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.