Yes, we hear this quite often these days, and to be honest it is not far from the truth. After all Marketing Automation and ROI go often hand to hand.
However, the real reason, though not so obvious, is just one inch below the surface.
In the past ten years, we’ve got the opportunity to work with many large organizations, many of which are well-known brands.
A lot of these companies go through almost identical challenges when question marketing automation and ROI, as part of their digital transformation journey.
The unfortunate thing is that after not achieving the desired/promised outcome, typically followed an overall bad experience and statements such as:
- “Marketing Automation doesn’t work!”,
- “This platform is not for us! We have to try something else.”,
- “We can’t afford to spend more money on this!”, and so on.
In this article, we go through some of the key challenges that lead to these experiences, and how to overcome them.
Hopefully, this article will give you enough good tips so you become a MarTech champion, and hit your ROI KPIs!
Introduction
Before we continue.
This article is intended for organizations that already have a marketing automation solution, and are not satisfied with the results.
Now, before we start, let’s make few things straight.
Any Marketing Automation platform (a real one), is one of the most powerful tools, that any marketer can have in her toolset!
It can be the most powerful canon and the most sensitive sensor, gathering valuable insights and driving ROI.
However, as such, it represents a two-edged sword!
You can use it for the benefit of both your customers and your organization’s growth, and to build stronger relationships.
Or…, it can cause severe damage to your brand and company image, revenue, and ultimately can lead to losing customers.
It is perhaps the only tool that has such a massive impact on your brand and customer satisfaction in your entire organization.
So, not to freak you out, but just to emphasize its significance, and therefore the importance of investing the necessary time and resources to make sure you set things up right, and operate most efficiently!
So Why Marketing Automation
The core purpose of marketing automation is Customer Experience. Period.
Everything else is just bells and whistles.
You will not set up such an expensive system to just send emails and run some reports.
If that’s the case better go with MailChimp or similar.
Good Customer Experience will most likely have a positive impact on your ROI.
Additionally, the Marketing Automation Platform should be the “Control Center of Intelligence and Insights” for your marketing department.
It is the place where you should get your entire marketing efforts status quo, measure performance, and orchestrate most of the communication with the outside world.
Anything from campaigns, confirmation emails, online receipts, or real-time messages, this type of platform should be able to manage.
Common Challenges
What we’ve seen often, is that many organizations don’t give enough privilege to marketing automation as part of their tech stack.
There are many reasons for that, but one of the most common is that CRM is more important, …aaand also the fact that the Marketing and IT, in general, are in eternal misalignment. Yeah.
A study conducted by KPMG and CMO Council, based on a survey of over 200 marketing leaders, elaborates into more details on the organizational impact caused by the misalignment between CMOs and CIOs.
They state, “CMOs in “very effective” relationships with IT are more likely to have multi-year strategic MarTech plans in place and support those plans with 18-month or longer funding perspectives.” (Making MarTech Pay Off – 2021)
Additionally, many times Marketing Automation solutions have been configured without much planning or proper architecture design in place.
Things like messy data models, poor data quality, unconventional naming across assets, flows, and so on, bring companies down to their knees.
Things start to crack, KPIs break, customers complain. …(dramatic look) things go downhill.
Not enough testing and quality assurance is another common trait among companies. This typically causes issues such as, wrong emails being sent to the wrong audiences, which further can result in increased unsubscribe rates and ultimately higher churn.
To sum up, these challenges have a significant impact on the platform:
- Performance
- Security, and
- Usability
So, what to do!
In general, there are many things that can be done, this section covers some, which are quite critical to be addressed.
- CX Strategy
- Solution Architecture
- Automation and Personalisation
- Platform Maintenance
- Organisational Structure
CX Strategy
Why is Customer Experience Strategy Important!
CX is your long-term guidance and a driver for deploying various strategies and tactics in order to achieve success, improve Inbound/Outbound marketing, conversion rates, etc.
Typically you have to align your CX, DX, and UX across all relevant platforms and channels.
Designing the right Customer Journey will give you that great oversight of how your business should position itself in regards to your customers, and it will be a crucial input for designing a solid Solution Architecture.
With the right CX strategy, you can improve your CSAT scores, brand positioning, and loyalty, and if well-executed, it will increase your activation rates.
Solution Architecture
With a good CX strategy in place, you can safely create a scalable and performing architecture design.
Among the many aspects of this phase, some of the key areas to focus on are Data Model, Data Quality, and Data Integration.
More on these, another time! – but feel free to ask.
Automation and Personalisation
Content personalization is super-critical not only for keeping conversion rates high, but most importantly to ensure the sender IP address and domain/subdomain don’t get ranked down or blacklisted in the worst case.
We write more about it in “Few Reasons why Email Double Opt-in!“
That being said the content has to be meaningful, in other words valuable!
We explicitly cover the importance of being relevant in “What makes people listen!”.
To be more specific, personalization is not profile merge fields, e.g. Hi “[first_name]”, etc.
True personalization is highly relevant content, custom-tailored, often on run-time compiled, and unique for the specific recipient.
It’s a true “match-making” between your customers and your products/services, or other relevant information.
While most of the Marketing Automation platforms offer some sort of personalization, such as dynamic content, the most advanced ones are based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms.
For example, Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses Einstein, you can read more about it here.
With Einstein, you can utilize features such as:
- Email and Web Recommendations, as next-best content
- Send Time Optimisation for determining the best time to send a message, and
- Einstein Engagement Scoring to score the contacts, e.g. Leads which can be extremely helpful for your Sales teams to close deals faster
In regards to, Automation Flows, e.g. Journeys, Programs, and Campaigns.
Well, this is a true challenge for many organizations!
It is very easy to end up with hundreds of automation flows, and completely lose track of what is happening.
Having an overall “map of the world”, as a diagram to give you an overview of which flows are active and how they are related, will make a huge difference.
And there is no better tool for the job than LucidChart.
This process will make it easier to debug and make better decisions in case you need to build on top of the existing setup.
Platform Maintenance
Many organizations tend to set things and forget them. As mentioned before it is quite easy to lose track of what has been implemented over time.
So, frequent platform assessments will add up to the overall platform success.
This should be a must requirement for all serious marketing automation marketers.
We write more about what this work should cover here.
Platform Assessment in general creates a valuable insight for the overall platform condition and performance, and it can help you as part of the legal compliance, in case of a GDPR audit.
Organisational Structure
One of the major and often least invested areas critical for a successful Marketing Automation adoption is the necessary team structure to maintain the new setup and all related operations.
I strongly suggest, besides your Steering Committee, you also establish a Design Authority and Change Control Board responsible for all key decisions regarding the overall platforms ecosystem, CX, and architecture.
This team should comprise Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Architects, and SMEs.
The following program structure has been suggested by Salesforce, and if well implemented can truly make a difference.
The value in terms of control and insights this team can create is unprecedented.
It will give you the subtleness you need for your business to grow while your customers are happy with your products and services.
That being said, Agile or SAFe is the way to go. If your company is sensitive on this topic, at least consider some kind of a hybrid model.
Conclusion
Our expertise comes from years of experience working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and Oracle Eloqua.
However, no matter which tool or platform, the success/fail patterns across companies are more or less identical.
It really comes down to you and your team. How do you utilize the platform and how are you organized to achieve success.
If there is a single thing on top of mind which I could advise before you get hands-on and go crazy, that would be long-term planning and architecture.
Having a solid Solution Architecture is like a strong fundament onto which you will build your castle. Anything otherwise can only compromise the integrity of the entire solution.
This post was created by advension.com. For more information about what we do and how we can help your company, please see our services, or just get in touch.
Photo by Elio Santos on Unsplash
