It’s no longer enough for a publisher to rely on a welcome gift and the occasional newsletter to attract and retain subscribers. Frequent, personalized, and well-timed communication has become the norm. Marketing automation ensures that the process remains manageable even with large numbers of titles, customers, and touchpoints.
Why Marketing Automation Is Essential for Major Publishers
Marketers don’t want to overwhelm (potential) customers with information they won’t take in anyway—after all, that’s largely a waste of money and effort. They know that people do want to receive commercial information, but it has to be relevant to their own specific situation. And it has to be presented at the right time. But as a marketer, how do you get exactly the right information to the right people at the right time when you have thousands of contacts? Automated marketing, or marketing automation, makes it possible to reach out to large numbers of customers on a personal level.
Support throughout the entire customer journey
There’s a long road between the first encounter and the moment someone becomes a (loyal) customer; and after that, there’s yet another long road to the stage where the customer also purchases other products or services. Every customer travels that path (the customer journey) in their own way and at their own pace. It’s wise to guide each customer along that journey to prevent them from dropping out or getting lost.
To be able to offer that personalized guidance, as a marketer you need a lot of information about your (potential) customers. Some of that information is usually available within the organization, but it’s highly fragmented. Some of it is in the CRM system, while other parts are in the account managers’ email inboxes, with customer service, with the agency that helps organize events, or with the distribution partner. If a publishing company has grown through acquisitions or mergers, there are often multiple versions of all these systems as well.
In addition, a great deal of information can be found on systems that do not belong to the publisher: Google Analytics, for example, tracks what interests people on the site, and social media reveals what they like or what upsets them.
Combining Dissimilar Data Sources
Unfortunately, each of these data sources has its own structure, making it difficult to link the data together or combine it into a single, coherent file. And figuring out “by hand” which data points belong together is simply impossible for a large publishing company. To address this, 2bMore has developed the “gripper”: instead of merging data files, data is combined based on various “keys.” Such a key might be a customer number or an email address in one instance, and a phone number or an IP address in another.
