1.1 Why is marketing automation growing?

Email marketing automation has been widely adopted by both B2B and B2C companies, and is currently growing rapidly. This trend has been given added impetus by:

• The dissolving of traditional boundaries between sales and marketing departments.
• Changing consumer behaviour: Social media, user generated content and mobile browsing are all changing the way consumers research and make their purchase decisions. Marketing automation provides a scalable way of keeping pace with ‘nimble-footed’ consumers.
• Marketing automation platforms are becoming increasingly sophisticated, accessible and affordable for businesses.

So, should you use marketing automation? Simple answer... yes, because it works:

And here are some case studies to illustrate the point:

• McAfee introduced automated processes to score leads, segment its audience and provide “right information, right time” triggered emails. The outcome: Leads dropped 35% but were of higher quality and conversion rates rose by 400%!
• Software company Opsview utilised automation software to handle leads coming into its website, identifying those that would use a free version of its software or an expanded subscription version, then sending targeted email depending on their preference. The outcome: Company revenues increased by 178%
• Stationary supplier PaperStyle.com automated its email process to deliver targeted and timely emails to customers who were planning weddings. The outcome: Email open rate went up by 244%. Revenue increased 330% per emailing.
• Acteva introduced marketing automation allowing it to quickly build and adapt landing pages and deliver targeted and personalised emails across 65 different audiences. The outcome: The business saw 350% marketing ROI plus 100% annual growth in areas where marketing automation was implemented.

1.2 Getting “buy-in.”

The argument for planning and rolling out marketing automation are clear and compelling.

So now that you’re persuaded, it’s going to be important for you get management on board. Here are three useful suggestions to help you do so:

• Start small. If you try to build the ultimate marketing automation programme all at once you’ll end up overwhelmed. Start with change that’s small and incremental, and ramp things up from there. Start small, think big!
• Set clear and achievable initial goals and objectives. Don’t be over ambitious at the start of the automation process. Give yourself time and set goals that you are confident can be achieved. Then leverage the successful achievement of your objectives to get buy-in on further automation.
• Sell the bottom line. Business is about making money, so to increase co-operation and reach the level of automation you want, sell the huge potential of marketing automation to save costs and increase revenue. Produce a well-structured and logical report to show this, maybe utilising a nice “before and after” automation graphic:

Are you in it for the long haul?

Email marketing automation can be a rich and rewarding process for any business. This graphic will give you an idea of how the automation pathway can develop over time:

The five phases of email marketing automation

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The 5 key success factors

Businesses that make marketing automation work, do so by following a structured approach. If you don’t cover off these first fundamental steps then you could be in danger of simply automating for the sake of it, rather than automating to help you achieve your business goals.

2.1 Set your objectives

You need to be clear about what you want to achieve from marketing automation, and why. So begin above all by defining your goals: Ask yourself, your colleagues, your key stakeholders; what are the drivers that will deliver your numbers? Is your key driver repeat business? Increased average order value? Increasing the value of initial customer spend? Reducing churn and attrition? Winning more referrals and recommendations? Prioritise these. You can’t do everything all at once with automation, so go for your top priority first.

2.2 Identify problems and opportunities

Now is not the time to be coy. Be very clear about the problems and opportunities you experience with your marketing. Identify where the opportunities really lie for marketing automation to have the most influence and impact on your numbers. Is it in your lead nurturing? Or in your postsale loyalty and retention nurturing, for example? Or is it all about driving that online sale?

B2B and B2C marketers will be facing different opportunities here – different sales lead times, different conversion funnels. There’s no cookie cutter approach. List down the headaches that your marketing people face that automation could help with: what are the manual tasks that are taking too much of your hard-pressed time? What do you wish you could do but simply don’t have the time to?

2.3 Be clear about your data

Your database will form the foundation of your marketing automation. Data collected, via any customer touchpoint, can be influential in triggering an automation programme decision. Here are our 5 key database considerations you should focus on in your planning stage:

• Data cleansing – get your database audited and cleaned up before you begin an automation programme. The old adage ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’ remains as true as ever.
• Data hygiene – have a plan in place to keep your database clean. Marketing automation can help with this: for example, sending automated surveys to customers after a set period of time, incentivising them to update their details
• Data capture and enrichment – be clear about the customer behaviour and profile data you need to drive the automation you want. And have a plan for collecting it.
• Data integration – marketing automation can become increasingly sophisticated and productive for your business, depending on the level of integration you have between your marketing automation platform and your CRM and CMS data. You won’t necessarily need third party system and data integration at the start of your journey, but think about building it in, down the line.

2.4 Do your customer journey workflow planning

Understanding your customers’ journey – the route they travel as they interact with your business – for example, from their first visit as a prospect to your website to their first purchase and then onwards into customer advocacy – is a critical success factor in your marketing automation planning

2.5 Get the content and creative right

Content is King. Remember, to get the best use of marketing automation you need to be sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Good content that is interesting to customers and relevant to their needs is an essential tool to ensure you are delivering the right message.

Marketing automation in action

3.1 Webform sign-up automated emails

The aim here is to respond to an initial website interaction by introducing your brand or your sales contact, saying thanks, offering added value and collecting more data while the contact is warm.

In this example from dotMailer client Harveys, the lead is first incentivised to sign up via a website form, with the promise of exclusive offers.

By capturing the subscriber’s first name, dotMailer predicts their gender and automatically populates the gender field when adding the record to the Harvey’s email list. Based on gender, a different image is served dynamically in the ‘welcome’ email.

Then an automated ‘thank you’ email is sent with a further offer: enter our prize draw. Acceptance at this point triggers another email, the lead can now enter the draw after completing a short survey (built with dotMailer Survey software) and handing over more valuable data.

3.2 Anniversary-driven automated email programmes

This is communication that is automatically triggered by the date of specific events:

• Birthdays.
• Anniversaries
• Deadlines.
• Renewal dates.

Here’s a good example of a personalised renewal email for Glamour magazine, reminding the customer that renewal is due and incentivising with two “bonus issues” if they renew now:

This birthday email from fabric.com, builds engagement with the customer by remembering his/her birthday and, of course, offering a birthday “gift” of a discount on their next order:

3.3 Email engagement-driven programmes

• Automatic follow-up when a link is clicked, or a campaign opened
• Automatic re-engagement emails where there are no clicks or opens

These are email campaigns triggered by a contact’s engagement with an email campaign you have already sent. For example, a user opens a solus email campaign you have sent manually, and clicks on a link in the email inviting them to learn more about your summer special offers.

This is your chance to reinforce the offers and calls to action on your landing page by sending a series of automated emails, perhaps offering some additional incentives if they act now, or to click them through to a deeper landing page with more detail and more added value.

You can trigger these forms of campaign off any range of email engagement behaviour. So for example you could send a triggered campaign to everyone who opened a campaign, or clicked a particular link, or to all those who didn’t click a link, or didn’t even open the campaign.

3.4 Website engagement-driven programmes

• Automatically follow-up on:

  • abandoned baskets.
  • abandoned sign-up forms
  • abandoned browse sessions
• Automatically follow-up on pages or products browsed, items in basket, form fields completed using dynamically tailored email content.

Following up website visits and behaviour with tailored real time email messages can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool. Again, this is where marketing automation can work hard to influence your contacts’ behaviour by sending the right message, at exactly the right time, without you or your marketing team having to lift a finger.

dotMailer (for example), enables you to send a dynamic email to anyone who abandons a shopping cart.

It’s dynamic because the content is unique to each recipient, depending on what items they have had added to their basket, and what items they have previously browsed or pages they have previously visited on your site. You can use this opportunity to re-engage with the user, offer them alternative purchases or promotional incentives to get them back into the purchase funnel in a single click.

This works for B2B marketers too. You can fire triggered emails to users who have submitted one step of a two step signup process, with the content tailored dynamically around the previous pages they have visited, and the webpages they have viewed. This kind of email marketing automation can have a dramatic and lucrative effect on your website conversion rates, basket values and lead pipelines.

3.5 Customer insight-driven programmes/h1>

• Dynamically tailored email content based on purchase history, recency, frequency, value, products purchased and location of purchase.
• Dynamically tailored email content based on customer preferences or profile and changes to that profile
• Dynamically tailored content based on lead status or lead score and changes to that status or score.

A classic example is the Amazon “customers who bought also bought” email:

dotMailer client, Spicerhaart, operates a network of estate agencies, with several distinct brands.

With dotMailer, they have created a customer behaviour driven marketing automation programme that nurtures home buyers throughout their lifecycle. Because the whole process is fully automated, over 90% of the emails are triggered by an applicant’s actions, as Spicerhaart’s iMarketing Manager, Matt Dale, explains:

“Once an applicant has registered, we keep track of which properties they have viewed and use that information to ensure they receive priority notifications when we take on a new instruction. Each of the individual property details that we send out has links to the properties on the website, so we can then monitor open and click rates to see what is attracting their interest and use this information to tailor other send outs.”

“Because the email marketing campaigns are designed to help improve customer service, the process doesn’t end when a customer makes an offer but moves into an added value phase designed to provide support with critical decisions, such as finding legal services and mortgages, moving on to setting up utility contracts, identifying and managing removals once contracts are exchanged, then completing the sale.” “At the end of the process of course we’ll also do a ‘welcome to your new home’ mail, and run a satisfaction survey to get their feedback on how well we were able to help,” Matt comments. “We’re also keen to get customer quotes, both on Facebook and our own sites, and encourage them to get their friends to use us, with vouchers for introductions. Email is a great way to help generate that kind of user-driven content.”

3.6 Lifecycle marketing and nurturing programmes

A customer’s lifecycle of interaction with your business can be complex and multistaged. For the purposes of this Guide, we’re going to show you the way to break any lifecycle down into three basic, distinct stages that enable you to set up three email marketing automation streams that will deliver you results.

On a basic level, these three stages are:

• Engaged prospects.
• Lapsed customers/clients.
• Engaged customers/clients.

3.6.1 Engaged prospects

The aim with this group is to draw prospects further down the sales funnel and convert them to customers. Emails in this case represent part of the automated lead nurturing campaign and will be designed to:

• Drive engagement through welcome programmes.
• Educate about your brand/products.
• Build trust.
• Drive conversion with “added value” offerings.
• Build a relationship

3.6.2 Lapsed customers/clients

Here, the aim is to bring lapsed customers back into the fold, to get them spending again. Communication might be in the form of:

• Re-engagement programmes
• “Come back, we miss you” offers and incentives
• Surveys to find out the reason for the loss of engagement (particularly useful if you have a high churn rate).
• A reminder to lost customers of what they’re missing via front of mind programmes.

3.6.3 Engaged customers/clients

With engaged customers and clients we have a different set of aims. Here emails are designed primarily to sell more, to cross-sell and to up-sell by offering:

• Loyalty building “added value” offers.
• Exclusive offers and promotions
• Cross-sell/up-sell product recommendations
• User generated content and/or events.
• Refer-a-friend programmes.
• Renewal programmes.

For example, overleaf a DMA award winning automated email campaign by dotMailer for Dove Spa, uses a 6 stage programme. It includes a ‘thank you’, an engagement building informative mail about the benefits of Dove Spa, followed by a cross-selling email.

Making your content King

Writing and producing the content for an extensive email marketing automation programme can be demanding. The mistake some marketing teams make is to start off planning too large a programme, only to find that they simply don’t have the time or resource to produce the content needed.

Our advice is to think big, but start out small. Begin with a short programme aimed at a single audience and then build on this over time. Content planning: things to remember

• Start small, think big
• Take stock of the usable content you already have.
• Map out the content you’ll need.
• Plan your content production resource.

4.1 Your Content Audit

Chances are you are not starting with a blank page when it comes to content for a lifecycle email marketing programme. Make an audit of the content you already have on your website, your blog, in previous newsletters and email campaigns – even on Youtube. Re-purposing content is a secret weapon used by savvy marketers.

Look for the content you already have that ticks any of these boxes:

• Inspires
• Enlightens.
• Educates.
• Helps and advises.
• Entertains
• Builds trust.

4.2 Lifecycle planning – your customer journey

We talked earlier about the concept of your customer journey – the route they travel through their interactions with your business, from first contact to conversion to sale, and onwards through post-sale care, repeat purchasing, and advocacy.

A dotMailer example…

This is an example of a simple customer journey mapping that we undertook for our own dotMailer marketing base, following a sign up to our 30 day trial. Here, we are tracking whether a user has logged in and whether they have sent an email campaign through the dotMailer app in week one. You can see how each path and action or decision, leads to an opportunity to send an important email marketing message that helps us to nurture our new trialists. And it helps us to influence the outcome at each stage

Creating a map like this will form a clear, logical plan for your email marketing automation programme that will in turn drive your data and your content plan.

4.3 Mapping content to each stage

We can use this decision tree to easily plan out the email marketing messages and content that we need to write and the emails we need to produce for each event.

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