In 2024, the majority of marketing activities happen online. However, the offline world is still there and is vital for many companies, especially retail, FMCG, and service-based ones. If you run such a business, and even perhaps the majority of your sales come from the offline world, can you still utilize marketing automation? The answer is yes! Let’s have a look at how a good marketing automation platform can help you combine online and offline marketing.
In this post, we want to focus on several important aspects of marketing automation that can be used in both online and offline contexts. It all starts with managing your customers’ data.
Effective customer data management
Regardless of your industry, you should be collecting and analyzing customer data. Whether it’s purchase history, preferred communication channels, or behavioral insights, such information is vital to creating more efficient and targeted campaigns (online and offline alike!). Customer data gives you insights into when and where you interact with your customers so that you can build more in-depth relationships with them. This is where our contact database management feature steps in the game.
You can think of it as your all-in-one CRM solution, enabling you to keep all customer information in one centralized space. This way, it’s well-organized and easily accessible for your sales and marketing teams. Additionally, with this feature, you can group and segment customers to create more specific target audiences within your large customer base.
This allows you to personalize communication and approach different segments with different offers. For instance, you can create a segment of customers that came to your business via the offline channels so that you can keep providing them with high-quality offline experiences.
Marketing automation supports omnichannel communication
With a good marketing automation platform, you can communicate with your customers via many different channels, both online and offline. iPresso offers the automation of the following channels:
- Text messaging (SMS)
- On-site communication (push notifications)
To support our clients’ offline efforts, we recently introduced a new feature called GeoPoints. With GeoPoints, you can create a database of geographical points/locations (such as stores or specific geographic coordinates) and then integrate them with your customers who frequent these locations or work/live nearby. As a result, you can conduct even more personalized marketing communications with them because they can receive offers and messages regarding a nearby location. This feature works great in the retail and FMCG sectors because you can invite customers to come and visit a store or a service point.
With this feature, you can engage with customers in a way that meets them exactly where they are. In this context, online and offline experiences become one comprehensive brand experience because you are no longer tied to the online world.
And here, we’d like to mention one more solution that makes offline communication far more effective. Thanks to iPresso Satellite, you can adjust your marketing messages based on a customer’s geographic location or local weather conditions. This makes communication more relevant and interesting to the customer (many brands still don’t use such a solution, so it is likely you will be a pioneer in your sector or country).
Personalized product recommendations and communication
Another thing to consider is personalization. It’s your absolute must-have if you want to provide users with relevant and tailored offers and communication. Today, thanks to machine learning and automation, you can provide customers with personalized product or service recommendations almost entirely on auto-pilot. And you are no longer tied to your website; such recommendations can be distributed via mobile devices and email marketing.
Here, you can leverage our marketing automation scenarios. That’s our core offering, which is extremely flexible. You can create scenarios that send product recommendations on auto-pilot based on previous purchases or browsed categories. Naturally, each recommendation is tailored to each individual and based on their purchases and interests. This increases the chances of customer interest and additional purchases.
What’s especially important is that MA scenarios can be set so that they act and respond based on customer behavior and interactions. So, for example, you can create a marketing automation scenario that sends out promotional materials or discount codes when a customer downloads your mobile app or visits one of your brick-and-mortar stores. Such a person can enter a store and almost immediately receive a text message saying something along those lines:
“Hi, Arthur! Good to see you in our store! We have a 10% discount for all your purchases today (yes, even the discounted ones!). Just give this code [123456] at the counter, and the 10% discount will automatically be applied to your purchase!”
Such an offer will most likely be extremely effective. Plus, this customer will be more eager to visit your stores again! Of course, that’s just one example; marketing automation scenarios can also direct traffic to a specific location, such as a company’s headquarters, store, or event booth, based on each customer’s proximity or behavior. The are many options to choose from!
Integrate online and offline communication with iPresso
In this article, we mentioned just some of the options that you can use in your online/offline communication. The truth is that the possibilities for marketing automation scenarios are vast. You can use our platform to:
- Distribute promotional materials and promo codes
- Direct customers to a specific location
- Stay in touch with your audience using several different channels
- And even communicate internationally via WhatsApp!
Marketing automation scenarios also allow you to stay in touch with your customers even over longer periods of time, thus helping you to build loyalty and customer engagement. This is where our loyalty tools come in handy. You can also benefit from automated surveys or feedback requests; they will help you understand your customers’ preferences better, which in turn will enable you to improve UX as well as the offer.
If you’d like to see how marketing automation can work in your business, we invite you to start a free 30-day trial access to our platform (no strings attached). You will be able to test iPresso in your business and make an informed decision on whether it can help you conduct more effective communication with your audience.
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