It’s 2018 and life is great for digital marketers. Cross-channel marketing automation platforms have finally hit mainstream.
With a few clicks on your mouse, you’ve set up and launched the main triggers and events for lead scoring, customer acquisition, up-sell, loyalty and reactivation programmes. A few moments later, customer data starts streaming in, lighting up the dashboards and heat maps on your tablet. Marketing ROI has just risen 30%!
Rolling back to 2012, digital marketers like us unfortunately are still suffering from information overload. An explosion of data from our mobile and email campaigns, e-commerce websites, online opt- ins, social media promotions, and internal products and transactional records, lay scattered across numerous excel spreadsheets and proprietary database silos.
Chances are marketers will be manually working with fragmented, incomplete, duplicated and conflicting customer data and end up relying on guesswork and gut feelings to drive the next decisions. It’s a time-consuming and error- prone process that often yields unspectacular results.
How can marketers embrace cross-channel marketing automation such as we foresee in the future – delivering the right message to the right customers at the right time, via the right channels?
A single view of your customer
Data integration is the first step towards realising marketing automation. By integrating all of your data – customer profile, transactional, product and response information within a single centralised repository, we can create a single view of each customer. Over time, a detailed picture of your customer’s behaviour will emerge.
Centralisation enables department or company-wide access to verified, clean and updated customer data through a single, controlled point of entry, putting everyone on the same page.
Find the stories in the data
Once you have your single customer view, that’s when you can start to analyse the data to identify patterns and trends. While historical insight is useful, with a single customer view, we can start to apply marketing analytics and tools that are predictive.
Explore the data, constantly monitor and measure your campaigns, share your findings with the team and convert the data into a narrative that has clear actionable insight. Clear marketing intelligence allows you to understand the relationship you have with your customers, how profitable and loyal they are, and how they behave across different channels over time. Now you’re ready for marketing automation.
Automating your campaign flow
At its basic, marketing automation is a system of logic and rules to trigger specific activities on demand. It’s an automated representation of the marketer’s campaign flows. With a good understanding of the key events and triggers in the customer life cycle, creating well-designed automated campaigns will be a walk in the park.
By Fay Wong
