Marketing Automation: The confluence of Arts and Science of Marketing

Marketing is witnessing a paradigm shift in the way it used to happen in the past and the way it’s happening now. With the advent of Marketing automation softwares, the processes involved in various direct marketing initiatives of every organization have become more streamlined, organized , data oriented and thus effective. With the mindset shift of marketers to make marketing a weapon to be at the service of customers, organizations are investing heavily on setting up marketing automation systems on top of their existing data-warehouse or a CRM system. Marketing automation provides marketers to drive campaigns with in depth analysis of customer segments, robust insights about customer behavior and demographics and thus help them achieve their ROI targets more smoothly.  Not only does a Marketing automation system helps the marketer, but it helps the end customers as well. This has happened because these marketing automation systems empower today’s marketer with tools and techniques to drive campaigns in such a way that it turns out to be a service rather than an irritant. With very robust opt out systems and touch management systems in place, Marketing automation softwares help marketers to stay away from customers those who have shown dis-interest to receive such marketing communications. Moreover it can cater to preference based marketing communications. Say for example somebody is ok to receive emails but not tele-calls as marketing communications from various organizations. A Marketing automation software lets a marketer configure a campaign flow in such a way that those who have preference indicated as email will receive emails only and not through any other channels of communication like a tele-call or an SMS or a direct mailer. Similarly if somebody is fine with receiving an offer via tele-call but has a preference to accept a call only during 5 PM in the evening to 8 PM in the evening, then a marketer can configure the campaign such that the call to the person goes sometime during this window.

But a marketing automation system’s benefits are not restricted to scheduling of campaigns only.  A Marketing automation system encompasses almost every aspect of activities that a marketing department of an organization undertakes. It gives top management of the marketing division an option to create marketing plan for the entire financial year or for a quarter whichever is the norm of the organization. Then this plan can be further broken down into programs which relates to specific lines of business within the organization thus letting budgetary allocation happen within the environment. This process not only helps at the beginning but is more useful at the end of the year/quarter when return on investment calculations are done as the calculations become very lucid.  It regulates access levels so that though all marketing resources are on the same platform, only that information can be made available whatever is required for the designated role of a resource. This streamlines processes in such a way that information, assets and workflows all are in a consolidated form and not scattered here and there. Apart from that, a marketing automation system allows workflows to be created within the system and thus marketing resource management, allocation and monitoring work becomes very smooth for marketing managers. For example (Pharmaceutical companies do marketing in a very different way. They do not reach out to the end customer and promote medicines as that does not make sense as well. Pharma companies execute their marketing initiatives through a wide network of medical representatives who directly interface with doctors and explain them new drug details and asks them to prescribe those. So it is of utmost importance to these companies to keep track of their Marketing Resource planning, reporting hierarchy, approval management process, budget, circulating up to date digital assets like brochures and more after overcoming geographic and language barriers. An Enterprise Marketing Management system (Teradata Aprimo strongest in this space) helps pharmaceutical companies manage their marketing resources, budget, approval system , digital asset maintenance and much more to execute in a very smooth yet seamlessly connected environment  )  The progress of the work can be tracked and reminder alerts can be set within the environment. Moreover , there are a lot of options to streamline workflows through approval management which makes the campaign cycle time very less as approvals are within the same environment and any task pending can be highlighted with a reminder /alert system.

Apart from these process related benefits which a marketing automation system brings along with it a host of advantages in terms of precision of campaign audience lists, more accurate in terms of timeliness of marketing communications, more interactive, enhanced features to nurture leads and of course a lot of options to track effectiveness of campaigns in a better way. In a nutshell a marketing automation system can take care of every aspect of the entire lifecycle of a campaign. These systems need very less manual intervention even in executing event based campaigns and are capable of automating invitation emails, reminders, thank you notes and missed you notes. Only the event attendees list needs to be prepared manually in an excel spreadsheet and uploaded to the system. Same is the story in case of a nurture campaign. All follow up communications be it a tele-call or an email with a brochure as an attachment can be automated based on the response of a prospective customer to the first touch. Moreover the entire marketing operations of the organization is managed in a much better way with campaign calendars and workflows of individual campaigns all managed centrally on a consolidated platform. Most of these marketing automation softwares caters to the most advanced forms of marketing like social media marketing and easily integrates with all prominent databases and CRM systems.

But as we talk more and more about Marketing Automation software enabling today’s marketers to execute highly precise digital marketing campaigns and automated execution, we also find these softwares providing ample scope of addressing the creative aspects of marketing communications. Most of these tools have an HTML editor as an integral feature which allows the marketer to create their own creative or the option of importing an HTML document is also present. Some have the feature of integrating with external softwares like Adobe Dreamweaver. With the HTML editor you can create the HTML content for the email communication as well as you can create a landing page where a customer will be redirected from the email body for registration or transaction. This feature enables the tool to keep track of responses very well and a marketer can easily find out the source from where the lead has flown in to the landing page. These tools even has the capability of enabling real time marketing on popular social media sites like Facebook, based on likes of an individual. This in turn gives marketers option to ignite their passion for creativity by placing banner ads on organic pages like Google, Yahoo or social media sites like Facebook. So a marketing automation software is a complete package on whom marketing divisions of most organizations are depending today.

The most prominent players in this segment are:

IBM Unica
Eloqua (Acquired by Oracle)
Neolane
SAS CI
Pardot(Acquired by Salesforce
Teradata Aprimo
Silverpop
Marketo

IBM Unica is the market leader in multichannel multiwave campaign management category. Gartner places IBM Unica as the leader in its magic quadrant of marketing automation softwares.

Forrester also rates IBM Unica as a leader in the multi channel campaign management space.