Customers come into contact with brands through a wide variety of channels every single day. Marketing campaigns can only be effective if they reflect all these channels, which will increase the probability of user engagement. Being present in the right channel at the right time with the right message is a challenge for marketers and one that ties up a lot of time and resources. Professional Marketing Automation solutions can help: they enable the precise, time-controlled placement of messages using pre-defined customer segments or, alternatively, customer segments determined in real-time. 

Automated applications allow the creation and management of cross-channel campaigns across email, social, web, and mobile in a single, central platform. In this way, campaigns can be designed and planned with the aim of getting closer to the customer – and automatically controlled based on personalized characteristics and insights.

Marketing Automation on the Rise

Holistic, automated systems are not yet widely used in practice, but are becoming more and more widespread. Regardless of whether a best-in-breed system or a Marketing Cloud is used, marketers can now largely automate their activities across the various Marketing channels.

By using data in real-time and initiating targeted interactions, marketers can experience real success. This can be achieved by combining data for targeted cross-channel campaigns while establishing a single customer view. Benefits include the minimization of inefficiencies and recording of campaign performance across all channels. 

The ideal solution is, therefore, an integrated approach that is designed to bundle all automation measures in a single place. 

The most important options for its use in Marketing are:

Behavior-Led Messages According to Customer Segments

Marketing Automation uses specific target values and segmentation characteristics from customer profiles to define needs-based contact routes. This means that customers who exhibit a certain behavior or remain inactive can be reactivated with a situation-specific message. 

This can be used effectively in lead generation. Modern Automation platforms can support the marketer in obtaining leads. Such solutions can help to create landing pages then individualize and send customized messages to the right contact at the right time. 

Highly personalized leads are distributed across all relevant Marketing channels, taking you from the first click to the conclusion of a deal. At the same time, Marketing ROI is measured with the help of dashboards. This makes it possible to determine exactly which activities are successful and which sales targets are achieved for each country market and for each department.

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Strategic Setup of Cross-Channel Campaigns

Modern Automation solutions follow the whiteboard principle. They allow marketers to set up cross-channel campaigns from a simple, graphics-based user interface and to expand them as required. Across email, mobile, and online, the solutions illustrate complex contact scenarios and outline the potential for increasing your customer interaction. 

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Continuous Optimization

What counts in the end are the results, and whether these results are different than initially expected. Digital marketers want to be able to analyze their campaigns at a glance – and know what measures they can take to increase the effectiveness in the future. 

Marketing Automation Platforms provide a holistic and transparent overview of cross-channel campaigns. For each campaign phase, they provide real-time statistics that show which parameters work best and which have little effect. Marketers can take timely action to optimize campaign performance. Marketing Automation also makes it easy to test different campaign variants.

Conclusion

It is widely agreed that cross-channel digital campaigns are an important way to reach customers, but they are not easy to implement. Their holistic planning and control in a marketing automation solution make it possible to win over customers, accompany them throughout the entire customer journey with personalized messages – and encourage them to make a lasting and effective commitment. 

In view of the increasing complexity of day-to-day business and the growth in international competition, I expect marketers to be asked to invest much more in automation systems in the coming years.

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