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.

Brands Don’t Know Their Customers As Well As They Think They Do

Chris Crum writes for webpronews.com:

IBM and Econsultancy have some new research out suggesting a “massive perception gap” between how well brands think they are marketing to their customers and how well customers actually think brands know them. Businesses think they’re doing a pretty good job. Consumers, not so much.

The study, which surveyed businesses and customers specifically in the United States, found that about 90% of marketers do agree that personalization of marketing campaigns is critical to their success. Even still, 80% of consumers polled don’t think the average brand understands them as individuals. This is despite consumers sharing more personal details with businesses than ever before. Some how, brands are still failing to make the most of it.

In my experience, marketers can be their own worst PR agents.  For the most part, they understand what their customers want, but they can't deliver.  However, they are constantly spinning what they are doing as to seem as though they are meeting the customers demands.  So this survey doesn't surprise me.  I'm surprised that 80% of customers don't feel like they are individuals.  It's hard to create great customer experiences with this stat.

The IBM/Econsultancy research found that 80% of marketers “strongly” believe they have a holistic view of individual customers and segments across interactions and channels. They also strongly believe in their ability to deliver “superior experiences” offline (75%), online (69%), and on mobile devices (57%). Yet just 47% of marketers say they’re able to deliver relevant communications.

Worse yet, customers don’t think they’re getting personalized experiences. Only 37% said their preferred retailer understands them as an individual. And that’s the preferred one. Only 22% said the average retailer understands them. 21% said communications from their average retailer are “usually relevant”. 35% said communications from their preferred retailers are “usually relevant”.

The biggest disconnect with marketers is in implementation.  In the survey they state they believe they can deliver "superior experiences", yet just 47% say they are "able".  So marketers believe they have the strategy to be great in the area of customer experience, the technology or knowhow to deliver these great strategies is lacking.  A lot of that comes down to the relationship with the CIO.  As I wrote in Across The Board, CMOs Struggling To Deliver An Integrated Customer Experience, until the CIO and CMO speak the same language and the CMO embraces technology, this will continue to be an issue for marketers in the future.  When only 37% of customers believe their preferred retailer knows them at all, there is an issue.

“One explanation for relevancy void may be a lack of innovation for the multi-channel lives we all lead,” IBM said. “According to the study, only 34 percent of marketers said they do a good job of linking their online and offline customer experiences. With the vast majority of dollars spent offline and the majority of product research happening on the Internet, the two are already linked for consumers but this gulf must close for marketers if they are to advance. One issue is the technology of integration, with only 37 percent of marketers saying they have the tools to deliver exceptional customer experiences.”

The technology exists today, marketers just have to embrace it.  The technology is nascent, so it is harder to implement, but this can be done today with hard work.  The results will be well worth the effort.

“The customer is in control but this is not the threat many marketers perceive it to be. It’s an opportunity to engage and serve the customer’s needs like never before,” said Deepak Advani, GM at IBM Commerce. “By increasing investments in marketing innovations, teams can examine consumers at unimaginable depths including specific behavior patterns from one channel to the next. With this level of insight brands can become of customer’s trusted partner rather than an unwanted intrusion.”  

Advani is correct in labeling this an opportunity.  For the marketers who dare to embrace the new realities of digital marketing, they will reap the benefits that come from delivering targeted content creating exceptional customer experiences.  For the marketers that don't embrace this sea-change, their companies will become less relevant in the digital age.  

The Content Marketing Paradox - TrackMaven

TrackMaven has put out a white paper documenting 13.8 million pieces of content from 8,800 brands.  With the massive amount of options to post content, are organizations providing relevant content to their users.  The key to digital marketing is providing relevant (targeted) content to customers to provide great customer experiences.  With that in mind, have marketers been using relevant content or is there still a shotgun approach.  

TrackMaven documents Pottery Barn on an initiative they had to increase their "engagement" on Pinterest.  The mistake they made, which a lot of marketers make when it comes to social media channels, is to increase the amount of content.  Increased content = increased impressions = increased engagement, right?  Not so fast.

Pottery Barn Engagement and Posts

What is happening in this example is the number of pins are increasing, however the average interactions per pin is decreasing at about the same rate.  So in effect, they are working much harder to engage the same amount of customers.  I love this chart, because it shows that more is not necessarily better.  In the database marketing world, my push is to always increase frequency, whether that be purchases or trips to a casino, etc.  But the key metric to look when frequency starts to increase, is does the worth of the customer per transaction decrease and at what rate.  

In this case, frequency of pins is increasing, but the engagement is not, so the content is not relevant, there's just more of it.  Pottery Barn isn't the only guilty party when it comes to this tactic.  As TrackMaven saw, a lot of brands were implementing the same tactics.

The good news is Potter Barn (using TrackMaven software of course) was able to identify this and change tactics.  Instead of focusing on content designed to sell certain items, more like an advertisement, Pottery Barn started to pin content that helped their customers make their home better.  Of course Pottery Barn goods were front and center in this approach, but they posted less and focused on relevancy to their customer to change the engagement equation.  So the new equation is:

More relevant content = increased engagement

Pottery Barn results with new relevant content strategy

Much better content has resulted in the end goal, more engagement through Pinterest.