The rise of marketing automation: beyond the batch and blast

Transcription

1 The rise of marketing automation: beyond the batch and blast The rise of marketing automation technology has shifted the way marketers are communicating with customers, with a larger emphasis now on providing more personalised and targeted customer experiences. While marketing automation is a great catalyst for marketing and sales teams to deliver better ROI to the business they re supporting, it is one thing to have marketing automation software but implementing and using it effectively is a different story. According to Bill McNamara, CEO at Marketing Decisions, marketers need to have the whole picture and the right support to get the right results from marketing automation technology. Unless you have the right knowledge and experience around bringing marketing automation to life and making it work, then you may as well be buying a sack of potatoes because in the end it is just a piece of software, he said. So how can marketer s use automation software effectively to increase customer engagement and improve ROI? Bill McNamara shares the five things any marketer needs to know when embarking the automation journey. Be willing to change, learn and improve You need to be willing to change, learn and improve. You need to recognise you can do better and be willing to put the effort to make that happen. The success factor of marketing automation relies on recognising that there s much more to this than just a bit of software. You need the software; but you also need the whole picture and the right support to get the whole thing working well endto- end. Marketing automation is just a piece of the puzzle and the end to end marketing processes need to work and sing in harmony with marketing automation. We have what we call our own marketing maturity model which addresses all the related aspects that need to be aligned with marketing automation. The model explores the whole endtoend process and marketing automation is the catalyst to get that right. It addresses areas such as:

2 Are you getting enough visitors to your website? Are they the right quality of visitors? If they re at the website, what s happening? Are you getting the right engagement and conversion of those people so that they can start entering the top of the funnel for marketing automation? Once they are in the funnel do you have the assets and processes in place to engage with them and move them through the funnel? How are you using gathered information to support sales? How are those processes working? Are leads being dropped at any stage through the process? Batch and blast ing is dead We took on a new client a couple of weeks ago and they were using a basic service provider tool which centred around batch and blast s, which many businesses are still using. Their reason for moving beyond the traditional service provision into a more sophisticated marketing automation environment was because they believed they could get more value for their business; rather than doing things more traditionally the ESP way. Batch and blast ing is something we are confronted with very often. We have clients who want to send an to their entire database because statistically they think they are going to get more responses and to an extent they re right when they say that. From a statistical perspective, they probably will get more responses to begin with. But for many of the people they re sending their material to, it is irrelevant. As a result, they will end up with a higher unsubscribe rate and even more importantly, they will end up with what we call emotional unsubscribes. This is when people see an in their inbox which they know is irrelevant and can t even be bothered to open to unsubscribe anymore. It s getting harder and harder for the traditional batch and blast to deliver the results they previously used to deliver. Over the past couple of years since we ve been supporting Eloqua clients, we ve been sending out literally millions and millions of s and we ve seen it get harder and harder to get results this way. Back when we first started you could almost send any old out, forget the subject line and the content of the and it would get through to customers. But that is not the case anymore. Companies now have to work smarter. They have to have marketing processes supporting what they re doing. At the end of the day is just a channel, one small component of a much bigger picture. Brands need to be able to stand out it s an overcrowded place to be in, trying to get your s into that inbox and opened and actioned upon is tougher than ever. It s all about data At the heart of any marketing automation system is a database. The database is all about profiling the people you want to have a digital relationship with so you can understand them better and be more relevant and engaging. Marketing automation systems today have lots of opportunities to provide personal content. But it starts with that central database. One of the key success factors of using marketing automation effectively, is being relevant to the people you re communicating with,

3 because then you re going to get the response rates you re looking for. If you batch and blast the same message and treat everybody the same way, then you will ultimately end up being disappointed. Marketing automation emphasises the importance of enriching your database. It s about identifying what the key data points are to ensure that relevance to the people you re targeting. Other important elements to consider include good segmentation, running micro campaigns the opposite of the big batch and blast so you re increasingly relevant to people. One of the biggest criticisms of marketing automation technology is that it can make brands appear impersonal to their customers. While this can be the case, it is something that can be overcome. For example, text only s can be automated to be personal and signed off by a specific individual. We often find automated s that appear very personal get a personal response back. It s all about applying good practice and doing your homework well. Reach out to your customers in realtime Marketing automation provides the great opportunity to plan ahead and schedule so you re able to engage with customers in realtime, as they are interested. It creates the opportunity to engage at the point of heightened interest. For example, when somebody completes a form on your website you can automatically respond to that at the time they re interested. We run campaigns where if a known visitor has behaved a certain way on the website; we will automate an to those people giving them more information about that service or product. As a result, open rates can be 50 per cent or higher much more than typical. Marketing Automation provides a great opportunity to cut through the noise. It s also important to mix up your channels. If you re not getting the response rate you need then look at alternative channels and automate those processes to do that. Pretty much every campaign we work on now has an element of multichannel in it. Whether that automation is to a call centre, a telemarketing follow up (because we were unable to get the response we needed from ), or whether we send a reminder via SMS (if they re opted in on SMS) or reach out on social channels. Marketing automation goes beyond just s and it s important for marketers to understand it can be an effective tool to reach out and communicate with customers on various channels. Create a 360 degree view of your customer A common term used amongst marketers is the expression the 360 degree view of a customer. As the years go by and as we re continually striving towards this perfect data recollection of our customers, then brands will be much more relevant as they communicate with people. Technology will also support a movement away from the mass blast type approach. Technology like marketing automation is a catalyst for change and I think we ll see right message, relevance and consistency, much more going forward. The future is around connected systems making our marketing automation more intelligent and ultimately getting that Holy Grail of that 360 degree view of what s going on with our customers and prospects.

4 Marketing Decisions is a platinum sponsor of MAD Week 2014 and facilitating a roundtable at Marketing Connections To request an invitation to attend Marketing Connections click here For more information about additional MAD Week events download the official event agenda. Marketing Connections is a wonderful formula bringing together a group of CMO s to share the challenges they are facing which will be addressed throughout the day. These challenges will be addressed in a personal onetoone environment, allowing attendees to connect and learn from each other. Being involved as Marketing Decisions is a perfect fit for us because we have never really invested in putting ourselves out there and marketing ourselves. All of our businesses has come through word of mouth in the past and this forum is a really tremendous opportunity for us to be at a more personal level with people. We want to hear the challenges CMO s are facing and look at those problems and look at the ways to solve them. We are extremely excited about it and I m really looking forward to it. About Bill McNamara Bill McNamara, CEO, Marketing Decisions Bill McNamara is the founder and CEO of Marketing Decisions, one of the longest established and most experienced marketing automation agencies in Asia Pacific. Bill has served in various marketing roles in Australia and overseas but he began his career as an electronics engineer. After working in engineering roles for ten years for businesses in Australia and overseas such as Motorola and Westinghouse Signals, Bill ran product management and marketing functions for Motorola and Invensys with European responsibility. After returning to Australia in 2004, Bill headed global marketing for Australia s largest home grown ERP software business, Mincom, where he began to explore ways to make marketing more effective, beyond the difficult to measure performance of traditional campaigns, events and advertising. He founded Marketing Decisions in 2007 after being introduced to Eloqua, the most established and experienced marketing automation vendor in the world and he soon signed Ernst and Young as the first customer for the business. Since then Marketing Decisions has remained loyal to

5 Eloqua, establishing friendships with the founders of the company, the CEO and many of the staff. Bill has continued to grow the capability of Marketing Decisions, adding web development resources, graphic design, social marketing and other roles to the business. Today he and the team at Marketing Decisions provide marketing automation, social marketing and related services to global technology giants and household brands in Australia and overseas. Bill holds a Bachelor of Engineering, a Masters of Business Administration and he is a scholar of the Confederation of British Industry.