New year: Time to improve your marketing efficiency

Happy New Year. 2018 is underway! We’re all back at our desks after some welcome time off and in all probability a lot of over-indulgence!

With the festive season behind us no doubt you have been planning for the business year ahead and thinking – how am I going to fit in all this? I either need a second “me” or more time!

Unfortunately, technology has not yet reached the dizzy heights of human cloning or time travel, but the software and technology available to marketers is constantly being enhanced, and Marketing Automation is a key area for time saving.

Why Marketing Automation?

Most Marketers are already clear on the benefits of marketing automation but the wider business may not fully appreciate the fact that it will:

• Save time by reducing your workload, simplifying the process of setting up new campaigns and automating distribution and other processes.
• Drive engagement by treating customer and prospects as individuals, with effective communications.
• Increase revenue due to more appropriate targeting.
• Further improve campaign performance by allowing regular review and editing when needed.
• Ease budget management.
• Align sales and marketing teams.

All the advantages listed above can be important to a business, but saving time and therefore money, is probably at the top of most lists.

How does it save time?

A typical marketing team is extremely busy, so if a system can be put in place enabling the team to focus on the strategic elements such as the customer journey, brand building and content, rather than the routine data manipulation, send and distribution – this would have a clear benefit to the business as a whole, not just the marketing team.

It can also save your sales team time, when it’s appropriate to let automated emails do the initial follow-up to a prospect filling in details online, etc, until a pre-determined level of activity has occurred to justify a sales person’s follow-up.

Linking your CRM of customer and prospect data to your marketing automation system will mean that email or mail distribution is automatic when contacts meet the criteria that you have set within the software.

What sort of system do I need?

The automation systems available vary from entry-level email marketing automation like MailChimp and other ESPs provide, to more complex communication systems. These more advanced systems, such as PeopleStage, enable more advanced multi-channel automation, which can be continuously informed by insight gained from analysis, modelling, and more.

What is the right system for you will depend on what kind of campaigns you currently run and how far and what channels you want to automate. Generally speaking: more automation = more time saved.

There is of course an initial time investment during the set-up period where you define the criteria for different sends and the creative/campaigns that would be sent in each instance. Once this is agreed and set-up, you can leave the system to do the rest. Just ensure you monitor and report to ensure effectiveness of campaigns and criteria so you can tweak these on occasion if and where required.