Nine best practices to drive marketer’s success with automation
Delivering the right message to the right customers using their preferred channel is difficult – even with the best marketing tools. But it’s an even taller order when marketers already have their hands full trying to keep up with new marketing channels, new data types, and new demands from customers – all while juggling campaigns that can involve millions of engagements.
In a world where 50% of consumers use between three and five channels during a purchase journey1, sophisticated cross-channel marketing is key to campaign success. And although there’s a myriad of digital tools out there that promise to help, choosing a solution that’s both easy to use and provides the breadth of functionality you need can be difficult.
Enter: marketing automation.
Marketing automation manages every aspect of a digital marketing campaign, including tracking the customer journey across channels, making personalisation easier, and enabling you to maximise conversions.
Those who have adopted it report its significant impact, with 98% of marketers saying it is very or extremely important for their success.
The popularity of marketing automation is reflected in a large and dynamic market landscape that continues to evolve as demand rises.
But don’t let this complexity of choice get in the way of raising mindshare and market share for your brand. The right marketing automation solution will deliver real value for you, your team, and your customers. By streamlining your work, it enables you to deliver marketing campaigns more quickly, ensure all campaign communications remain consistent across channels, and scale seamlessly.
With the right tool, you can orchestrate entire campaigns. And by coordinating them across both online and offline channels, you allow campaign processes to flow smoothly, delivering results quickly.
And the results speak for themselves. For example, customers using Adobe Campaign to automate key marketing functions can see up to 293% in ROI and experience a payback period of just six months.
Drive campaign success with marketing automation
A versatile marketing automation solution should be accompanied by a great marketing strategy to create even more of an impact.
Some marketing automation best practices that could be incorporated into your strategy include:
- Consider how to apply automation to manual processes
What tasks do you want the new software to do? How will it work with your existing tools? Once you’ve created an initial plan, decide which channels you’ll use to contact your customers, and why. - Define clear goals to ensure continuous improvement
Review regularly to evaluate how the campaign could be improved. - Align the campaign with major stages of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, decision, retention, advocacy)
Understanding your customer’s journey is key here - from where they go to browse information, to who influences their decisions, and which channels they prefer to build the right campaign workflows. - Incorporate third party market insights
Data about how your customers are changing the way they treat email or use social media can inform how you can achieve campaign success. - Introduce accurate personas and audience segmentation
Leveraging personalisation techniques will make it easier to target customers and tailor communications. - Create great content
Find out what your customers are interested in and find new ways to work on the same themes. - Maximise returns
Campaigns should be aligned with your customers’ daily routines. Stay-at-home mums may check emails in the evenings and on weekends, whereas young professionals may be more likely to start their day by checking emails. Tools can help provide key insight; for example, a heat map tool tracks your workflows and shows you when sends are executing. - Extend the omnichannel campaign
In this way, you ensure it's not only about direct digital marketing, but also reaching out to customers through partners. - Maintain an agile mindset to tweak the strategy as circumstances change
Be prepared for market disruptions that appear from nowhere with a range of contingency plans.
Once you’ve settled in with marketing automation, there’s a lot more you can drive. Stay up to date with marketing trends, scale your campaigns with more targets, more channels, and more insights, speed up your customer interactions, or dive deeper into what else marketing automation can do for you. You’ll reach your destination ROI in no time.
Want best-in-class marketing automation with 293% ROI and payback in half a year? Book your 1:1 demo of Adobe Campaign today.