: Business owners can’t measure the success of any marketing efforts without analytics and metrics. There are affordable and free resources online to measure campaigns that can help ensure reports are current and data is fresh.

Choosing The Right Tools For Your Business

Most marketing automation tools will offer some benefits to almost every business. However, some are typically going to be more useful or relevant than others. Here are some questions to ask yourself when searching for the best fit for your company:

• Is it a full-service automation platform? Business owners don’t necessarily have to choose this type of automation tool. However, if they intend to automate multiple marketing elements, it could be easier to have everything in one place.

• Does the automation software include the resources that are required? Although most will cover a variety of automated tasks, some limit their offerings. Review the tools and resources out there to find the ones that deliver precisely what your business needs.

• Am I receiving a one-time charge or a regular fee? Some automation tools can be free to use with limited access. Others might have a one-time use or purchase fee. Still, others may have a monthly or semi-annual fee involved.

• What challenges can I expect along the way? Be particular in analyzing whether the goals of the automation tool are the same as your business’s goals. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to implement an email campaign autoresponder if improvement in website sign-ups is what is desired. That would require automation of a pop-up campaign or another type of conversion optimization.

Conclusion

The numbers don’t lie: Those using marketing automation may see improvements in engagement, conversions, sales, productivity and other aspects of business operations, therefore creating a win-win situation for everyone involved. Automation can also increase a company’s return on investment and free up your sales team’s time so they can focus on nurturing relationships and working through the customer life cycle.

While there is a wide selection of solutions from which to choose, it’s important to ensure the solution you’re considering makes sense for your business. In doing so, organizations can adopt useful automation software and offer an engagement-focused approach to building and growing customer relationships.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Ekalavya Hansaj

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Entrepreneur who chased success against all odds. Proud Father. Author of “How To Grow Your Startup And Small Business” Quarterly Global. Read Ekalavya Hansaj’s full executive profile here

Sourced from Forbes

In News

How to Balance Marketing Automation and Personalization

September 25, 2019 No Comments

By Albizu Garcia

Brands have embraced automation to help them carry out a spectrum of everyday tasks. According to a recent survey published by Social Media Today, 75 percent of marketing teams use some form of an automation tool. However, with growing popularity, there are growing concerns. The same survey reports that 61 percent of marketers are concerned about the lack of personalization due to automation. Likewise, a global study by PWC found that as technology advances, most consumers want brands to use technology as a tool for increasing personalized support. Put simply, customers want more human interaction, not less.

That’s why it’s vital that today’s businesses find the right balance between automation and personalization. Companies that go overboard on automation can come across as detached and generic. On the other hand, those that get too personal with customers can come off as intrusive and creepy. Brands need to get it right to maintain a trusting relationship with their customers.

Here are ways marketers can successfully balance automation and personalization.

Offer Timely, Valuable Content

Email campaigns are an effective, low-cost way to leverage automation and personalization, but marketers need to be careful not to clog consumer inboxes. Instead, they should focus on offering relevant and valuable content that doesn’t involve using intrusive data.

Most consumers are familiar with receiving personalized content based on an action, such as an online purchase, that features a related product or service. Using transactional data to send automated, personalized emails can be less intrusive since it’s a natural, and at this point expected, component of the relationship.

Marketers can also use geographical data, such as a customer’s zip code or address, to deliver personalized content, like creating a segmented list of customers and offering them discounts to nearby events. Although consumers dislike when brands bombard them with irrelevant, generic messaging, they also don’t like overly personal messages that infringe on their privacy.

Respect Consumer Privacy

Research shows that 81 percent of consumers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them, but not at the expense of their privacy. There is a fine line between highly relevant content and tactics that take marketing personalization too far.

For example, sending mass emails to consumers with the same promotions or offers isn’t an effective strategy. Consumer interests vary significantly. Marketers should pay attention to their target audience and consider whether the interaction will make them feel special or unsettled. Customer data can be used effectively, but content that’s too personalized can disturb customers, thus putting them off the brand.

Enhance the Customer Experience

It’s crucial that marketers use technology to improve the consumer experience, rather than eliminate the human touch. For instance, British grocery chain Sainsbury’s delivered an exceptional customer experience with its “This Time It’s Ultra Personalized!” campaign. The store used smartphone location data to provide personalized offers to customers through their mobile devices as they walked around the store. Not only did the campaign promote in-store offers, but it helped the company gain insights about how people navigated the aisles. As a result, Sainsbury’s was able to make better merchandising decisions and improve its in-store customer experience. Marketers must remember that relationships are crucial in business and that automation tools provide additional support.

Combine Automation and Human Touch

There are many ways marketers can mix automation and personalization, such as inserting tags to add customers’s names in emails to make them feel like the message addresses them individually. Going a step further, marketers can encourage team members to interact with potential customers by making calls, sending emails or requesting a connection on social media.

For example, if a visitor downloads content from the brand’s website, it’s a good idea to have someone on the team reach out personally, immediately. According to an oft-cited Lead Response Management Study, waiting more than 10 minutes to follow up decreased the odds of securing a lead by as much as 400 percent.

If automation and personalization are going to be effective, it’s important to find a way to balance the two. Overdoing automation can make brand messages seem robotic and irrelevant. Likewise, getting too personal can overwhelm consumers. A successful relationship between consumers and brands ultimately relies on the right blend.

Feature Image Credit: Maskot | Getty Images

By Albizu Garcia

Co-Founder and CEO of Gain

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

Why Marketing Automation Matters for Your Business

March 5, 2019 No Comments

Sourced from Inc.

Marketing automation can free you up to focus on big-picture business strategy.

If you care about growing your business and making it run more efficiently, marketing automation should be your next point of focus. Marketing automation uses different software to streamline and organize tasks so that they get completed in a productive, timely manner. It does the legwork for you so that you can focus on more important things.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if your business is ready for automation. Consider the following:

You have a steady flow of customer acquisition.
You want to improve lead generation.
Your emails are increasing to the point where you feel burdened.
You want your customers to have a more personalized experience with your brand.
You’re spending a lot of time doing little things instead of big things.

If any of the above resonates with you, it may be time to utilize marketing automation to make the most of your resources. Here are just a few of the reasons why marketing automation matters for your business.

It saves time.

Think about your routine for time-consuming tasks like checking and responding to emails, updating social media, scheduling meetings, etc. These are the little things that come with running a company that you’d be better off leaving to someone — or something — else. In this case, that’s automation software.

If you’re a leader in your business, it’s not surprising that your inbox is flooded with emails. According to a survey by Carleton University, workers spend around one-third of their work day sorting through emails. Imagine all the things you could accomplish with that kind of time.

You could use that energy to build a stronger growth strategy, create new products, revamp your content marketing and so much more. With wasted time comes wasted money. This is one of the greatest benefits of marketing automation: You work smarter, not harder.

It nurtures new leads.

It’s always more difficult acquiring new customers than it is to retain existing ones. That’s why it’s important to focus a lot of your automation strategy on lead generation.

If you want to grow your business, this is your first of many steps. You need to put energy into consumers at the top of the funnel if you want your business to grow at a steady pace. To do this, create a personalized, trustworthy, navigable experience for your visitors. Get in touch with consumers the second they hit your website, hand over their email address or contact you. Being immediately responsive and communicative with customers shows them you care about their needs and their buyer’s journey.

According to Harvard Business Review, your potential customers are seven times more likely to purchase from you if you respond within an hour of them taking some sort of action. Twenty-four percent of companies take more than 24 hours to respond to customers, while 23 percent don’t bother responding at all. That’s a lot of potential revenue and interested consumers going to waste.

By setting up an automated system that gets in touch with consumers during their buyer’s journey, you’re setting yourself up for success and sales. If someone signs up for your freebie and really likes the content, then gets a warm welcome email from you, it shows them you take that extra step to keep in touch.

It improves customer retention.

Once you’ve got enough leads on your plate, focus on keeping those customers happy and coming back for more. According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by five percent can increase profits by more than 20 percent. Keeping the right customers is essential for business expansion and higher return on investment.

Automate processes to reengage consumers. This could be sending emails offering them exclusive discounts or promo codes, entering them in a giveaway, telling them about a seasonal deal you have going on, etc. Segment your email list so that you know which stage of the funnel each customer is at. This leads to better execution of your automation process and is the perfect way to reconnect with consumers.

What’s next?

There are endless things in your business you can automate for improved efficiency. You save time, money and resources when you leave menial, repetitive tasks up to technology to focus on bigger, better things to grow your company. Decide which stage of the funnel your consumers are at and work your automation strategy around that. Soon enough, you’ll start to see your business expand with tons of happy customers behind it who trust your brand and stay loyal in the future.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

Chris Christoff is the co-founder of MonsterInsights, the leading WordPress plugin for Google Analytics.

Sourced from Inc.

In News

Predictive Analytics and AI Drive Up Customer Lifetime Value

January 29, 2019 No Comments

By Matthew Kelleher

We focused our efforts on seeing whether using Predictive Analytics combined with AI driven marketing automation can help improve the customer experience around the key stages of the customer lifecycle – prospect’s first purchase, second purchase, multi-purchase, VIP and churn. Our strategy was to improve marketing performance at each of these stages by using Predictive Analytics to understand where each customer is on their own journey. When the brand understands the customer’s next likely action, they can specifically target those individuals with more effective comms, ultimately, driving up total customer lifetime value.

Results at each stage of the lifecycle have been excellent. For instance, one brand saw an increase of 83.5% in second purchase rate. This, and other case studies, can be found here. Anyone who attended my presentation at either Technology for Marketing or Festival of Marketing recently, would have seen me present the outcome of the longer analysis to see if they could improve Customer Lifetime Value. For those of you who could not attend, you will have to wait for the release of the new case studies to the website in the next couple of weeks.

The obligatory Q&A session followed my presentations at both these events. But to be honest, I always find these questions instructive and rather good fun. Too often, and I’m not alone in this, I get carried away with what I want to say, and questions illustrate key elements that I’ve missed! So, these were the six questions that were asked (although I must admit I thought there were more) with a few more thoughts than I had time to give on the day.

How has GDPR affected your data gathering? How did you fight an increase (if any) in unsubscribed customers?
Whilst it has felt like forever, the period since May 25^th is still, in the grand scheme of things, relatively short! Our impression is that, in general (can you see me caveating this response very heavily!) the long-term impact on sign ups and consent is relatively little. However, for some organisations their ‘re-permissioning’ experiences have been fairly disastrous. For instance, a database of active contacts of 500,000 reduced to 6,500 (if you are in this group then you are not alone). It’s not the objective of this blog to cast aspersions on the quality of advice given to some organisations, all I can really say is that without the correct permissions, processing data for comms or even for Predictive Analytics is not possible. There are minimum amounts of data required to make Predictive Analytics work, so for many organisations with smaller databases Predictive Analytics may not work and the issues surrounding GDPR only serve to increase that group.
Do you have an example of using Predictive Analytics for recruitment initiatives – getting new customers rather than increasing the value of current customers?
RedEye has not worked with any organisations to develop models around acquisition. However, our whole strategy is built around recent prospect/customer behaviour as the key driver for predicting their next likely action. Marketers can better understand how an individual prospect or customer is behaving in relation to their brand. By tracking as many interactions, across as wide a number of channels as possible, this can then be compared with the typical behaviour of customers who have completed certain journeys. And this is applicable to many different market sectors.
What were the actions that came out of the predictive model to reduce churn. How were they implemented?
25 minutes is a very short amount of time to pack in a lot of things. One that I often leave off the list is a detailed description of the treatments employed at each of the stages. But there is a very specific reason for this… the platform RedEye has developed provides the data to the marketer, and it is up to the marketer to then leverage this information. They know their brand and customers better than anyone else. A review of the treatments used by Travis Perkins would be a completely different presentation. Every brand will develop specific treatments and the insight of what Travis Perkins did is therefore of less relevance when we’re looking at how the system was plugged together to provide the outcome. I often say ‘if you knew a specific customer was likely to never buy from you again – what would you want to say to them?’. Every marketer would have a specific answer to this, I am sure!
How did you link website behaviours to an individual? Was it logged in users only?
At FoM I briefly shot off an answer, which was that we utilise a tag management solution, which was a bit blasé. The RedEye solution has always been built around a personalisation capability centred on the value of an individual’s browsing behaviour, which is also at the core of our approach to Predictive Analytics as described above. We then link this to channel engagement information, transactional data and any other type of data a client has that has a personal identifier of any kind. It is this data that is at the core of the CDP function and therefore the bedrock of Predictive Analytics. With regards to the issue of ‘logged in’, no, the customer or prospect does not need to be logged in, they just have to have given their consent.
Did any of your clients face major hurdles in pulling together all the data from siloed and legacy data pots? If so, how was this overcome?
I would say that the vast majority of organisations that RedEye work with have internal hurdles with regards to data silos. Some clients who want to input more data find they are restricted by internal systems, and there is very little that RedEye can do to overcome these bottlenecks. But assuming that the data is available somewhere in an organisation, the CDP is there to help marketers resolve these issues. We try to make this work more effectively in two ways. Firstly, we create easier ways to format data into the system, using simple connectors to input (and export) data. And secondly, we offer support staff to help this happen for clients who are resource strapped.
Which is the best CDP you would recommend for publishers?
If I remember this question from the day it was asked by Nish! Well Nish, as an executive of RedEye I would say get in touch with us! But being a bit more professional, and having asked my colleagues on the Customer Data Platform Institute I would recommend BlueConic and Lytics who I’m informed have good experience working with publishers.

If anyone else has any other questions I would be delighted to do my best to answer them, get in contact with me here.

By Matthew Kelleher

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

In News

4 Marketing Automation Trends to Watch in 2018

February 1, 2018 No Comments

By Brian Wallace

According to some estimates, worldwide spending on marketing automation software will hit $32 billion this year, and that number is expected to increase in the years to come as more companies begin embracing marketing automation and the tools become more sophisticated.

Thanks to products from companies like Hubspot, Marketo and Act-On Software, marketers now have the ability to create highly effective digital marketing programs that were unthinkable just a few years ago.

Technological improvements related to machine learning, chatbots and analytics will drive a number of notable developments in the field of marketing automation. Here’s a look at four trends to watch in 2018.

1. Automated Social Media Outreach

A recent MarketingSherpa study found that 58 percent of social media users follow brands on social media. Considering that more than 2 billion people use various social media platforms worldwide, that means marketers can use social media to interact with an enormous number of prospects via social networks.

Social media automation tools like SocialDrift allow marketers to automate various interactions that would otherwise be tedious to complete manually. These interactions can drive social media users to take actions like following your brand or visiting your organization’s website.

To get started, users provide SocialDrift with information about their target audiences, and the company’s system then uses machine learning algorithms to automatically engage with social media users through likes, comments and follows.

2. Integrated Behavior-based Email Workflows

An email workflow uses Boolean logic to communicate with contacts who are already in a marketing database. Based on rules, emails are triggered that are intended to nurture existing contacts to move down the marketing funnel.

Email workflows have been around for some time, but integrated workflows that use other channels (like social ads) in addition to email are a newer phenomenon. Thanks to tools like Ad Espresso and LeadsBridge, it is now possible to trigger retargeting ads only when contacts enter specific workflows.

Best of all, these marketing workflows can be triggered by various customer behaviors, ensuring the messages are highly relevant to a prospect’s stage in the funnel.

3. Predictive Lead Scoring

What attributes are associated with your best customers? Hopefully you have some working understanding of your ICP — or your “ideal customer profile.” Now tools allow organizations to unleash the power of machine learning on lead scoring.

Using probabilistic calculations, software platforms like Infer can reliably determine what leads are more likely to convert to customers.

Predictive lead scoring can help marketers to pinpoint the best-performing channels without having to wait weeks or months for leads to move down the funnel.

4. Personalized Content Recommendations

Digital companies like Amazon and Netflix have demonstrated how powerful personalized content can be when it comes to engaging audiences. Marketing automation technology already allows marketers to offer personalized content to website visitors, and in 2018 that practice will expand as new marketing automation tools make sharing personalized content easier and more effective. For example, Optimizley Personalization and Adobe Target allow marketers to share the right content with the right people across channels and devices.

Marketing teams can now run account-based marketing programs like the one from Marketo with ease. Content marketers can develop content for specific target accounts or types of target accounts, and personalization platforms can display specific pieces of content to website visitors based on IP address.

Create ‘Wow’ Experiences

Marketing technology has come a long way. From simple website analytics and basic email to machine learning and social media automation. Today marketers in all industries have powerful technologies at their fingertips that make it possible to create “wow” experiences for prospects and customers.

The many trends to watch in 2018 include the emergence of technologies that allow marketers to create more personalized experiences for target prospects at scale.

Feature Image: While these may have been around before, improvements in machine learning, chatbots and analytics will push them forward in the year ahead PHOTO: Dmitry Ratushny

By Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace is the president of NowSourcing, an industry leading infographic design agency based in Louisville, Ky. and works with companies that range from small business to Fortune 500. Brian also runs a local event to make Louisville a more competitive city (#thinkbig) and has been named a 2016 Google Small Business Advisor.

Sourced from CMS WIRE

In News

Marketing Automation Is Now a Must for Successful Campaigns

January 30, 2018 No Comments

By Tomi Saikkonen.

As the lifeblood of any business, marketing is integral to attracting and retaining the desired target audiences and driving the growth of business revenue. With the marketing landscape becoming ever-increasingly competitive, businesses must do what they can to generate new leads, quickly preparing them for a sales-ready status. In this regard, marketing efforts must strive to build effective campaigns that drive further success for the business.

Marketing automation is the ideal tool to enable businesses to support their campaigns to get to achieve the desired goals. Marketing automation can be utilized to accomplish the primary goals of any campaign. That can be generating leads, brand awareness, a sales promotion to boost revenue, or even rebranding the company or a set of products.

Marketing Automation Benefits

Marketing automation technology offers businesses numerous benefits. If your business has yet to engage through marketing automation, here are several reasons to convince you to get off the fence and try it for yourself.

1. Offers a personalized experience

Today’s customer is more sophisticated than ever. Traditional methods of attracting and retaining a customer base will no longer cut it. Nowadays, customers are looking beyond the cookie-cutter experience. And with titans of the industry like Amazon and Netflix creating an expectation of personalization, customers expect such individualization from all businesses.

With a cultivated expectation for a personalized approach, businesses can benefit from employing marketing automation to provide such an experience. By integrating a marketing automation platform into your CRM system, you can segment the clients depending on their position in the customer journey.

This enables your business to target the most interested, potential customers with personalized offers at the same time, nurturing customers who have yet to make a decision.

Creating such a personalized experience enables customers to engage with more meaningful, personal content while your business maximizes its potential sales targets.

2. Enhances customer experience

Along the lines of personalization, customers expect an enhanced process for interacting with your business.

Marketing automation fills the gap when there are not enough members of the sales team to successfully continue the nurturing program post-sale. Even if a customer is not ready to buy immediately, the cultivated expectation is there for a steady form of engagement. This is where marketing automation can help create a successful campaign.

Whether it’s a series of informative emails or predicting, upselling, and cross-selling, marketing automation can monitor user behavior to respond to actions appropriate for the corresponding user. This may include proactively sending automated emails or alerts to customer service and sales teams to service customer needs before they arise. Not only will this enhance customer satisfaction, it will also create pathways to customer retention.

3. Makes marketing measurable

Marketing automation eliminates the guesswork in any marketing campaign. Measuring the impact of marketing efforts is effectively done with marketing automation. As a result, you can identify the most effective marketing channels and leverage them in your marketing efforts.

Actionable reports ensure the measurement of accountability across all departments. Employing marketing automation enables businesses to measure important metrics relevant to their campaigns.

This includes, but may not be limited to:

Content performance measurements
Customer data enrichment
A campaign’s impact on the sales cycle

4. Improves time management

Today’s businesses must compete in an ever-changing marketplace. This creates a competitive landscape where those businesses that can engage with customers first often get to convert leads faster. Such commonality means businesses must manage their time more effectively than before to avoid losing customers to their competitors.

Marketing automation revolutionizes how businesses manage time and targets. By employing marketing automation tools, businesses can focus on potential prospects ready to be converted. This saves time and energy, and creates new opportunities to engage with future prospects.

By being able to effectively improve processes and sales funnels, businesses allow their team members to focus on what’s important – engaging customers – thus increasing the chances of a sale.

The future of any successful campaign lies in its ability to deliver personalized and engaging experiences for a company’s desired audience. Knowing this, marketing campaigns will need to adapt and make extensive use of marketing automation.

As marketing automation platforms evolve to increase features and capabilities, now is the time to invest in it to ensure channel optimization and integration. In doing so, you ensure your business is fully equipped to deliver successful campaigns to your customers.

By Tomi Saikkonen

Sourced from RELEVANCE

In News

Why B2B Marketers Need To Implement Marketing Automation?

October 16, 2017 No Comments

By Amberlynn Adam.

If you have ever been part of a marketing team of a corporate, you will know how hectic the work can be. Along with focusing on industry needs, the marketers are also supposed to concentrate on day-to-day tasks which are generally repetitive in nature. Imagine spending your time on sending the same welcome mail every time a new customer logs into your portal, sending emails on discount offers to existing customers every time a clearance sale happens or directly engaging with every new individual who enters into the company’s social media profiles. There is no point in blaming the marketers if they get fed up with doing the extra work and loose their focus on the original task. This is where the importance of Marketing Automation comes into the picture.

Why Marketing Automation?

The chances that you have heard the term before but do not exactly have a clear idea about what it is-Can happen. In simple words, marketing automation refers to the software that can be used to execute marketing actions without manual effort. So why should you be interested in having marketing automation software? The answer is simple. In today’s corporate world, marketers who use the software tend to outperform the ones who don’t use it for performing their tasks.

The Origin Of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation emerged as a way for marketers to reach out to potential customers through multiple marketing channels. The origins of marketing automation can be traced back along with the origin of CRM platforms. Majority marketers will agree that marketing automation & CRM platforms go hand in hand.

The marketing automation started taking shape and became more distinct during the middle of the 2000s and in the past few years, it has become a $1.62 billion industry garnering over 142,700 users worldwide.

Moreover, the cost of marketing automation tools has become affordable in a way that nowadays even start-ups who have just entered the market have started using them. Earlier, it was only accessible to large multinational corporations and their likes.

Previously marketing automation mainly revolved around email marketing but it was the time when the internet was just getting popular among the general public. Later it developed as an amalgamation of much-needed marketing technology, namely web analytics, email and marketing resource management. With the arrival of social media channels, mobile commerce, and landing pages, marketing automation tools started developing themselves to become an all-in-one marketing and sales platform.

Marketing Automation Is High tech but Tech Friendly

One awesome feature of marketing automation is that even if it is developed as per the most sophisticated technology, it’s very simple to handle. The best marketing solutions are designed specifically to overcome the need for a technical team to run it. A marketing manager with basic digital knowledge will be enough to properly handle the marketing automation tool.

Possibilities in marketing Automation

Email marketing
Landing page creation
Cross-channel marketing campaigns
Lead generation
Segmentation
Lead nurturing and scoring
Cross-sell and up-sell
Retention
Measuring ROI
Website personalization

These strategies are familiar to all the marketers out there, but without the right equipment, they can be hard to accomplish. When a company’s marketing team grows above the primary level, there comes a point where it won’t be possible to manage 1:1 connections with customers using the manual tools available. That’s when automation comes in handy.

6 Benefits Of Marketing Automation:

Better Leads

One of the best benefits of marketing automation is that it can help you reach out to potential customers at the exact point in the sales funnel, for example, where they’ve expressed an interest in your newsletter or browsed your blog for long enough, etc. This means that the lead list will be more targeted, and potentially useful instead of just a list of random email addresses.

Better Client Relationships

Marketing campaigns carried out through the automation software would be done at regular intervals and at a specified frequency. Marketers can use it to gain the trust of the customers through repeated efforts and by maintaining consistency.The software will play an important role to fill up the communication gap between the business and the customers.

Multi-Channel Campaign Automation

Marketers understand the need to coordinate their campaigns across multiple platforms, channels, and devices, because today’s customers often jump from one to another, spontaneously. Marketing automation can make this omnipresent status significantly easier for marketers to achieve.

Marketers can target customers with hyper-relevant product recommendations, conditional content, and smart segmentation, not just through email, but also social interactions, SMS messaging, push notifications, targeted ads, and more with the help of marketing automation.

Customer Retention through automation

Customer retention is one of the easiest ways to raise profits. Certain automation tools such as win-back and abandoned cart campaigns can have a huge impact on customer retention.

Automating those retention programs, prompted by an abandoned cart or a defined period of inactivity, constructed with timely and relevant messaging, can be the approach to bring the customer back and re-engage them with the product.

Avoiding human error

One of the most useful marketing automation benefits is that software can’t make the same kind of mistakes that we humans sometimes make. This ensures avoiding small, silly manual errors that sometimes have large, catastrophic results.

Understanding the correct message and applying it

Through the help of marketing automation, marketers can instantly understand which message is suitable for each target audience, as well as where, when, and how to send them for best results. Marketers can continuously test, optimize, and re-test messages, creative executions, and even subject lines. This type of information is needed to optimize content, resulting in getting the job done in less time and money not going to waste.

The potential of marketing automation is endless and it is the future of digital for brands. Marketers around the world are pursuing marketing automation tools as it is essential for attaining that competitive edge over the rest. Marketing Automation not only benefits your business but, it also helps in improving the relationship with your customers.

Feature Image Credit: Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash