There has been a drive in the business industry over the last couple of years towards the concept and use of automated marketing. For businesses looking to invest in this there are major risks and inherent flaws. In fact, the Aberdeen Group released a study indicating that close to 90% of companies struggle with automated marketing, largely due to the lack of integration of upstream processes and systems, and silo thinking.
These challenges, however, can be addressed by linking the business's automated marketing system to a business intelligence (BI) solution.
In simplistic terms, automated marketing is the method of marketing products and services directly to consumers by utilising technology. An example of this is those pesky e-mails and SMSes that one receives on an ever-increasing frequency.
Keeping promises
However, to understand the problems or flaws of most automated marketing solutions, one needs to look at what is required from the solution itself. The focus here is not on tool functionality, but rather on the promises that automated marketing implies:
* Firstly, to increase revenue! Since automated marketing is by nature below-the-line, the uptake on offers must be relatively easy to track, depending on how generic the campaign is. This information must be fed back into the process to refine product offerings and better-targeted future campaigns.
* A business's solution must reduce costs and acquisition expenses, but increase sales revenue, competitive advantage, market share, and brand awareness and preference.
* Marketing staff should be able to use their time more efficiently and effectively.
* Consumers must not be bombarded with unwanted campaigns. Rather, these campaigns should increase customer satisfaction, bringing the right campaign to the right customer at the right time.
* The system must be adjustable so one can refine and adjust campaigns as demand and market conditions dictate.
* Depending on the nature of the company, the solution must either encourage personal contact or encourage self-service.
So, where do the problems lie?
Campaigns should increase customer satisfaction, bringing the right campaign to the right customer at the right time.
Gerhard Botha is principal consultant at PBT.
* Probably the costliest aspect of bulk marketing is that businesses reach customers that would have spent that money on its product anyway!
* Frequently, information from the various departments in a company is not interfaced. Master data management is still a pipedream for too many companies, leading to a silo view of the customer.
* The solution must be true to the 'automated' bit. Though one can never run the company's marketing on auto-cruise, it must not take more effort to set up and implement than manual campaigns would demand.
* One should not attempt to up-sell and cross-sell to people who do not want or cannot afford the product.
* There is no human interface to typical automated marketing solutions - this is the nature of the solution, but the message the customer receives must be tailored.
Typically, automated marketing systems will be fed manually or hooked into a CRM system. The disadvantage of this is that although CRM systems give some insight into customer behaviour, like basket analysis, demographical data and have some financial details, it does not have the power of a full BI solution in terms of referencing across functional areas, or better still, advanced analytics. So how can BI be used to drive automated marketing?
A BI solution that primarily consists of a data warehouse should have the ability to cross-reference data from various departments and systems and be better equipped to track and predict spending and payment patterns, cross-reference credit information from third party enriched data sources and predict campaign outcomes. Should the company's BI solution also include an advanced analytics and data mining component, then aspects like cluster analysis will provide an even better outcome in terms of offer uptake, fewer annoyed customers, predictive behaviour and avoid offering discounted products that the customer would have bought anyway.
The power that BI can and will provide is the analysis of feedback based on uptake. One must factor in normal purchase behaviour, cyclical fluctuations and market trends to fully understand the success of a marketing campaign. This will lead to further refinement of campaigns and tuned advanced analytics models, which will in turn lead to actionable insights, identifiable trends and problems.
In general, BI solutions are well equipped to provide a single view of a customer through cross-referencing and fuzzy logic matching, which will allow companies to better understand and market their product, which will in turn contribute to better understanding customer preferences, purchase patterns and relationships with other departments to uncover hidden opportunities.
Since corporate performance management is a key component of BI, one can closely match KPIs with intended marketing outcomes. Other marketing opportunities include:
* BI solutions can also be used to identify new customers.
* These solutions can predict attrition in many cases.
* It can identify market and trend analysis.
* A BI solution can link back to CRM for direct, personal interaction or give insight into better above-the-line marketing initiatives.
Many of the advantages of using BI for automated marketing hold true for regular marketing, but the idea is to have an intelligent, self-adaptive automated marketing solution. By incorporating BI with the automated marketing solution, this can be achieved and automated marketing can prove successful for businesses.
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