7 good reasons to automate marketing campaigns

We’re hearing a lot about the trend of marketing campaign automation. If you want to persuade your company to invest in this area, you should refer them to these seven concrete examples of the advantages of implementing an automated marketing solution.

1. Efficiency

I’m always amazed at how marketers find it so difficult to drive their campaigns if they’re completely dependent on IT or manual workflows. We regularly come across campaign managers who have no direct access to their data and have to ask their IT departments to give them manually programmed selections, or request data to be passed on from A to B to C. The automation of repeatable standard steps, such as producing data counts, selections or setting up target groups and campaigns with multiple stages, can significantly improve efficiency.

2. Optimisation

Automating campaigns can help you to save the valuable capital of time. When you stop having to do tedious tasks that you used to do manually – see 1. above – you’ll save time for more worthwhile tasks such as the optimisation of your marketing communication processes. Are you focusing on the right target group, offering the right deals and content? Which channels should you use? What has worked well for you in the past? These are the questions you should be asking, and you certainly shouldn’t be wondering whether or not IT has the time to programme your selections.

3. Personalisation

Campaign automation is mainly about building bridges between your CRM-data and the channels you use (email, social media, direct mail, telephone etc.). As soon as you connect these bridges you can massively enhance the personalisation of your content using methods such as RFV, Best Next Offer and Predictive Analytics, so that the right message reaches the right people at the right time. This will drive an increase in sales.

4. Trigger-based marketing

The time when you could plan your campaigns six months in advance is long gone. Today it’s all about automated event-triggered campaigns. These can be instigated by the customer (300 points on my bonus card), by external factors (snow is predicted in two days) or can be time dependent (it’s my birthday tomorrow). It isn’t really feasible to administer such campaigns manually.

5. Multi- or omni-channel marketing

There’s one thing we know for sure: the number of channels is going to grow. Successful communication via multiple channels, or even omni-channel communication where the customer experience can be controlled via all channels in parallel, is a must in our fragmented channel landscape. It’s virtually impossible to manage these manually. Companies who try to do this are stuck in silos while their competitors take their customers from them before their very eyes.

6. Consistency across all channels

One of the main advantages of omni-channel communication is the ability to offer a consistent customer and brand experience independently of the channel. Consistency also means that you can implement rules, such as frequency capping. When applied consistently across all channels you can ensure that your marketing is customer-centred and doesn’t get stuck in a channel silo.

7. Customer journey management

The customer journey is the number one challenge for the marketer today. The old marketing saying AIDA, ending with the word ‘Action’, has shifted us into a world where the action – for example a purchase – marks the beginning of a loyalty process that can turn customers into real fans. The customer journey offers a number of advantages to marketers who can manage it effectively for their customers. Automation plays an essential role in managing complexity.

In short, marketing campaign automation enables more efficient and effective marketing.