Putting marketing automation systems to work

Marketing, in a nutshell, involves communication about a product or service, to encourage people to purchase and/or use the product or service. Sounds simple enough in principle, but in practice marketing is loaded with complexity and many a marketer`s headache.

The marketing industry is busy with campaign promotions, products, service offerings, up-sell, cross-sell, retention and competition, to name but a few. Marketing is a science, and these activities are engineered to win the customer over.

The bottom line is, the only value created by a company is the value that comes from customers. The challenge for every marketer is to remain competitive, by keeping customers loyal for longer and serving them efficiently. It is all about meeting customer needs. But how is this achieved if the customer base exceeds thousands?

Any business faced with this challenge needs to take advantage of available technology like marketing automation systems to help profile, target, attract and retain customers.

Today, the "shot-gun" approach to marketing is not feasible. Companies need to create customer intelligence so that they know and understand their customers, and how they will react to a particular campaign offer. By understanding customers` behaviour, businesses will know exactly what to pitch to them, when and through which channel, and what the potential outcome would be. This is known as predictive analytics.

Organisations offer many products and services, designed to cater for specific customer needs. Factors including demographics, gender and spending habits add to the complexities of drafting a campaign offer. Proper segmentation and profiling helps a company offer the right product and service to the right customer at the right time through the right channel.

Companies need to create customer intelligence so that they know and understand their customers.

Gerrit van Wyngaard, SAS Institute SA`s customer intelligence product manager.

Marketing automation must enable marketers to design, develop and execute multi-channel, multi-stage marketing campaigns. The information gathered from the segmentation and profiling stages should be used to target customers, execute the personalised offers via preferred channels and measure results of each campaign at individual customer level.

Marketing campaigns are of little use if the value and return cannot be measured. Marketing automation allows for review of campaign success and adjustment of the offer if necessary. Customer feedback is used to augment customer intelligence to better profile customers during the next campaign.

Mature marketing organisations must be able to profile customers so any changes in behaviour are immediately apparent. These changes might trigger an opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell a new offering or may indicate the likelihood of losing a client.

Marketing automation software should enable automatic generation and execution of a cross-sell, up-sell or retention strategy if the situation arises.

E-mail is a preferred marketing channel for many companies, but poorly targeted or managed communications still yield poor profits and may have a negative effect on the business, eroding the brand by annoying or alienating customers. Many companies outsource their e-mail services, feeling that they lack the expertise or capability to deliver the best performance.

This "pay-as-you-go" model can become expensive over the long-term. The best alternative is a fully integrated in-house system for delivering high-impact, personalised e-mail communications. This allows the presentation of offers as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign to customers whose preferred correspondence channel is e-mail.

Successful Web presence hinges on a company`s ability to get the right offers to the right customers at the right time. By monitoring strategic key performance indicators, drivers that influence bottom line results can be identified, giving an accurate picture of how well the business objectives at every point in the process are being achieved.

This knowledge can be used to make critical changes to e-business strategy, improving the customer experience and the company`s overall success.

Today, all marketing organisations are under increased pressure to do more with less. Predictive modelling helps improve marketing effectiveness, but this alone does not assist with constraints like channel capacity, budget and customer contact policies.

To ensure that marketers are targeting customers with offers that maximise overall profitability, they must incorporate constrained optimisation, allowing the marketer to plan and prioritise all outbound communications to maximise economic outcomes and balance capacity to deliver.

Software vendors provide many solutions for CRM and direct response marketing, yet only around 16% of most organisations` annual marketing allocation is directed at CRM and direct response marketing, while as much as 63% is directed at mass marketing.

A few vendors have ventured into mass marketing because of size and complexity. They offer marketing resource and performance management with the end goal of making operational the ability to plan, measure and optimise marketing investments across all brands, media, channels and segments. This capability allows them to help customers within the direct marketing as well as the mass marketing space.