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Enterprises have never before had a choice of so many high-performance sales and marketing software. Just a few years ago, marketing activities were bundled into one campaign. But now, many small campaigns are deployed with diverse target groups, instruments, and content to reach customers. The challenge: today’s customers are not interested in just being informed, they want to interact with enterprises – on a personalized level, via their favorite channel. Enterprises thus face the task of enlivening all marketing activities and campaigns via all possible channels. This is feasible with a marketing automation system – and you can bank on our experienced specialists to support you in setting up a customized solution on marketing automation.
Key Functionalities of a Marketing Automation Program
The ideal marketing automation system should offer these functionalities:
- Multichannel capability: a marketing automation solution matched properly to your needs uses interfaces to integrate all channels that come into question for communications. This spans traditional direct marketing channels like emailing and telephony, push, Web, and social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. Moreover, such a solution should support your customer service staff, for instance, with next best activity marketing services.
- Campaign programs/planning: multi-stage customer journeys allow you to achieve revenues not possible with single-level campaigns. The sequence of campaign steps taken – like contact, interest, reminder, purchase, and thanks – depends on how the customer reacts to the prior step.
- Response tracking: campaign managers view up-to-date responses on opening rates, click rates, product sales, or acceptance of services to assess the success of their campaign. The marketing automation program simultaneously calibrates the target groups dynamically for subsequent campaigns. Here, it is important to include both responders and non-responders when analyzing the level of success.
- Managing customer contacts: contact with the customer is the lever that determines your enterprise’s success, but it’s a scarce commodity that should not be taken lightly. It is crucial to minimize the risk of sending spam to your customer, otherwise after that he/she is not likely to take even good offers seriously. Integrated applications help your enterprise to identify the optimal time for contacting the customer via the best channel.
- Process support: a host of steps in a campaign need to be coordinated. Hence, a full-scale comprehensive solution to manage a campaign should use just one interface to map and handle the entire process – i.e., estimate of the potential, approval, selection, shipping, etc.
Want to learn more about optimal customer journey management? The next article will show you how to further optimize your customers' journey!
