Everyone understands that the future of marketing is a personalized experience for every user, and that having the ability to understand the customer journey and map key marketing communications at precise moments in that journey can result in a massive uplift in customer acquisition and retention.
That’s why many companies consider automation capabilities as one of the important criteria when choosing their marketing platforms. Some even purchase advanced marketing automation platforms in hope of delivering an omni-channel 1:1 personalization experience.
Assessing your maturity in marketing automation
Let’s say you purchased a platform, painted a promising vision and set goals akin to a new year’s resolution. After months spent on platform integration, you kicked off by automating one or two marketing campaigns, such as welcome emails or manually curating a few segmented messages.
Although things seem to be up and running, you realize that most of the time you’re still sending batch and blast communication on the platform, and the automation capacities are greatly under-utilized.
Does it all sound too familiar?
Don’t get us wrong. We are not over-advocating marketing automation as if it should be the centerpiece. However, there are certain aspects in your long-term strategy, like personalization at scale or consistent inbound pipeline, that can only be achieved effectively through the help of marketing automation.
To give another perspective – you’ve invested in the platforms and paid for the capabilities, and know that a good return is out there which you should be able to capture. Not trying to fully utilize your automation functionalities is like joining an expensive gym membership exclusively for a single dumbbell. For someone who cares about ROI, won’t you have the itch to use it to its full capacity?
Consider the following table, which illustrates different levels of maturity in marketing automation, to give yourself an indication of where you are against your target.
Accelerating your marketing automation
If you noticed a discrepancy in your assessment, don’t worry. This is a commonly heard scenario. Let’s face it – marketing automation by its nature is vastly detailed and complex. It is not as simple as plug & play and suddenly everything autopilots itself.
The reality is, marketing automation success has a cascade effect. It takes a lot of upfront knowledge to set things right. Done poorly, one small mistake could create a snowballing effect. Not only do you need the right knowledge, but you also need a wealth of different supporting resources – data engineering to feed in data, marketing to curate communication, platform specialists to ensure logic flow and deliverability, to name a few. In most cases, the various resources are borrowed from other teams, and the speed of progress can really be dependent on required teams’ availability and priority.
Complexity holds people back. It’s all too tempting to stick with what you know when it’s too hard to know where to start.
Yet, if you are looking for a way to change it, it is important to acknowledge that although marketing automation is set to reduce manual effort, the implementation is not effortless. Leveraging external expert services earlier helps you overcome the friction faster and delivers the return you desire more effectively.
Let’s get you a hand!
At Ematic, we’ve built years of experience on marketing automation across many platforms. We understand your pain points, and can bring essential expertises to help all parts of your marketing automation process, from strategy planning, technical setup, campaign creation/management and analytics and optimization.
Whatever problems you are facing, Ematic is here to solve. <<Contact us>> to explore how we can improve your marketing automation, or learn more about our service offerings.
