Marketing Automation – A Silent Revolution
In this first installment of a series of four articles, we will share some tips about B-to-C and B-to-B Digital Marketing Campaigns.
We all know that a good marketing email campaign is the first step to create loyalty from your existing customers and to convert new leads into sales.
However, this exercise is extremely time-consuming. From the draft of a template, the content creation (text, image or videos…), targeting, integration and routing, the entire process can take up several days. And needless to say that the more entities involved (web developer, creative studio, activation team etc…) the more time you will spend and waste before you can even think of deploying your campaign.
Ultimately, this takes a toll on your KPIs, and could also affect the performance and morale of your team.
So how could you save time without losing content quality?
The answer is very simple, yet tricky to implement properly. AU-TO-MA-TION. It consists of automating your campaigns via specific software like Adobe Campaign, Pardot, Eloqua or Marketo.
First, you will have to define your targets according to different personae (the profiles of your customers, their needs, their issues). Once these profiles are defined, you will have to create several email templates or landing pages depending on the situations (invitation, newsletter, promotion, email confirmation, etc.) will be the skeleton of your campaign. The basic material in short. Your teams will add the content they want, such as text, images, links.
Since the software is linked to your database, your teams will set the targeting filters (NAF code, company size, prospect maturity, etc.) independently. The essential interest of this tool is that it will allow you to trace and analyze the behavior of your prospects in a very detailed way.
Reading area, click rate, A / B test, consultation of other media (website, white paper …); you will collect essential data to identify the maturity of your prospects and to “score” them ie. to evaluate their level of maturity with an index represented by a number and a letter, A1 being a “warm” prospect compliant to your target (business, company size) with a strong interest (e.g. he has visited your website several times and/or has downloaded multiple media) and D4 is a cold prospect that has neither interest, nor the profile of a potential customer, so very little to no intention of purchasing your products. For more details, read this article that explains the scoring matrix used by Oracle’s Eloqua tool.
What is the real added value of this type of practice?
The main advantage of marketing automation lies in the information it will provide to your web marketing team but also to your sales representatives. Once your database of “warm” prospects has been identified, your sales teams (field, telesales, customer service) will be able to take advantage of these highly qualified contacts for their prospects.
This is the lead generation.
Finally, you will benefit from premium performance indicators for your ROI reports.
Maybe you use Google Analytics? Already complete in terms of KPI, it is surpassed by this software that will provide you with detailed reports on prospects behavior.
In summary, refining your marketing strategy, getting to know your prospects better, generating qualified leads, saving time and giving your teams more freedom are some of the many benefits of marketing automation. Need some guidance regarding marketing automation?
Click here to get in touch with our team of experts.
