When Salesforce’s ‘State of Marketing 2017’ report predicted that there will be a 21 per cent growth over the next two years in the number of marketers using marketing automation, no eyebrows were raised. Studies had shown that marketing automation drives up to 14.5 per cent increase in sales productivity, while bringing down marketing overhead costs by about 12.2 per cent.
The surprise element was the addition of analytics to the marketing automation game plan. Today, sophisticated marketing automation platforms are capable of delivering hyper-personalized and meaningful content to individual customers, even as the marketing and sales departments leverage the intelligence gathered by the latest analytics tools. The right technology collaborations can work wonders. Did you know that Amazon’s on-site recommendations have a 60 per cent higher conversion rate as compared to other e-commerce sites?
Making sense of marketing automation
In its simplest form, marketing automation is a set of technology tools that helps organizations to streamline and automate tedious marketing and sales responsibilities, such as creating and deploying online marketing campaigns and sales activities. Whether it’s sending marketing emails to customers, managing social media interactions, or any website activities, marketing automation makes the process a lot more organized, transparent and measurable.
Marketing automation makes it possible to reach out to customers across multiple channels with highly personalized content, thereby promising an excellent return on the investment and augmented bottom lines. Marketing automation solutions like Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and Hubspot help enterprises get smarter about the way they deal with customers.
Much ado about analytics
Analytics is all about the big picture. From the number of people who visited a company’s website to the technology—phone, iPad, etc.—they used to access the site, analytics provide enterprises with data-driven parameters to reach important business decisions. For instance, it can show an organization how its keyword marketing campaigns are performing in terms of overall conversion rates.
Numbers, they say, don’t lie. So, analytics is the most honest way to discern whether certain marketing and sales initiatives are working or not. In fact, predictive analytics can help enterprises increase customer retention by gathering deep insights on customer behavior and preferences.
When the twain meet
While both technologies bring their own individual advantages to the table, it’s when marketing automation joins forces with analytics that enterprises reap huge dividends. Together the two provide a comprehensive macro as well as micro picture of the customer to help marketing and sales teams achieve their targets. The idea is to use data to get smarter about interacting with customers and streamlining business processes. Here’s looking at five reasons why marketing automation working together with analytics is a great idea:
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Customized communication
Enterprises need the right communication tools not just for prospective customers, but also for the existing ones. Going beyond the point of purchase, enterprises must offer relevant content and information – for instance, about product upgrades and special offers – tailored to the needs of individual customers. The collaboration between marketing automation and analytics makes this feasible. Plus, predictive lead scoring ensures that messages go out to the right contacts at the right time.
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Measuring success
Most enterprises struggle to measure and optimize marketing initiatives. The dual benefits of marketing automation and analytics let numbers do the talking. So, whether or not a company’s online ad campaign should continue needn’t be a matter of going with the gut! Boardroom discussions can now be backed by data.
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Smooth customer journeys
Organizations that are able to skillfully manage the entire customer experience – across multiple touchpoints over time – show enhanced customer satisfaction and increased revenue. The dynamic teamwork between marketing automation and analytics helps companies break away from the siloed nature of service delivery to discover effective ways to collaborate across functions and levels, thereby bringing about a shift in the organizational culture. Further, by integrating content management with marketing automation, enterprises can create intelligent customer engagement strategies.
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Insights into customer behavior
What, where, when, why, how. Marketing automation, together with the right analytics, can tell enterprises everything they need to know and more about their customer behavior. From optimizing marketing campaigns to making the company website more customer-friendly, decoding and understanding customer behavior is the key to success in any business.
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Hyper-personalization of consumer experiences
Netflix, Starbucks and Amazon are fine examples of enterprises using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to create hyper-personalized experiences for customers. Predictive personalization, powered by the marriage of marketing automation and analytics, helps an organization’s recommendation engine to throw up customized offerings to every customer. An omnichannel marketing automation and analytics platform caters to the evolved, super-connected customer of today.
Read: How Machine Learning and AI can enhance the retailer interaction with customers
To sum it up
Amazon’s success is not a matter of luck. It is about using the right technologies, at the right time, for the right purposes. The company uses easily available data such as the customer’s search query, average time spent on search, past purchase history, brand affinity, average spend amount, etc. to create unique customer profiles and then, cater to each customer’s needs in a highly contextual manner.
Data by itself – say, a customer’s name or birthday – is of little value. What makes it valuable to enterprises is its ability to help gain and retain customers. How about personalized emails or birthday discounts? When analytics is used in combination with marketing automation, the marketing and sales teams are better equipped to do their jobs in today’s competitive times. It’s the perfect recipe to win customers for life. Ready to try out the recipe? Contact us now!