Back in 2017, when I was responsible for designing and implementing the follow-up process for Bookapo, a Farsi book summary service – like Blinkist, Get Abstract, and Shortfom – the online automation tools were limited and exclusive to companies with a more extensive customer base. However, even early-stage startups can now take advantage of the many benefits of automating the marketing process. In this article, I will share my experience with some of the automation tools I have used and also write about the promising future of marketing automation.
How I Used Marketing Automation in my early career
My first experience with automation tools goes back to when I started utilizing CRM tools instead of endless queries to our database and many, many, and many spreadsheets. For the first time, I could set reminders of follow-up calls, do real-time segmentation, and send out promotional messages based on prescheduled plans. The only challenge was collaboration and sharing leads and reports because of how they handled the software on each machine. The cloud systems were not out yet, and people had quite a hard time combining all the data for the weekly report.
Email marketing was another area revolutionized by the development of automation systems. I used to prefer Mailerlite because of its slick features, even way more advanced than Mailchimp. Still, their pricing system is not a good fit for every business as it is based on the number of subscribers rather than the number of emails. Therefore, nowadays, I prefer an email marketing tool that can act as an email list management system, which is almost impossible on Mailerlite.
Only with these services could it be possible to visually design automated email marketing systems without going through hundreds of lines of code. Automated emails guide subscribers through every step of their journey, from transactional emails like welcome emails to promotional emails like a special offer from a campaign. By setting up email marketing automation workflows, I could reach the right people at the right time.
A failed Attempt
Another experience I have with marketing automation, which unfortunately was a total failure due to technical complexity, goes back to implementing a referral system.
We wanted to give away vouchers for one month’s subscription to Bookapo to some selected well-known people in the startup ecosystem. The next step was to send three unique digital coupons as soon as they activated their free subscription. And the process repeats for every new subscriber. We had to make sure every person received three unique codes via email and SMS, and also, every code must work just for the non-subscribers and could be used once. We even got excited about our idea and wanted to send people voucher codes starting with their first name, so they feel even better when giving them away to their friends. The project had many other details, but considering the technical infrastructure, we never had the chance to implement the process.
The downside and the solution
Although the idea of utilizing marketing automation tools is intriguing for many companies for the sake of reducing the unnecessary tasks from the marketing team, having a separate tool for each channel and each marketing purpose could add to the complexity of keeping in touch with customers and prospects and also sometimes could end up with many inner conflicts, like sending different offers at the same time or even worse, sending promotions to an unhappy customer.
That is where all-in-one tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo, and Webengage truly shine and can handle such intricate situations. The shift is in the way they look at the whole process. It is not just about recording some actions and sessions and acting accordingly. It is how these tools try to humanize the process by having a separate entity for each person and filling the profile of that person with as much information they can gather, omnichannel and across different devices.
The Future of Marketing Automation
There are still two problems with this kind of marketing automation. First, these advanced platforms can capture so much raw data about each person that it is almost impossible for a marketer to understand and act upon just by reviewing them like before. Second, as the journeys could be multistep, conditional, and personalized for each person, it is more challenging than ever to track marketing efforts and determine which actions impact KPIs most and run controlled tests, which was far more manageable with the previous generation of automation tools.
Here is where the next generation of automated marketing tasks begins. Growth managers and marketing products managers are looking for tools that can provide insights based on their customers’ data and evaluate complex journeys using AI and machine learning models. I know many startups currently working on brilliant services to fill this gap. On the other hand, market leaders are also trying to develop add-ons to their current products to address those two problems.
Salesforce Einstein is just one of the promising attempts to “innovate and automate fast with AI across Salesforce,” as their website reads.
The Take-Away
In upcoming years, more services will be available to marketers to understand their customers and automate their marketing efforts using data-driven insights and recommendations from AI. That is why I believe every marketer should spend most of their time learning about the underlying marketing principles behind each tool to catch up with the fast-growing pace of the business world. Moreover, from the users’ perspective, we can expect less spam and more relevant marketing messages with more intelligent automation systems.
