Marketing Automation — It’s All About Customer Experience

happy customer looking at the laptop's screen and smiling
James T Fletcher
CEO, Principal Consultant

27/9/2018

You may already know how marketing automation can benefit you as a marketing professional. A marketing automation platform collates data, brings together and optimises omnichannel campaign interactions into one database, and provides invaluable analytics to help you gauge your return on investment.

In other words, marketing automation helps you streamline your strategic marketing actions.

But how about looking at what marketing automation does for your customer?  

If you look at it from the customer’s point of view, you’ll see that marketing automation brings just as much value to customer experience as it does to you. The right marketing automation platform gives you the knowledge to understand your customer’s journey as a whole.  And, once you have that data, you can predict—and, better yet, respond to!–customer wants and needs, personalising the content you provide to your customers and ensuring a great customer experience across the entire marketing funnel.

Here’s how marketing automation can boost your customer experience:

Know what your customer needs thanks to powerful analytics

An automation platform give you the tools to deliver targeted content and to track its performance—basically, it helps you give your customers the right content at the right time across all of your omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Remember: your customers are just as busy as you are, so they won’t want to spend their limited time wading through email duplicates and repeat approaches that are not right for them.  Is your customer ready for a newsletter? Do they want to hear from you on a weekly basis or a monthly basis? How much contact is too much, and how much is just right?

Marketing automation analytics give you the data you need to assess customer readiness across their user journey and to feed that data into your own campaign planning – because when you know what each customer needs and target your approach accordingly, you won’t waste your customer’s valuable time. Your customer will appreciate your efforts, be thankful for the value you’ve provided at each interaction…and most importantly, be likelier to stick around.

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Give them what they want—where they want it

With marketing automation, you’ll see exactly where and how potential customers and actual customers are interacting with you, so you can deliver a personalised experience in the right places and ensure your content marketing strategy actually works.

Are they reaching out on their mobile devices?  Do they want to engage on social media or are they commenting on blog posts? Can they approach you easily across any of their preferred platforms?  And do you know which of these platforms they prefer?

Your marketing automation software will identify user journey maps across multiple channels and quantify how much your customers interact with you, giving you the information you need to effectively personalise, target, and optimise your marketing messages and user interface for each platform.  Your customers will see what you have to offer and you’ll make it easier for them to save time and effort by connecting with you there.

Remember:  your customers are busy, and they will appreciate your efforts to reach out exactly where THEY want to be.

Better feedback for you = better experience for them

A satisfied customer is a loyal customer.  But do you really, truly know when your customers are happy?  How do you measure and make sense of campaign data? Can you pinpoint where you could be reaching your customers better?  Do you know what they prefer?

The right marketing automation tool enables you to get the feedback you need to provide your customers with a better service.  You can ask the right questions and put feedback requests in the right places so your customers (a) know are listening to them, and (b) can give you the inputs you need to drive your strategy, assess its impact, and boost your customer’s overall experience.

Which initiatives give you a good return on investment?  Which could do better? The data culled from reporting can be used to fine-tune your strategy and make a measurable difference in ensuring your customers feel like you really and truly listen to them.  

In a nutshell:  When you measure and optimise your marketing initiatives, you can give your customers a personalized experience and value in each and every interaction.  A satisfied customer is a loyal customer. And a loyal customer will stick around—and want more.

Do you want to know more about how marketing automation can boost your customer experience? We can help you find the right platform for your company.