Marketing automation – a term that conjures up few positive associations. It conjures up memories of impersonal newsletters, misdirected product recommendations and annoying ‘follow-up’ calls. This is as true of banking as it is of any other industry. But with a growing generation of customers who neither know nor seek personal contact with a bank, the effective digitalisation of sales is much more than the optimisation of an unloved channel – it is a question of survival in the medium term. That is why we will show you how customer-centric sales automation works.
The Role of Marketing Automation as a Part of Lead Management
Lead management is the strategic process of automatically identifying, personalising, nurturing and tracking sales opportunities across multiple channels. Marketing automation is a subset of lead management and is the system-supported execution of recurring marketing tasks. Instead of performing these tasks manually, such as sending marketing emails, marketing automation can be used to define process steps and automate them using workflows. For this to be not only efficient, but demonstrably effective, your marketing automation needs to be built on the following five pillars.
1. Targeting – Data-Driven Target Groups
If you do not know your target, you will not reach it. This is why data-driven targeting is so important. Customers with similar characteristics and user behaviour (e.g. same age, similar income, interest in a product, etc.) can be grouped and defined as a target group. This enables sales activities to be automated through pre-defined workflows.
2. Triggers – Event-based Triggering of Marketing Activity
Marketing automation uses identifiable events (triggers) to automatically execute pre-defined actions (such as sending a message) at a specific time. Different user behaviours can trigger the action, such as downloading a fact sheet or interacting with a website for a pre-defined period of time. This makes it possible to respond to a customer interaction in a timely and personalised manner. This increases the likelihood of a lead being closed and can increase brand awareness, even if the customer does not end up buying a product.
3. Personalisation– Individual Customer Interaction
In the context of email marketing, personalisation means using information that is already available about the recipient to initiate an individual communication. This can range from a simple personalised address and first name greeting to individual product offers and tailored services based on comparative data, user behaviour or location-based characteristics.
It has been proven that customer interactions with personalisation elements in theme and content have a 26% higher chance of being noticed and on average result in 5.7 times more sales than without any personalisation. (Source: campaignmonitor.com)
4. Tracking – Rule-based Triggering of Actions along the Customer Journey
Tracking can be used to monitor the customer journey and create an exact online footprint of the target customer. This makes it possible to track when a recipient received a marketing content, navigated to the landing page and whether they interacted with it. From this information, the customer profile can be sharpened, and follow-up actions can be triggered. The collected insights can be processed and transferred to a CRM tool for follow-up.
5. Integration – Continuous Lead Management through Closed Loop Integration
As already made clear in points 1-4, marketing automation consists of various individual activities, which in themselves can already offer a benefit. However, the full potential of a lead management system unfolds when individual activities are networked and integrated into existing systems. In this way, results are fed back into the organisation in order to constantly optimise lead management through a continuous improvement process.
You’ve read enough and want to start implementing with us? Congratulations! abaQon supports you as a competent partner in the definition, design and implementation of integrated lead management, in the creation and establishment of your digital sales strategy and in the evaluation and implementation of a suitable marketing automation solution.
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