I’ve talked a lot about how email marketing is both art and science in the past. This has never been more true than today. Whether you market to businesses or consumers, using an part art/part scientific approach to how you market to them has never been more important. And, using a well-thought-out process that includes targeting and segmentation, then really tweaking your message to make it extremely relevant to those segments is key to email marketing success. And, as I’ve pointed out before, it is equally important to start with clean email address data and email deployment tools and strategy.
So, how do you effectively accomplish all of this? With the exploding numbers of marketing channels available to your business to communicate and interact with customers and prospects, how do you capture all of this rich information and effectively apply the intelligence to your email marketing campaigns?
Two words . . . Marketing Automation.
Sandra Zoratti wrote (yet another) great article recently on the Marketing Automation in BtoBOnline. She defines marketing automation like this:
In other words, [marketing] automation is the creating and sending out the evocative, subjective, creative (art) messaging that helps us, as b-to-b marketers, better engage with our prospects and clients.”
So true! With marketing automation, you can actually start to bond with your customers through your marketing interactions. Marketing automation tools (now available at a myriad of price-points and complexity) will help you better capture the rich inbound customer interactions (tied to specific behaviors) so that you can make all of your outbound communications much more relevant to each segment, and therefore, successful.
In her article, Zoratti also points out the three common deficiencies resident in companies trying to build more personal, targeted and personal communications programs (a leading strategy according to the CMO Council):
1) Poor data gathering techniques and analytics.
2) Siloed data and, as a result, inaccessible data.
3) Inaccurate and/or unclean data
With a marketing automation solution in place, however, these deficiencies can be remedied over time — making all marketing efforts much more effective. Zoratti comments:
We b-to-b marketers need help to capture and leverage the power that lies latent in data, create customized content based on that analysis and then measure results and learn from each marketing action. Over time and through iterative learning, we get better and better at content marketing and speaking relevantly to our customers.
And, marketing automation helps you get there. If you haven’t considered using a marketing automation solution to help you market better, you should definitely take a look at what is available in the market. Marketing automation will definitely lift your marketing efforts to the next level and help you extract more success from each campaign over time — because you are marketing smarter. As Zoratti says, ”When leveraged properly, marketing automation can drive big results for retention, engagement and your bottom line.” And, that spells marketing s-u-c-c-e-s-s!
By the way, if you haven’t had a chance to read Sandra’s book called Precision Marketing, you owe yourself a great Holiday gift. This book provides excellent perspective on how to market with precision — and enhance your entire marketing strategy while doing so. I highly recommend it.
Happy Holidays!
