Analysis. Marketing Automation: Adding Science to the Art of Marketing. April Service Area. Business Development Strategies

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1 Analysis April 2011 Marketing Automation: Adding Science to the Art of Marketing Service Area Business Development Strategies Comments or Questions?

2 Table of Contents Key Highlights... 2 Introduction... 2 Marketing Automation at Work: QuantumDigital Pulls the Trigger... 3 Vendors Are Stepping Up to the Marketing Automation Challenge... 5 Marketing Automation in a Multi-Channel World... 6 InfoTrends Opinion... 7 About the Author... 8 Key Highlights In an environment where high-quality leads and customer loyalty are critical, marketers are seeking partners and solutions that can automate communications at the right time. Multi-channel marketing automation allows companies to capture the full context of interactions and react with the right message via the right channel at the right time. Service providers and software solutions providers are beginning to aggressively approach automated marketing for businesses of all sizes. Primary benefits of marketing automation include improved sales processes and productivity, timeliness, a single view of customer, engagement, marketing fulfillment, cost-effectiveness, and consistency. Introduction Everyone wants to improved customer contact levels and increased overall sales. Marketing automation is a set of processes (or platforms) that use of software to automate marketing and demand generation tasks. The use of a marketing automation tool streamlines the sales and marketing processes by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Marketing automation and automated lead nurturing are becoming foundational marketing activities for accelerating sales and reactivating dormant customers. In an environment where high-quality leads and customer loyalty are critical, marketers are seeking partners and solutions that can automate communications at the right time. Ideally, automated communications can be linked to transactions and can also help reactivate dormant accounts. Marketers of all sizes are seeking providers that can create automated programs to welcome new customers, cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers, nurture new leads, increase customer satisfaction, and win back customers. Fundamentally, these marketers want to add science to the art of marketing. InfoTrends

3 Examples of the types of services that can be enabled by automating the marketing process include: A welcome kit that is automatically sent to a new customer at the moment of account creation without the involvement of a customer service representative. Delivering dynamic content via the Web or a direct mail campaign based on demographics. Lead qualification based on actions taken or answers provided. Trigger-based marketing that is dependent on the actions that a prospect takes on the company s Website. The marketing automation software tracks the prospect throughout the campaign and can adjust messaging accordingly. Location-based marketing that sends offers to consumers mobile phones as they pass by a restaurant or shop to incent them to stop. Service providers and software solutions providers are beginning to aggressively approach automated marketing for businesses of all sizes. A number of companies are currently focused on driving marketing automation. Marketing Automation at Work: QuantumDigital Pulls the Trigger QuantumDigital Inc. was founded in 1986 in Austin, Texas. Today, the company is a turnkey provider for measurable direct mail, on-demand printing, , and mobile marketing. It specializes in developing data-driven integrated direct marketing programs. By leveraging the latest technologies, QuantumDigital offers real estate professionals, small businesses, and enterprise-level organizations a more targeted, measurable, and integrated approach to direct response marketing and lead generation. A YouTube video ( features TriggerMarketing, QuantumDigital s database-integrated and automated marketing program for real estate professionals. The application automates local marketing campaigns for agents, delivering warm lead notifications to their smartphones the instant that prospects respond to a marketing touch. InfoTrends

4 When an agent adds a property to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) or a similar database, a neighborhood postcard campaign, flyers, and a custom landing page are automatically created based on information that is pulled from the database. The agent receives a message (accessible via smartphone or computer) requesting authorization to mail postcards to a targeted area around the newly listed or sold property. Agents simply click a link within the message to launch marketing. Figure 1: QuantumDigital s TriggerMarketing Program Postcard recipients can respond via traditional channels, use their smartphones to scan a unique quick response (QR) code, text a unique phrase to a short code number, or visit a keyword-protected Website to obtain more information about the agent s property. Figure 2: Call-to-Action Postcard from QuantumDigital TriggerMarketing sends a warm lead notification to the agent the moment that prospects seek more information using one of the digital response technologies mentioned above. Furthermore, because the digital response technologies included on each marketing postcard are tied to a specific recipient, agents are able to follow up with warm leads immediately. InfoTrends

5 The program s latest social media integration offers agents even further reach to clients and prospects by making it easier to initiate conversations on Facebook and Twitter. Agents simply click on a link within their postcard marketing confirmation , and the automated program does the rest. Visitors to the agent s Facebook page will be able to Like and Share the listing, thereby creating more social buzz. In addition to saving time for the agent, this turnkey, automated program delivers warm leads and provides a concrete way to track campaign ROI. Reaching far beyond the real estate industry, QuantumDigital continues to develop similar automated, data-driven integrated direct marketing programs for: Service-oriented franchise corporations Enterprise-level consumer retail brands Agencies serving clients with service-oriented businesses Businesses relying on local awareness for growth Through these unique programs, QuantumDigital is demonstrating a great way to maximize its clients time and coverage by automating the marketing process in the background so their clients can focus on closing business. Vendors Are Stepping Up to the Marketing Automation Challenge A number of vendors are focused on the delivery of tools to support the overall marketing automation process. At the ON DEMAND 2011 event last week, GMC Software Technology announced the introduction of GMC Inspire, an end-to-end Customer Communications Management (CCM) platform. It creates new ways to engage customers and target markets across digital and print channels to increase retention, accelerate acquisition, and drive operational efficiency. CEO Dr. René Müller states, With the growth of online and mobile technologies, customers have more choices and higher expectations. This makes them harder to engage. Today, the most effective way to engage your customers is to deliver relevant, multi-channel communications that are in context with the customer s individual situation and expectations. GMC Inspire is a single platform that allows businesses to automate and control the entire communication cycle from capturing personal buying motivators to leveraging customer insight to the production of multi-channel communications and the management of customer responses. Enabling integration of communications across business units, GMC Inspire is designed to deliver consistent, compliant, and relevant communications across multiple channels. GMC Inspire is an advanced customer communications platform that can be deployed in the cloud and tailored for specific business needs. The solution is designed to engage InfoTrends

6 prospects and customers at different stages of the customer journey, from awareness to acquisition to building value and loyalty. Marketing Automation in a Multi-Channel World Each channel has response mechanisms that can act as triggers to leverage marketing automation. Over the course of a marketing program, someone may click on a link within an newsletter, download a white paper from the company s Website, interact with a QR code, or enter a coupon code on a Website from a print advertising campaign that he or she received. Using a traditional marketing approach, a company may record a portion of these actions, but multi-channel marketing automation allows companies to capture the full context of those interactions and react with the right message via the right channel at the right time. Primary benefits of marketing automation include improved sales processes and productivity, timeliness, a single view of customer, engagement, marketing fulfillment, cost-effectiveness, and consistency. While there will always be an element of art in marketing, marketing automation makes it into a science. The improvements associated with marketing automation include: Improved follow-up to all new leads: Implementing an automated lead response process via marketing automation will ensure that leads receive a consistent, prompt, and personalized response from companies. It will also prevent leads from falling through the cracks. Timeliness: A primary benefit of marketing automation is timeliness marketing the most relevant product or service at the most relevant time. For example, imagine the opportunity for companies in the wedding industry afforded by the Relationship Status data provided on Facebook. When a person s status changes to Engaged, that is the optimal time for a florist, photographer, or wedding planner to make contact. Marketing automation tools can trigger situation-appropriate messages when they are most likely to have an impact. Single view of the customer: Ideally, a marketing automation tool can aggregate all contact with customers and prospects across campaigns to achieve an integrated view. Cross-channel automation enforces consistency across channels and allows marketers to focus more holistically on the customer and the message. Engagement: Marketing automation creates a vehicle to draw a prospect through the marketing funnel (moving from awareness, to consideration, to a customer, to a loyal customer) with less effort on the part of the salesperson. The marketer can design the end-to-end dialogue prior to campaign or program launch and then leave the software to manage the interaction. Marketing automation and a well-designed lead nurturing program help accelerate the speed at which leads move through a sales cycle. InfoTrends

7 Increased sales productivity: Marketing automation helps identify high probability prospects and then hands off these leads directly to salespeople. Leads are qualified utilizing demographic criteria defined by each organization based on their qualifying methodology. This eliminates wasted time and allows salespeople to focus on good leads. Marketing fulfillment: Marketing automation drives self-service, interaction, and fulfillment from start to finish regardless of the delivery channel. Multi-channel marketing automation also allows companies to centralize and repurpose digital assets for consistency across media. Automation simplifies the fulfillment process. Cost-effectiveness: Marketing automation reduces the strain on both marketing and sales staff by minimizing the need for human interaction within specific processes. This means that salespeople can avoid repetitive, mundane tasks and focus on what they do best. In addition to freeing up resources, advanced marketing automation tools can organize and synthesize the high volumes of data that multichannel marketing campaigns generate today. Consistency: Ultimately, marketing automation promotes consistency by reducing human response delays, error rates, and managing preferences. This may be the most important benefit to marketers, as marketing automation ensures that a person consistently receives the right message via the right channel at the right time. Real-time tracking to optimize ROI: Marketing automation helps clients track results in real time. If a campaign is not meeting expectations, the marketing executive can quickly modify it. Marketing automation systems make it easier to track the true ROI of marketing programs, especially for complex multi-touch campaigns. They ultimately result in smarter marketing decisions. InfoTrends Opinion Not so long ago, people weren t even sure what marketing automation was. Now, marketing teams are aggressively seeking out those systems that will enhance sales productivity, increase the sales pipeline, and ultimately drive improved business results. Companies want to add science to the art of marketing. The B2B and B2C sales environments have changed drastically with the introduction of the Internet to the personal and business space. Companies are finding that it is increasingly challenging to reach potential prospects, and they are changing their sales and marketing tactics to cope. Print service providers and software solution providers understand that their customers are beginning to view marketing automation as an integral asset to their organizations. It s time to figure out your strategy and develop the tools that will drive you into the world of marketing automation! This material is prepared specifically for clients of InfoTrends, Inc. The opinions expressed represent our interpretation and analysis of information generally available to the public or released by responsible individuals in the subject companies. We believe that the sources of information on which our material is based are reliable and we have applied our best professional judgment to the data obtained. InfoTrends

8 About the Author Barb Pellow Group Director A digital printing and publishing pioneer as well as marketing expert, Barbara Pellow helps companies develop multi-media strategies. She assists companies in creating strategies to launch new products, building strategic marketing plans, and educating their sales force on delivering value. Comments or Questions? InfoTrends