9 ways to boost customer loyalty with Marketing Automation

I'm not a big fan of the lists, but it makes it convenient to talk about a few of the concepts.  Marketing automation is a very important tool for the digital marketer.  I will even go as far as saying it should be the center of the digital marketing universe.  Because digital marketing grew up as being web, this is not a popular view among digital marketers, but that doesn't mean it's not true.  

Gathering knowledge allows to build relationship: the more you know about customers, the more relevant offers you can address. Personalization is impossible without advanced behavioral and transactional analytics.

Marketing automation starts and ends with data.  Data is the basis for running any marketing automation tool.  Without a good data collection and architecture strategy, marketing automation will be hampered to a degree.  It also ends with data because the capturing of the behavior driven informs the next decision.  It is cyclical as far as data collection is concerned.

1:1 Marketing. Dynamic content and e-mails are the base of long-lasting bond with customer, because they show that you treat him individually and adjust offers to his/her particular needs. Also find opportunities to say thank you to them, ask for opinions and suggest complementary products

1-to-1 marketing is the dream.  To cost effectively do this is still farther out, but we are getting close.  The problem becomes content.  To effectively market to each person in the database is unrealistic, but start at the top.  What would it take to market to the top 10% of the database on a 1-to-1 basis.  Start from there and then try to go farther into the customer base.  

Use analytics to improve content quality: with content marketing you can not only educate your customers, but also discuss values you share, what is crucial for establishing loyalty. 30% of customers say that shared values are one of 3 top reasons for being loyal to a brand. Hence invest in content and optimize it. Read more about content marketing and marketing automation synergy.

Good content can be scary for marketers.  The time and effort to create such content is time consuming and costly, especially in the form of man hours.  It is also hard to quantify the results, which normally don't start to materialize for many months.  However, great content builds a relationship with the brand.  Storytelling and guides for customers help them relate to the brand better than most advertising.  Let the analytics guide the decision.  If customers are buying bathroom products from Home Depot, don't send them content about building a fence.  A great timed "how to" on bathroom design could go a long way to loyalty and upsell opportunities.

Measure: don’t just repeat common knowledge that making actual user buy is 7 times cheaper that bringing new one. Use advanced analytics offered by Marketing Automation Systems to measure ROI of your loyalty improving actions, and optimize them.

The crucial part to any marketing automation strategy, how are you going to measure the results?  This thought process usually comes at the end, but it should start at the beginning of your marketing automation journey.  The first thing your boss will ask after the marketing automation system goes live is "how are we doing"?  You need to not only be able to answer his questions, but you need to answer that question for yourself.  Marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities.  They are never finished and they need to continually evolve.  The only way to determine the evolution is by understanding the results.  

How Not To Use Marketing Automation

Normally I would never suggest not using a marketing automation for anything, but it is a funny title so I'll let this slide.  I would even argue that bad marketing automation is better than no marketing automation, but not by much.

Generic Broadcasting – The time that you save with marketing automation should be used to not only improve your content in the first place, but also to personalise through segmentation. Consumers in all market places are becoming more and more sophisticated, and can spot poorly executed marketing automation. And their perception is likely to be that you don’t care about the communication.

This is the first step of marketing automation.  So many times the implementation strategy of the marketers installing the new system is to do what they are currently doing, but in a new fancy tool.  I think this is an okay step if the desired outcome is to QA the output to make sure all the data is correctly hooked up.  Other than that, marketers should have an understanding of what the new capabilities of the tool they have purchased and at least start with a few general segments to make sure there are some differentiation in the messaging.

My advice is to bring in a group that has experience in the tool who focuses on the strategy behind utilizing the tool to help build a roadmap.  It's okay to start broad, in fact I recommend it.  But don't tart from scratch.  Start implementing the "low hanging fruit" opportunities in your business right away.  This will be your baseline and then you start to grow from there.

Being A Spammer – Automated emails are a great way of engaging with recipients who have shown an interest in your email, but you should still spend time focusing on the quality of your communication. Avoid the usual spam trigger words and don’t go sending an email to thousands of people all at the same time. Marketing automation can increase the risk of spam, but a good email provider will help you with this.

All the good Email Service Providers (ESP) will provide services to assist you in "warming up" your domain to the Internet Service Providers (ISP).  This is a necessary first step to make sure everyone can see your emails when you send them (deliverability %).  

However, this does not mean your job is over.  If you decide automation will allow you to send emails to your customers everyday with messages which do not resonate with most of them, you will quickly be flagged as spam.  If this happens too many times, the ISP's will block your emails.  When I started at one property, Yahoo was blocking all the emails and the deliverability rating was in the high 60% range.  It took a long time to get unblocked, so make sure your content is relevant and you stop sending to customers that are not opening your email.

Bad Time Automating – Automated communications are tricky: you’re writing them at a time where the context of how the communication will be received isn’t known. Most of the time, this is absolutely fine as you are only scheduling a few hours ahead, but beware of shifting events. 

Most of the time your emails will not be "set it and forget it".  You may run with an automated email blast for customers that signed up today with an offer to engage further, and that is fine in most cases.  In a lot of the cases the automation is used to increase the segmentation capabilities, not to create a generic email blast to all your customers over and over again.  

If you run into this problem of timing, then forget about scheduling too far in advance.  Take your time and make sure the message is relevant to the customer at the time the email is sent.  This will save you from looking like someone that doesn't understand the customer at all.  That is the worst thing that could happen.

Communicating Constantly – With marketing automation, communications with your audience should become a lot easier. But don’t get carried away. If it is easier, then the temptation will be to communicate more often, but this is as off-putting for a recipient as communicating poorly. It can also have a detrimental effect on the size of your audience.

The quickest way to being marked as spam or unsubscribed is to over communicate through email.  Just because its easier to do, doesn't mean you should.  Make sure you are communicating a little more than your customer is engaging with your brand.  Its okay to communicate everyday if your customer is buying something everyday, but this is usually not the case.  If your customer purchases a product once a month, maybe every other week is a good cadence to start.  Remember, the beauty of a marketing automation tool is your customers don't have to all be on the same communication cadence, they can be on their own, as long a you have enough content to make that strategy make sense.

Send And Forget – One of the objectives of most communications is to elicit a response. Whether that is an open from an email, a click on an advert or a reply / share from a social media post. So when you are automating, you should always have a process in place for monitoring their impact – you should be able to set this up as an email or smart phone notification. Ignoring this can result in recipients not talking (positively or negatively) to anyone, something to avoid at all costs.

As I said above, this strategy can be detrimental to having a marketing automation tool.  Never send without analyzing the results.  All marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities, they need to be changed and enhanced constantly, because as you change behaviors the communication cadence and the offers need to change with it.  There are also segments of customers in the campaign who are not getting what you are throwing out, so constantly look for opportunities to enhance the campaigns taking these customers into account.  Analyzing is the most important step of the process.

Closing the Loop on Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is starting to come into the mainstream, but many companies are not using the toolset to create amazing interactions with their customers.  I know many brands that have sophisticated toolsets and it is used to show me points and my name.  I get the same exact email that all of their customers get with my name attached, this is not an amazing interaction.

Data and Analytics as the Foundation

Seems logical, right? You would be amazed at how many brands are still working through “We don't know how to get our transactional point-of-sale integrated with our demographic and third-party purchase data.” Solid data management and extract, transform, load processes form the foundation from which a solid enterprise marketing platform is built.

Data is the backbone of any marketing automation solution.  This may be why the technology isn't as pervasive as it should be.  Getting all of the data into one location in a consumable format for marketers is not an easy task.  This is the first step in the marketing automation journey.  Starting with the data will increase the chance to have amazing interactions with your guest.  The more knowledge about the customer, the more customized a communication can be and this is what delights the customer.

Integrate, Orchestrate and Optimize

This is a large category, but an important one as far as customer engagement is concerned.

First up is integration. Integrate marketing programs across channels — leverage insights from outbound marketing programs to better serve customers on inbound channels and vice versa. With consumers switching channels as frequently as they do today, this is imperative.

Marketing automation tools today can currently run many inbound tasks.  This is especially true when sub second response is not necessary.  When giving the customer an option to to click on a button to serve up an offer or promotion, use the marketing automation tool to serve up the offer.  This way it ensures the customer is seeing the same offer they saw in an email you sent yesterday.

Orchestrate campaigns and their offers so that the timing and sequence, as well as the channel delivered, make sense based on individual consumer preferences. 

So many brands are tied to their own timing of communication, not the customers.  For instance, we alway send our bi-weekly communication on every other Tuesday.  This makes it easy for the marketer, however this does not take into account the customer.  

All customers should be on their own timeline.  Marketing automation tools are very sophisticated and can handle this type of philosophy.  Planning the interactions with customers based on their behavior will result in much higher response.  This is the type of delightful interaction customers expect.

Optimization is the final step in the execution phase. Make sure you use analytically based optimization across all channels to avoid over-contact and saturation of consumers. Consumers are only annoyed by receiving an email offer for a product or service that they just signed up for last week during an inbound contact center conversation.

Be sure to optimize constantly.  Marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities.  They are never finished and there is always money to be found in optimizing the programs.  Optimization goes much further than over contacting the customer, just as bad is not contacting the customer at the time they want to purchase.  Even worse is offering the customer something they would never be interested in, especially if they have been your customer for an extended period of time.  Tiffany, I already bought my wife the diamond, stop telling me about how amazing it is, you had me at hello.

The last step is to close the loop in order to perform truly integrated marketing. Take the information you learn from the delivery of both inbound and outbound offers: Did a customer open an email, respond to a social message or accept a verbal offer delivered via the contact center? If so, what effect does that have on downstream marketing efforts?

It all comes back to constantly learning.  The more your customer interacts with the brand, the more they tell you about themselves.  I am not the biggest fan of over surveying the customer and when asked why that is, I say its because I survey my customer all the time.  I send them outbound communications with call to actions and if they reply, they are telling me what is more important, voting with their wallet.  If they don't reply, they are telling me they don't appreciate this offer, or maybe it is this time, etc.  Learn from these interactions and enhance your campaigns.

Remember, Data + Insight = Action.  Always be looking for actionable data on your customers and using that in your marketing automation programs.

6 Rules for Creating Killer Email Campaigns

Email marketing still reigns supreme for most businesses when it comes to ROI.  The funny part is how many businesses are not taking full advantage of the medium.  Email is a channel and should not be seen as a strategy unto itself, it is just another way to communicate to the customer.  But because of its low cost and effective targeting capabilities, it is a channel that should be at the top of most companies priority list.

1) Map out the customer flow

Once upon a time I worked on the growth engineering team at Twitter. We were tasked with building something that could turn new signup users into die-hard Tweeters. The secret sauce to user activation was…email! But before we knew when to use email, we had to map out the Twitter user journey.

This is key to a marketing automation.  The first step of a campaign is to identify the goals for the campaign.  After that, the visual mapping of the workflow will save hours of time and allow for better if/then scenario processes to take place within the campaign.  When done visually, it also is easier to see pitfalls and mistakes.  This may seem like double work, but it is an essential step.

2) Master the balance of building your list, while not asking for too much

You’re ready to begin building your email list and customer base. You’ve also heard that the more info you have on a customer, the better. Besides, how are you supposed to create highly personalized email campaigns without any data on a user? Before you start pushing sign up forms with 20 form fields to all of your website visitors, you must first understand that customer intelligence should be built over time.

I am a big fan of finding out 1 thing about your customer in every interaction.  Transactional data about what your customers are buying is the best information to have, but also asking your customers a question with each interaction is not time consuming for them and through time will build a plethora of information for you which then can be used to further segment your customers.  Be careful what you ask.  If you ask something specific about behaviors, your customer may expect you to use this information right away and if you don't, they may become disenfranchised.  

3) Embrace marketing automation 

People say marketing automation isn’t personal and ruins your brand reputation with robot-like communication. I’m going to argue that it actually makes your communication more personal because it can be used to send messages based on individual behavior. Marketing automation makes it so that no two people receive the same messages.

This is a must in my book.  There is no better way to have targeted, individualized communication with large sets of customers without it.  Marketing automation tools should be a fundamental piece of the marketing technology.  It allows for the management of the customer, regardless of the channel.  It makes multi-channel communication possible.  I believe this is the center for all outbound communication, regardless of the channel.

4) Offer value with every touch  (Eat24)

You don’t need a reason to call grandma, but you should have a reason for sending an email to your subscribers. Promotional blasts are the bread and butter of ecommerce companies, and I’m not saying they’re a bad practice, since they do generate revenue. But, before you send another marketing campaign, you should always ask yourself, “Will my customers care?” The answer of course should always be, “Yes!”.

I worked with a company that did an email blast every 2 weeks regardless of if there was anything new to communicate.  The offer that was sent was usually the same offer with a different twist.  

Not only does this approach start to feel the same, which will lead to customers ignoring the email, it also doesn't create a sense of urgency for the customer.  If there is always a timed offering and it is always the same offer, customers will not feel the need to reply to the call of action.  They will start to learn there will be this new offer next week so maybe I'll just wait until then.  This limits the effectiveness of your communications.

5) Recognize lapsed users and bring them back  (Memebox)

Customers sometimes leave. While some loss is inevitable, others are absolutely preventable. A bad marketer doesn’t know who has left or who is about to leave. A good marketer recognizes the signs of churning and targets those users with the perfect message to bring them back.

The best time to market to a customer is before they become inactive.  Once a customer is inactive or has left, it is usually too late and those customers are very hard to regain.  It is very important to identify customer that are about to churn or are changing their buying habits in a negative fashion.  

For instance, a customer may purchase from you with a frequency of once a month, however over the past 3 months they have not purchased anything.  Lets say in this instance your active customer database is purchases within 12 months.  If someone who consistently purchases every month, but has not in the last 3 months, you as a marketer have to change your communications with this customer.  This customer is in danger of churning and you can't wait for 9 more months before they become inactive to recognize this.  At that point it will be too late.

6) Perpetually tinker with A/B testing

Email campaigns, like fine art or software, is never finished. There will always be something else you can do to improve the performance of a campaign. When looking for an email platform, find one that allows you to A/B test any part of your email.

Marketing automation campaigns are never finished.  They are constantly evolving no matter what the situation is.  Testing should be a standard part of all your campaigns.  It is important to remember that a baseline needs to be established before the testing takes place.  Also, be careful not to overlap tests that may have influence on results at the same time.  You always want to make sure you understand what changes drove what results.  If there are too many tests and changes at once, there is no way to possibly understand the impact of the tests.

I would add a number 7, analysis

Find yourself a good, easy to use business intelligence tool and analyze the performance of these email campaigns.  Create many different attributes of your customer.  Slice and dice the data to look for opportunities.  Identify groups of customers that aren't performing up to the standards of others, these are the customers that become new segments to target with different communication and content strategies.  This also is a must in my book.

Data is the First Step to Marketing Automation

I have implemented many marketing automation solutions over the past decade and one of the perplexing findings is how organizations put the cart before the horse when they are installing their solutions.  I like to say marketing automation solutions are "dumb".  Not the kind of dumb as in "this is stupid, why are we implementing these solutions, why not do something else".  They are "dumb" in the essence of they need help from something else to be successful.  They cannot work on their own.

Marketing automation tools are a slave to the underlying data.  All marketing automation tools do is query data and create metadata that is used to create content and messaging for your customers.  Now I am minimizing the importance of the marketing automation tools in that sentence, but from a high level, it works.  

Since the underlying data is what drives the marketing automation tool, that data is the first step in implementing the tool.  Without the proper data, your implantation will fail.  Getting the data into the proper format for consumption from the automation tool is the most important step of marketing automation.  

Understand the problems to be solved

Write out all the different types of campaigns or communications to be run with the automation tool.  This step is vital to understand if there is a gap in your data collection strategy.  Also, this identifies if the data is structured properly to even run these types of campaigns.  This step comes before buying a marketing automation tool.

For example, I want to send a reminder email to all customers who bought a television that specific cables will enhance the performance of their new purchase by 50%.  For this, the data will have to be structured to understand which customer bought a television set, along with cables because you don't want to sound like you don't know your customers, within X amount of time, their email, mailing or app device ID, and the channel they prefer to be communicated with.  Now the data team can make sure they have the proper structure for just this one use case. If the data can't be structured accordingly, then the marketing automation tool will not be able to deliver this campaign.

Define success for the campaigns

This can be a simple sentence in each case.  What this determines is how the analysis of the campaigns performance will be achieved.  Analysis is also part of the marketing automation tool implantation, because I guarantee you that the executives will want to know the impact of this large investment, so the data needs to be prepared to answer these questions.

For example, I want to see the redemption rate and revenue generated, along with the expenses for delivering and cost of goods for the customers who returned to the store and purchased upgraded cables for their televisions.  For this the data will have to meld together the ID for the offer, in this case the cable, along with the purchase item along with the expense data from the marketing automation tool and the sales system.  These tasks aren't easy, but they will pay dividends if this legwork is done upfront.  There is nothing worse than flying blind with your marketing automation..  

 The expectations for campaign execution times

This is one that almost always gets missed.  I have heard of campaigns that run almost all day because the data is not organized in a fashion that is not optimized for the marketers.  That kind of performance may be acceptable if the campaigns are run once a month, but for most businesses that is not the speed of digital marketing.  

For example, I want to be able to run the campaign for the television purchasers every day.  This includes time to run the automation, send out proofs for the collateral and have the deliveries out to the customer by 10AM.  This allows the data team to be able to optimize the data structures to make sure the data can be pulled fast and efficiently for all your automation campaigns.  

This by no means is an exhaustive list, but it is a start to having a successful marketing automation implementation.  No matter how many bells and whistles the marketing automation tools have, if the data does not support the wants and needs of the marketer, it doesn't matter because the tool is "dumb".  It needs the data to perform magic.     

The Current State of Email Marketing in 9 Fascinating Stats [#SlideShare]

Some very interesting stats on the slideshow, just click the title and you can view them.  The interesting stat to me was 20% of marketers link their primary revenue back to email.  I think this number is too low.  Email is still the best channel for businesses.  

Now I believe mobile will overtake email soon because it is a more direct channel.  Mobile apps have the potential to be the greatest marketing channel in our lifetime.  The phone is always with us.  It knows where we are, where we've been.  It knows if we are moving or standing still.  It knows where in our store our customers have been.  It is also always on, always available.

Email is not dead, but it already knows who will kill it.   

Marketers, You’re Thinking About Loyalty Programs All Wrong, And Other Consumer Disconnects [Study]

By Ginny Marvin:

Companies expecting to sit back and rely on their loyalty programs need to take a hard look at how their programs connect with key customers.

I wrote about the true purpose of loyalty programs earlier and this survey really brings to light that piece.  Marketers want to sit back and let the loyalty program be the driver of loyalty business, when that is just a piece of the puzzle.  There's so much rich, valuable data that comes with the loyalty program, that is what should be the focus, using the program as the carrot to give as much data about the customer as possible.  

Nearly three-quarters of consumers (73 percent) said that loyalty programs should be for brands to show appreciation for their loyal customers. And yet, two-thirds (66 percent) of marketers see it the other way around: loyalty programs are for consumers to show their commitment to their businesses.  “Businesses must revise their strategy and prove to consumers that loyalty goes both ways,” the report’s authors point out.  

It is troubling to see so many marketers looking upon their loyalty programs like this.  We all know that customers will want the most they can get out of the program and nothing is ever enough, but marketers need to be more strategic.

Similar to the complaints about loyalty programs being used by companies to get the sale rather than develop customer relationships, consumers also have gripes about email marketing practices. Interestingly, businesses seem to know their is a problem but can’t seem to change bad habits.

While 58 percent of the marketing executives polled acknowledged that customers don’t want to be sold, companies continue to pummel consumers with untargeted, untimely offers. Many businesses know this is a problem. Over a quarter (28 percent) of companies said they believe the reason consumers most often unsubscribe is because they’re sending too many emails and irrelevant offers. Consumers agree: just 10 percent said the majority of promotional marketing they receive is relevant to their purchase interest.

Marketers need to combine the practices of the loyalty program and email marketing (all of digital marketing for that matter) under one umbrella.  All of these disciplines need to work hand in hand.  I talked about companies changing their organizational structure to accommodate the new digital marketing age.  

When 90 percent of the promotional marketing customers receive is irrelevant, there is a problem.  I know in the emails I receive this is the case.  With so much data about customers, it is a wonder this still is happening in 2015.  As has been my mantra since Adobe Summit, relevant content will be the key to better customer experiences.   

Even though companies are getting better about the frequency of emails, there is still a faction of email marketers that believe more is better.  The secret to frequency of emails is to engage the customer a little more than the frequency in which they buy from you.  This way there is not an over saturation of emails, but there is also the opportunity to drive more frequency.