Marketing automation: Lower marketing costs. Measure ROI. For years, small- to medium-sized organizations have envied the powerful, integrated marketing campaigns conducted by their big-company counterparts. But with today’s new technologies, big budgets, big databases and big marketing departments are no longer the only keys to marketing success.
Rather, new marketing automation technologies are making it easy for even the smallest organization to create powerful, cost-effective rules-based marketing campaigns.
What is impact-based marketing?
Impact-based marketing is a process that allows marketers to deliver timely, relevant and consistent communications to their prospects or customers via email, direct mail, telemarketing or other communication channels. Through impact-based marketing, you, as a marketer, create “rules” that guides your marketing campaigns. These rules govern which information is sent out when, which messages go to whom, which prospects or customers fall into which categories, and so on.
Impact-based marketing campaigns can be as simple as a sequence of communications that are triggered by a specific event, such as when a customer fills out an online form. Or they can be highly sophisticated, involving multiple tracks of information, dynamic content and new rule sets that change or take effect after each communication. Perhaps most important, because impact-based marketing is triggered by actions taken by your prospects or customers, communications tend to be highly effective. Why? Two reasons. First, the information is highly relevant because it’s not only based on expressed interest, but also predicted areas of interest identified by actual behaviors. And, second, because these communications are sent to your audience at the time that’s right for them, rather than when it’s most convenient for you.
Impact-based marketing in action
Let’s say you send out an email announcing a web-based seminar. Using impact-based marketing, you can set impact that automate the different actions you’ll take based on the different responses (or lack of responses) to your invitation. For instance, those who didn’t open your email may, a few weeks later, receive a followup with a different subject line. Those who opened the email but didn’t click through would receive the same message, albeit with different benefits statements. And those who clicked through and completed the landing page form would receive an attendance confirmation—and perhaps other information as well.
While technology is making it easier to perfect the targeting of your marketing message, it’s also revolutionizing the management of your entire marketing campaign. In the past—and, unfortunately, in nearly two-thirds of companies yet today—marketers have used disparate software tools to manage their marketing campaigns. These tools—often called “point solutions”—may include an email marketing solution, a survey-building tool, a custom-built landing page and much more. However, the lack of integration between these tools and the fact that these tools are list based instead of database driven often leads to duplication of efforts, lack of data consistency and poor followup.
However, today’s latest generation of marketing automation solutions allow you to run virtually every aspect of a campaign from a single, integrated marketing solution. This reduces data complexity, provides better visibility into customer marketing interactions, ensures message consistency across mediums and enables a comprehensive impact-based marketing strategy.
If your organization is looking for a fresh way to increase its return on marketing investment, take a close look at today’s new and highly cost-effective marketing automation technologies. Then stop envying those big companies—and start emulating them!
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