How does marketing automation help you connect with your customers?

In my experience, many marketers have a laser-focus on using MA from a leadgen standpoint - and only a leadgen standpoint. And many, until we suggested it to them, had never considered using it for other purposes. Sales and customer success teams should get just as much value for their own side of the business. As it relates to customer communications, automated nurturing (and even scoring) should be in place to keep regular communication with customers. It can be used to send best practices, facilitate surveys, identify and nurture cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and help automate and personalize other interactions related to customer success and retention.

Hi Lauren,

Great discussion. In effort to be as prescriptive as possible to your primary question, "How does marketing automation help you connect with your customers," let's first define a customer as someone who: A) You have a relationship with, and B) Has purchased from you in the past. And let's stick with that group as those you're going to input into your MA tool.

Let's also assume that you determined that the use of a marketing automation tool is a good idea for this purpose. (Unless you are talking about taking any/all data from MA across all/any campaigns and analyzing it, which is another discussion). To do that perhaps you looked at the ratio of total active customers to the headcount in your sales or contact center, CLV vs. new business, existing renewal or upgrade campaigns, impact/integration with account management/support and service teams, etc.

If there is a case to use MA to help stay connected with your client base and you have clear goals, I'd do the following 3 things:

1. Create as many segmented campaigns as possible by as many relevant factors that makes sense, and that you can support.

Think about loose divisions by buyer profiles, tribes, communities, etc. This includes segments by product, service, industry, and other demographics, and, perhaps, most importantly, communication preferences -both channel and frequency. If you know your customers experience in the past you may know which among them want to hear from you on a a weekly, bimonthly, monthly, quarterly, semiannual, or annual basis. if not, ask them.

2. Use every touch point in every channel (email, phone, site visit, social media) to determine the content and offers in your next touch point.

This means creating flows, some that could branch several times to maintain focused, contextual and meaningful communication. Scaling personalization in this way is the ultimate power of MA and advanced MA programmers can make it happen.

3. Analyze responses and pass what you think is ready (not just the lead score) for more business over to sales.

Sure, you can use scoring and set up rules and alerts, but if you thought it through and genuinely created a campaign that is more personalized and sophisticated than a run-of-the-mill customer newsletter, you should be able to look at the responses and activities periodically and to determine which among the most active to nudge to sales to cross or up-sell.

- Chris Jablonski

I agree with Justin that automation should be looked at as a solution that enables buyer engagement, not simply a lead generation solution. At all stages of the buying process buyers want engagement and as Kristin states a 1-1 dialogue.

Defining the buyer personas and the path to purchase allows for a mapping of offers and content to be delivered at each stage. The content is the key part here in that it is the timely, relevant content that will keep the customer engaged at all stages of the process and post purchase. Automation, enables the delivery of this content and enables a cross-channel delivery of the content.

Despite what some expect, automation on it's own will not engage, but to the question at hand, when fueled with the right content and operated by defined process it will enable a better engagement and build better customer relationships.

Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo

I'd like to share a very simple example from one of our customers who offers a free trial of their product/solution.

They have setup a trigger campaign that tracks inbound leads that request a free trial and sends out a personal email from the sales rep that is a simple non-graphics email saying "Thanks for your request.. I just had a couple of questions so we can get your trial started. Do you have 15 mins for a call tomorrow?"

The response rate is 50% and above and this simple automation flow helps this client to connect LIVE with their customers and build a relationship, which I believe is the ultimate object.

Vaibhav Domkundwar
Nurture: The World's Simplest Marketing Automation App
http://www.nurturehq.com

I think several participants have given some good answers; the emphasis of "engaging customers" and "revenue performance" are very valid, but I want to add an interesting facet that many people don't think about. Marketing automation indeed requires sound processes to work. But another benefit to it is that it institutionalizes data about customers that was probably never collected before and promotes continuity of the Marketing and Sales messages and functions from the organization over time.

I say this because we've been hearing for a long time how a CMO's tenure at any firm is less than 24 months (give or take a few months, depending on who's survey your reading) Likewise, it is reasonable to assume that marketing support staff rotate more frequently than not; salespeople go through an even more frequent churn. How many times have you seen leads dry up because there was no one to nurture them? How many "hot" deals went cold because a salesperson left without briefing the person who inherited the account, so the new account owner shelves the opportunity because they have other "low hanging fruit?" Marketing Automation keeps the data from what Eloqua calls "Digital Body Language" readily available for anyone in the organization with the need to know, so any breaks or setbacks in human interaction can be partially remedied with the customer's interaction history.

When an organization creates its unique lead management processes that Marketing Automation fulfills, it is actually sustaining a coherent, consistent conversation over time with customers in spite of the revolving door of "actors" on the vendor side. This ability, which now can achieve a scale never before seen, allows the brand promise and experience to be communicated for extended periods. Of course, we will always need real people to establish trust and connect with other real people, but once solid processes of lead management are in place, Marketing Automation can allow those processes to work beyond the "tour of duty" of the people that originally configured the platform.

So part of my evangelism of that customer data is a strategic asset. Marketing Automation helps gather, store, analyze, and share such data in a way that allows continuity when connecting with customers.

Best,

Joe Zuccaro
Allinio
http://allinio.com
@joezuc

Sales is a one-to-one relationship, while marketing is a one-to-many conversation. The game is making the many feel like they are the only one.

In the past, the marketer’s tools were limited. Advertising, direct mail, email blasts, even telemarketing could only be personalized based on the demographic details of the person. The list was segmented to some fashion and maybe some of the messaging was altered, but there was no assurance that the message would be relevant to and accepted by the target.

Jump forward to today, and the use of powerful marketing automation apps to keep a running tally of a target’s behavior. This behavioral data allows for extremely relevant messages and content to be delivered to the target. This doesn’t happen just once but over a period of time creating that conversation that marketers crave. The data collected by marketing automation apps allows for relevant content to be delivered to the right target at the right time.

Let’s look at an example. I sell grilled cheese sandwiches. Without marketing automation my marketing method would be to buy a list from a cheese company and promote my sandwiches. I can also buy a list from a bread company and promote my sandwiches. The calculation I have made here is:

Liking cheese = Liking grilled cheese sandwiches.
Liking bread = Liking grilled cheese sandwiches

That is pretty big jump. Is an offer for a grilled cheese really relevant to someone who likes bread? Maybe, but the correlation coefficient (the measure of the strength of the straight-line or linear relationship between two variables) is weak. There are lots of reasons a person may like bread, other than an affinity for grilled cheese. They may not even like cheese.

However, with marketing automation apps I can buy a list of people who eat lunch. Doing so identifies the market most likely to eat a grilled cheese. Now I can drill into the best bets for new or current grilled cheese eaters. I start by sending a message about the wonderful flavor and variety of cheese and monitor who responds. Then I send a message about the health benefits of whole grain sliced bread. This has allowed me to ID who likes bread and who likes cheese. Now I can send a targeted and relevant offer that has a better chance of success.

A like of bread and cheese = A like for grilled cheese sandwiches

There is much stronger correlation than the bread only, or cheese only relationship. And the more someone likes these items, the better chance there is they will like my product.

Marketers need to move away from traditional demographic and qualification criteria to target their efforts. Instead, use marketing automation apps to monitor behavior and create that relevant and timely message. Ask you sales team, I bet they will say that actions speak louder than words when trying to identify the next big opportunity. Marketing automation lets companies do this.

Mac McConnell
www.BlueBirdStrat.com

We use our own marketing automation platform extensively at Eloqua to connect with our customers. We've been able to automate several processes to allow us to reach more customers more efficiently with a consistent message. For example, we have a welcome program that sends a series of emails to certain new customers with the message that applies to them. "Power user" folks receive more detailed messages than "reporting" type users and at a different frequency.

We also have renewal messages that are automatically triggered based on an account renewal date -- this information is synched daily between our CRM system (Salesfore.com) and Eloqua. In the past we've also used automation to routinely check in with our references. We see a lot more potential with that program and are in the process of upgrading it. We're also working on new programs specifically targeted at our Eloqua University All Access Pass holders to help them get the most from their subscription.

Sometimes the list of possibilities actually seems endless and we love it that way!

To help organizations better connect with their customers, to build and sustain one-to-one personalized lifetime dialogues across all marketing channels, marketing automation must make data actionable. One of the first steps to creating a valuable customer experience, one that is personalized and consistent, is ensuring your data is centralized in a single datamart in order to create a consolidated, 360 degree marketing view of the customer that includes: cross-channel inbound and outbound offer history, cross-channel interaction history (social, mobile, web, call-center, email, etc.), demographics, sociographic and expressed and preferred interaction behavior. Unifying inbound and outbound communications data enables marketers to better track and manage all marketing activity to generate targeted messaging and make the best, most relevant offers based on customer behavior and established preferences.

For example, a centralized customer database provides call-center agents with real-time access to view outbound promotional campaigns, website activity, purchase history and demographic information about customers. In services businesses, like telecommunications, with thousands of inbound calls to the contact-center each year, this information is used to dynamically tailor offers and reinforce promotional programs across channels. Agents can identify exactly which promotions the customer recently received, or accepted in the past, and the system automatically prioritizes the most appropriate offers to present.

Jon Miller from Marketo said something to me yesterday that was really interesting ..and that is ..."We think of automation as making a process more efficient, which in turn will return marginal improvements. But in the case of marketing automation - it's about creating real breakthroughs in revenue performance. It's not about making an underlying sales process 20% more cost effective - or even 30% more effective. It's about tripling it .. and in turn doubling your revenue."

He then showed me real stories of how marketing automation helped sales people achieve 50% higher quotas - and not by working harder - but by working smarter for all the reasons Kristin states.

I realize this response is off-topic ... because the question is about customers - but I thought Jon's response about sales people (in the context of a marketing discussion) was so spot-on.

Hi Lauren,
I read your question twice, and a key part of that question is how marketers stay in touch with customers. By customers you mean clients for your firm, as compared to prospects. As you know, firms are likely to achieve sales from current customers than new customers, so Marketing Automation is a tool that allows you to cross-sell and upsell. It's important that salespeople utilize their CRMs to create fields and track sales, and what was sold. Once marketers receive that database of current customers and comprehensive sales data, that data can be sliced and diced into subgroups, uploaded into marketing automation, and messages sent that include unique offers based on those subgroups with the goal to sell additional services or products. In addition, messages can be sent as a customer service approach, or even a newsletter, so that customers continue to be nurtured.