Mastering the art of connected marketing automation

In today's fast-paced digital marketing landscape, businesses are constantly seeking ways to enhance customer engagement and drive better results. Marketing automation has emerged as a powerful solution to streamline marketing efforts, automate repetitive tasks, and leverage customer data to deliver personalized experiences.

What is connected marketing automation?

Connected marketing automation, then, is the next level up from just streamlining and automating tasks; it's about interconnecting all marketing channels for a seamless, unified customer journey. It leverages customer data from various touchpoints – be it web, mobile, email, or social. This data intelligently triggers actions based on customer behavior and preferences to ensure timely and relevant interactions, taking customer engagement to new heights.

In this blog post, we will delve into the concept of marketing automation, discuss its benefits, and explore how you can revolutionize your marketing strategy using Customer Data Platforms (CDP), personalization tools, and email campaigns.

What are the benefits of connected marketing automation?

Connected marketing automation elevates your strategy beyond simply automating repetitive tasks, such as emails or social media posts. It brings together customer data from every touchpoint – online and offline – and utilizes it to inform personalized, engaging interactions in real time. By interlinking all your marketing channels, it ensures a seamless and unified customer experience.

In a world where customer journeys are increasingly complex and fragmented, connected marketing automation provides the coherence and relevancy that today's customers demand. It enables your business to respond proactively to individual customer behaviors and preferences, leading to enhanced engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, increased revenue. In essence, it is the bridge that connects your marketing efforts with the unique needs and wants of each customer, allowing for a truly customer-centric approach.

Connected marketing automation tools

Building a successful connected marketing automation strategy requires strong marketing automation tools, which are typically established on three integral components: a Customer Data Platform (CDP), a multi-channel personalization, and email campaign management. Here's how each element plays a crucial role:

Customer Data Platform (CDP):

A CDP lies at the heart of connected marketing automation. It collects, organizes, and harmonizes customer data from all touchpoints, creating a unified and real-time view of each customer. This comprehensive understanding fuels every other aspect of your marketing automation strategy, enabling more informed and precise decisions.

Multi-Channel Personalization:

To deliver truly connected experiences, you need the ability to tailor every interaction to the individual customer's needs, behavior, and history. Personalization capabilities take the rich data from your CDP and use it to craft unique experiences that resonate with each customer, where they are - across various channels, driving engagement and loyalty.

Email Automation Tool:

Lastly, your email campaign builder enables your business to create, send, and track personalized email campaigns. The use of personalization tags and conditional elements allows for the customization of content for each recipient, further enhancing the effectiveness of the campaign.

Connected marketing automation examples: driving business success

To better understand the power of marketing automation, let's explore some use cases that demonstrate its potential:

Connected marketing automation implementation guide

By integrating a CDP, personalization tools, and an Email Automation Tool, businesses can create highly targeted and personalized connected marketing automation strategies. For example, when implementing a cart abandonment recovery campaign, businesses can leverage the power of CDP to segment customers who have abandoned their carts, trigger a real-time personalized email using the personalization tool, and finally, create and send the email campaign using the email campaign builder. This integrated approach streamlines the process and ensures that each campaign is optimized for success.

For example, in this Connected Marketing demo video, Sarah O'Reilly demonstrates the integration between Sitecore CDP or Personalize with Sitecore Send to create highly customized and personalized messages for customers. The main takeaways from the video can be summarized as follows:

1. You can add custom fields for each user to be used in personalized emails, such as recommended products, preferred brands, or geo-information.
2. Using Sitecore Personalize, you can add customers to the mailing list in real time through a full stack triggered experience.
3. You can also use Sitecore CDP batch segmentation to identify customers with similar interests and to be added to a mailing list using Audience Sync.
4. Then you configure personalized emails using conditional elements and personalization tags based on data coming from Sitecore CDP and Personalize.
5. Final step is by configuring automated email sending through Sitecore Send's marketing automation.

Conclusion

Embracing marketing automation and integrating CDP, personalization tools, and email campaign builders can accelerate and increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.