Keeping customers — automatically

Mar­ket­ing is a busi­ness func­tion that has been trans­formed by automa­tion tech­nol­o­gy, impact­ing demand gen­er­a­tion in a way that has reaped huge finan­cial ben­e­fits for organ­i­sa­tions. But as Act-On Soft­ware, a leader in mar­ket­ing automa­tion, points out, there’s still much to do.

It is an issue that Act-On’s chief exec­u­tive Andrew MacMil­lan is pas­sion­ate about. He talks about a huge mis­align­ment of mar­ket­ing effort with­in the major­i­ty of busi­ness-to-busi­ness or B2B com­pa­nies, with too much focus on cus­tomer acqui­si­tion and not enough on reten­tion. As a result, organ­i­sa­tions and their mar­ket­ing func­tions are miss­ing a trick.

“Tra­di­tion­al­ly, the mar­ket­ing func­tion with­in most B2B com­pa­nies is focused on demand gen­er­a­tion,” says Mr MacMil­lan. “This involves find­ing new prospects, assess­ing their suit­abil­i­ty and fit as a prospec­tive client, scor­ing their inter­est, and then hand­ing the next stage of the client acqui­si­tion and reten­tion process to the sales func­tion.”

While the adop­tion of mar­ket­ing automa­tion in the last few years has speed­ed up and effec­tive­ly stream­lined the demand-cre­ation process, its use has been pri­mar­i­ly just for that – acqui­si­tion mar­ket­ing.

Now the wide­spread adop­tion of mar­ket­ing automa­tion is reach­ing a tip­ping point. As the use of the tech­nol­o­gy becomes a major­i­ty strat­e­gy, the ear­ly adopters are look­ing for ways to retain a com­pet­i­tive edge. And it is the for­ward-think­ing chief mar­ket­ing offi­cers (CMOs) who are recog­nis­ing the broad­er appli­ca­tions for their mar­ket­ing automa­tion plat­forms.

This comes at a time when greater demands are being placed on the CMO, in terms of engag­ing cus­tomers with the brand, yet as Mr MacMil­lan says, no one is actu­al­ly account­able for the cus­tomer life cycle.

“We can see huge oppor­tu­ni­ties for the CMO to step into this role,” he says.

The use of mar­ket­ing automa­tion has just scratched the sur­face; the tech­nol­o­gy can also pro­vide the struc­tur­al frame­work for mon­i­tor­ing, mea­sur­ing and engag­ing with cus­tomers across the life cycle. The same tech­niques used for demand gen­er­a­tion can be used to score and nur­ture oth­er busi­ness rela­tion­ships, includ­ing influ­encers and end-users.

As more busi­ness­es turn to a sub­scrip­tion-based mod­el, more of their rev­enue even­tu­al­ly starts com­ing from exist­ing cus­tomers than from sign­ing new prospects. As a result, the extend­ed use of mar­ket­ing automa­tion for cus­tomer reten­tion will grow.

“We are see­ing more and more com­pa­nies apply their mar­ket­ing automa­tion to the renew­al process. By incor­po­rat­ing pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics they can apply a much more pre­scrip­tive approach to mar­ket­ing across the entire cus­tomer life cycle,” explains Mr MacMil­lan. “This allows organ­i­sa­tions to man­age and trig­ger com­mu­ni­ca­tions based on life-cycle stage or cus­tomer behav­iours. They can iden­ti­fy who the brand advo­cates are among their cus­tomers, tak­ing mar­ket­ing intel­li­gence to a new lev­el.”

A study into the cus­tomer engage­ment life cycle, car­ried out by Act-On Soft­ware and Gleanster Research, involved a sur­vey of mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. It found that top-per­form­ing mar­ket­ing teams made bet­ter use of cer­tain tac­tics than aver­age com­pa­nies. For exam­ple, top per­form­ers were twice as like­ly as all oth­er com­pa­nies to trig­ger per­son­alised mes­sages by stage, based on prospect behav­iour, demon­strat­ing a clear under­stand­ing of the cus­tomer life cycle. Top per­form­ers also lever­aged data using tech­nolo­gies that include mar­ket­ing automa­tion.

We are see­ing com­pa­nies recog­nis­ing they can still cre­ate a very per­son­alised cus­tomer engage­ment expe­ri­ence, but in an auto­mat­ed way

“The way to grow a busi­ness is to increase the num­ber of qual­i­ty prospects,” says Mr MacMil­lan. “It is a major dri­ver of poten­tial rev­enue. With mar­ket­ing automa­tion they can also retain and engage those cus­tomers.”

Some mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als may have con­cerns that mov­ing from more tra­di­tion­al man­u­al mar­ket­ing inter­ac­tions to auto­mat­ed process­es could under­mine the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship. In fact, it can bring a more per­son­al touch to the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship, mov­ing beyond con­ven­tion­al mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion and engag­ing cus­tomers on an indi­vid­ual basis.

Mr MacMil­lan says: “We are see­ing com­pa­nies recog­nis­ing they can still cre­ate a very per­son­alised cus­tomer engage­ment expe­ri­ence, but in an auto­mat­ed way. The way to do this is by using data and rule sets to ensure every sin­gle prospect and cus­tomer feels they are con­stant­ly being dealt with as an indi­vid­ual and in a per­son­alised way. This is where peo­ple start to feel engaged with a brand.”

Does this mean that mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als need to acquire a whole new set of skills to be able to use mar­ket­ing automa­tion in a more sophis­ti­cat­ed way? Or will there be a need to bring in tech­nol­o­gy experts to run the sys­tem for them?

It means nei­ther, accord­ing to Mr MacMil­lan. “We believe that you can have pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy that is easy to use. With our own prod­ucts, you do not need to have a data­base admin or spe­cial­ist IT exper­tise. They are designed to be sim­ple to use by mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Basi­cal­ly, the scor­ing process­es with­in the automa­tion tech­nol­o­gy takes the raw data and boils it down into some­thing that you can use,” he says.

The busi­ness world is becom­ing increas­ing­ly cus­tomer cen­tric, with a grow­ing demand for com­pa­nies to treat the cus­tomer life cycle of engage­ment as a con­tin­u­ing, seam­less process rather than a series of stages to be man­aged sep­a­rate­ly by dif­fer­ent func­tions with­in the busi­ness. Mar­ket­ing automa­tion tech­nol­o­gy is the key to deliv­er­ing a more holis­tic man­age­ment of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence through­out the buyer’s jour­ney.

“We are see­ing more and more com­pa­nies glob­al­ly rolling out mar­ket­ing automa­tion, and it is hap­pen­ing very quick­ly,” says Mr MacMil­lan. “The CMOs with­in the top-per­form­ing com­pa­nies are becom­ing the new man­agers of the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship. And using mar­ket­ing automa­tion to focus on and man­age the entire cus­tomer life cycle leads to high­er lev­els of cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and engage­ment with the brand.”