Data-driven marketing automation

Data-driven marketing automation lets you minimise manual work and maximise performance for your marketing team.  While there are many automation tools out there, an integrated marketing automation platform gives you greater visibility and control across marketing functions and leverages your customer data to personalise and target more accurately.

At Datamine, we support customers all over New Zealand and Australia as they implement and develop their marketing automation solutions and use data to optimise their performance.

Here’s what you need to know:

How marketing automation works

Marketing automation is an umbrella term for any tools or platforms that automate marketing tasks.  These include campaign management, lead management, email design and scheduling, customer lifecycle journeys and customer data collection.

There are many tools and options on the market, but most businesses now use full automation platforms that manage all core marketing tasks.  By drawing from your customer and business data, these platforms give you a new level of control over the different parts of your marketing process.  They can help you optimise both lead management and base management streams so all customers – and potential customers – get the right messages at the right time.

Get more insight in our free Guide to Marketing Automation.

Marketing automation, like any new initiative or business project, can come with challenges and roadblocks. However, many of these arise from the way businesses choose to use the technology rather than the platform itself.

Here’s a look at some common pitfalls – and how Datamine can help:

Data issues

Data is the engine that drives automation, but not all data is created equal. If your business has a huge volume of data, low-quality data or data stored in multiple places, implementing an automation platform could be more difficult. This doesn’t mean automation is impossible – it just means that your business may need expert support to clean and consolidate your data before you start.

Neglecting process optimisation

Automation isn’t just about eliminating manual tasks from your current processes – or at least, it shouldn’t be. If you’re using a marketing automation system and it’s still taking too long to launch new campaigns, it could be a sign that you haven’t examined your workflows and found ways to streamline them. Again, the Datamine team can offer support here – we are experts in optimising marketing automation processes and maximising the impact of your marketing automation platform.

Focusing on delivery, not learning

It’s easy for marketing teams to get caught up in campaign delivery – after all, that’s the main focus of their work. However, focusing on delivery above all can leave your team without the time or energy to spend on trialing, testing and refining automation approaches. As a result, you could miss opportunities to improve your marketing outcomes. It’s a good idea to set up a dedicated time for testing and learning so your people know that they’re an important part of the process.

Failing to track and measure

It’s hard to know whether your marketing efforts are working if you don’t track and measure performance. While this is a crucial piece of the optimisation puzzle, it’s something many businesses lose sight of in the day-to-day shuffle. Marketing automation platforms make it easier to track in real-time and measure against KPIs, and support from Datamine can ensure that you’re using these tools correctly.

Under-resourcing

Finally, many businesses invest in a marketing automation solution but not in the skills or resources needed to plan, design, build and monitor marketing campaigns. It’s important to have skilled people on your team to lead your marketing automation work, along with support from experts if needed.

Data-driven marketing automation delivers many benefits, and your success in this space is highly dependent on what you can achieve within your resources. When you partner with Datamine to manage your marketing automation, you get access to our deep knowledge of marketing automation, data, analytics and reporting to assist you on your marketing automation journey.

We see the main benefits as:

Marketing automation best practices include precise planning, consistent tracking and measurement, and using data to drive everything you do.

Here are our key pointers for marketing automation success:

Plan, execute, measure

Marketing automation can take much of the manual work off your hands, but you still need to plan, carry out, and track your performance.  The good news?  Your marketing automation platform can do many of these tasks, helping you execute your plan and track performance in real-time.  Many automation platforms include simple dashboards that let you track performance against your chosen KPIs.

Improve targeting with data

Data is your secret weapon in marketing – and automation can help you use it effectively.  With data-driven automation, you can identify customers based on behaviour, trigger actions or segmentation, and use that to personalise messaging.  The goal is to know your customers and target them with the right messages based on their historical behaviour and current context – for example, a long-term customer with changed purchase behaviour.

Test and learn

Marketing automation is a golden opportunity to take chances with your marketing and find out what works.  Trial different approaches to segmentation, content, timing and customer journeys, measure results, and put your findings into your next campaign.  It’s important to have a dedicated time for this process, as it’s easy for testing to get lost in the day-to-day.

Leverage your systems

Make the most of your investment by leveraging all your tools, systems and integrations.  Instead of simply letting your new platform manage the same old marketing, use functions like journey automation, templating and re-use to streamline operations and give customers a better experience.

Prioritise personalisation

Treat every customer or lead as an individual, using the power of automation.  For example, you might send highly-engaged customers and less-engaged customers down marketing funnels with different goals.  The highly-engaged group could receive an email journey aimed at conversion, while comms to the less-engaged group aim to win them back.  With an automated marketing system, it’s much simpler to build, execute and track targeting at this level.

Want to know what marketing automation could look like in your business?

Talk to one of our experts.