A Guide to create the perfect Marketing Automation Plan

Defining Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the use of technology (called Marketing Technology or MarTech) to manage various marketing campaigns across multiple channels to help businesses target customers with promotional content over e-mails, social media, SMSs, and web. Apart from this, marketing automation also enables you to identify potential customers, disseminate contextualized communication, create personalized experience and much more. But more importantly, marketing automation takes away the need for human involvement at the time of implementing an online marketing campaign. Thus, it ensures that the personalized communication is delivered to the right customer (existing or potential) at the right time and over the right channel.

Why Marketing Automation Matters?

Marketing automation helps eliminate the need for human intervention when it comes to sending promotional messages at pre-decided times to various sets of people. With marketing automation, you can:

• Load the content you want to send on to the software
• Segment the audience into groups of people to whom you could deliver customized communication
• Automatically send the marketing communication at a pre-decided time to everyone at once, no matter how big the audience
• Or send a pre-set message to an individual based on an event or trigger to more effectively engage the customer
• Automatically generate new leads by tracking the customer behavior on your website, app, or social media pages
• Track the effectiveness of each individual marketing campaign
• Gather customer feedback and analyse it to revise your existing marketing strategy if required

This ensures that you can:

• Pre-plan your marketing campaigns and execute them without any mistakes
• Increase the size of your target customer-base
• Scale up the marketing efforts as your customer-base grows in a very convenient manner without incurring any additional human effort
• Better customer experience while browsing through the brand’s website, app, or e-commerce pages
• Have a leaner marketing team as every employee can deliver more within the same time, thus boosting the productivity of your marketing department as a whole

The Future of Marketing Automation

As per Grand View Research, marketing automation market which was valued in 2019 at $4.06 billion is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.8% from 2020 to 2027. Surely, like all other business functions, the COVID-19 pandemic would end up providing a further boost to that estimate. The following are key drivers for rapid adoption of marketing automation:

• Businesses are realizing the benefits of personalized marketing communication
• A growing reliance of customers on e-commerce, meaning marketers would be incentivized to invest their budgets on digital marketing. Given that it is difficult for a human marketer to send personalized marketing communication to a customer base of a few thousand, it is logical for businesses to turn towards use of MarTech
• Higher proliferation of data and the growing awareness of the benefits of leveraging insights derived from it to shape business strategies
• There is a major push for digital transformation of all business functions in general. Thus, even MarTech and marketing automation are being enthusiastically adopted by businesses.

How to create the perfect Automation Plan?

> Identify the right tasks to automate

The first thing you need to decide is what all tasks involved in the marketing activities of your company that can be automated which would typically be those repetitive tasks or/and tasks that do not require a considerable application of human discretion.

> Create a marketing funnel

Creating a marketing funnel helps you understand the number of customers at each of its different intent stages (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, Advocacy). Moreover, you also get to understand on an individual basis, which customer is at what stage of the funnel. This in turn helps you decide the type of promotional content you could target each customer with. For example, you have identified a certain customer to be ‘considering’ your product, you might want to promote various deal offers around the product to push them into the ‘conversion’ stage. Or say, if a customer has been loyal to your brand, you may want incentivize him/her to advocate your product by providing referral points-based discounts, which could also strengthen the loyalty.

> Set goals based on the funnel

To push customers down the marketing funnel, you need to carefully plan a set of goals that have to be achieved at every stage of the funnel. This could typically involve metrics such as increase in click-through-rate, growth in online sales, repeat purchases, product referrals, and so on.

> Track KPIs for each goal

Once you have decided on what goals you seek to achieve, you need to track the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for those goals. For example, percentage of people who were browsing for a particular product category and ending up visiting your website/product display on e-commerce sites. Or for example, the likes-to-followers ratio for your promotional posts on Facebook, or positive vs negative sentiment expressed on your Instagram posts.

> Optimize, optimize, optimize

Through a continuous evaluation of how your performance on each KPI, you would be able to determine what works, what does not work, and what backfires in terms of your promotions. Moreover, you would also be able to identify the most effective marketing channels for your brand. Accordingly, you would be able to optimize the brand communication strategy as well as the budget spend on various online marketing activities.

How we can help

PennyWise offers end-to-end marketing automation solutions for businesses who seek to tap into the latest technology to optimize their marketing efforts. By unifying customer touch points across different platforms, we understand the customer journey to create different customer segments to target the right customer with the right message at the right time. Together with the above, an integration with Sitecore Experience Commerce expertise will help you to deliver seamless and integrated omni-channel marketing communication in a personalized manner leveraging data intelligence.