Imagine that you serve a customer. You call him, write emails, prepare proposals, recommend materials, remind him about events, and redirect him to websites. A lot of work, right? Now imagine having to handle 50 of them a day in the same way. That’s a lot, huh? How about if it’s not 50, but 500? Or 10 thousand? With Marketing Automation, it is possible to serve each of them individually. You can act in a personalized way on a large scale.
Companies that communicate this way with millions of clients use iPresso. Each client is being contacted individually concerning time, communication channel, content or form of communication.
A more technical and industry-specific definition:
Marketing Automation is a system, consisting of several interconnected tools, which collect data about the recipients and, on their basis, allows for conducting automated and personalized communication in many channels.
The Marketing Automation system collects the below types of data:
- attributes – characteristics (data about users e.g. email, name, city)
- behavioral – activities (e.g. visiting a website, clicking on a link)
- transactional – purchases (e.g. placing an order)
- consents for personal data processing
The Marketing Automation system uses various communication channels:
- SMS
- web push, mobile push
- www (on-site)
- in-app (mobile app)
- social media (e.g. FB messenger)
The most common applications of Marketing Automation:
- Lead Nurturing – educating potential customers leading to a purchase
- abandoned cart in an online store
- advanced database segmentation
- leading communication to anonymous recipients and conversion into registered ones
- notifications to recipient segments
- promotions with elements of personalization
- recommending products and services
- managing website traffic depending on the recipient
- automated customer service processes (onboarding, tutorials)
- coherent, integrated, and automated communication in Customer Journey
- surveys
- extension of the service with communication
Why use Marketing Automation? What does it give me?
If you have an online store, and you are investing in its promotion, which, after all, is supposed to translate into increased traffic and attracting new users, then, to put it simply, you do not want this work and money to go to waste. That is the exact moment Marketing Automation most often enters – customer appears on the website or in the online store. It examines him in a split second and tries to guide, encourage, draw attention in a way that best meets his needs, so the user you paid for, who also did some work and spent the time to visit your website or store, gets a better offer.
Marketing Automation plays a significant role in turning a potential anonymous customer into a customer and, in turn, into a loyal customer who is more likely to return.
Although this is just an example, it is one of the most popular and quite self-evident applications.
More advanced use of Marketing Automation goes much further and also supports, among other things, user acquisition through integration with advertising systems.
If you have an online store, you probably use an e-commerce platform – Marketing Automation allows you to utilize its potential, better serve your customers, increase cross-sell, up-sell, significantly enhance promotional activities or be able to conduct them at all.
Now more and more companies, including B2C are building their customer databases.
Yes, this is the area that Marketing Automation is developing. The foundation of marketing automation is the database of customers, communication recipients, who have agreed to it. The Marketing Automation system itself can automatically add information about the customers and thus enrich the database. The use of direct communication, with the recipients’ consent in a personalized way that better meets the needs. Such communication can be much more effective and supportive of other outreach channels, but, most importantly, it is cheap.
That is also where we enter the concept of the so-called CDP, or customer/consumer data platform. In the case of B2C companies, this role is also more and more frequently played by developed Marketing Automation systems.
How to start?
It’s best to start with something smaller and relatively simple to implement. That could be, for example, sending an email cycle to new contacts or a newsletter with dynamic content. Over time, introduce other elements and processes. Step by step, but consistently develop, check what works and what does not.
After a few months, you can have quite an advanced machine that works like a customer acquisition and service team 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
iPresso users can have even several hundred non-stop automation scenarios working for several years in practically unchanged form.
Isn’t it too complicated for beginners?
If you have ever sent out a newsletter, run a search engine campaign or even managed an online store, you will have no problem with the basics of Marketing Automation.
How does the withdrawal of support for 3rd party cookies by browsers affect the performance of Marketing Automation?
For marketers who have long been concerned with database hygiene and, above all, with personal data processing consents, and who build automation scenarios based on this – paradoxically, this will work well because it gives a competitive advantage.
CDP, DMP, Marketing Automation – where are the differences?
DMP (or Data Management Platform) is a platform that aggregates data about anonymous users, collects mainly 3rd party data, or cookies without the consent of browser owners. Therefore, more and more talk about the imminent decline of this type of technology.
CDP (Customer Data Platform) is a platform that gathers data about users, contacts, for example, customers from many sources in one place. That is the so-called single point of truth. Each contact receives its identifier and usually is being added to the database after giving appropriate consent to the processing of personal data. That facilitates customer data management, integration between systems and provides so-cold 360 views. CDP is now becoming a natural component of Marketing Automation.
Until recently, Marketing Automation was reduced to a tool for designing and automatically sending emails, text messages, or pop-ups in pre-defined sequences to a precisely selected group of registered contacts or users of a website connected to the system. Many systems of such classes still offer such possibilities and do it pretty well meeting the marketers’ expectations. However, more complex Marketing Automation solutions also include CDP, analytical tools, integration buses, creative tools, and additional industry-specific communication channels.
Can we say that iPresso is also a CDP?
Yes, iPresso has also played this role practically from the beginning. It assigns unique identifiers used in integrations, combines contact data from many sources in one place, provides the so-called 360 views, and conducts the so-called orchestration of actions in many communication channels to each user individually.
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