What is Marketing Automation and how does it work?

What does Marketing Automation do?

As opposed to email marketing tools that offer selections based on fixed lists and bulk features, a Marketing Automation platform gives you much more features and (real-time) integrated data.

• Hypersegmentation

  You create dynamic customer segments from all available data. These are calculated every moment and each gets its own personalized follow-up. This way you are able to send or show each customer or prospect a relevant message at the right time.

• Advanced Email Marketing Automation

  You send emails according to a schedule (schedule) or if they are started by an action of a relation (webhook). By having multiple schedules follow one another, a complete customer journey workflow is automated. This can start with the first acquaintance on your social media, web shop or website, payment and onboarding after purchase and loyalty and upsell campaigns afterwards.

• Omnichannel

  Your relations use different communication channels at different times and locations. You align the channels:

  • email messages with the right message at the time when your target audience is reachable via email

  • social media (ads) to your different target audiences (custom audiences) based on the knowledge from your data

  • website and landing page personalized and prefilled (prefilled)

  • sms and app messages when your relations are mobile (on location, in store) are

  • web push messages for immediate service and engagement when relations are online

  • print and telemarketing exports and links to your CRM

• Personalization

  Based on all the combined data, you can personalize content, depending on the person receiving the expression, the right content is brought to the data.

Why a Marketing Automation?

By timing and personalizing the communication with relations, a Marketing Automation platform helps your customer and prospect in their search and you in achieving returns, running campaigns more efficiently and customer retention. This is because you can enter into the right communication with relationships at every stage.

Marketing Automation benefits

• Return

  By getting relationships interested in your product at the right stage, providing information for orientation, a targeted offer or service after purchase, you increase the likelihood that your offer and service will match the customer's needs. With large groups of relations, it is crucial to do that with software and based on aggregated data from the organization. A higher ROI is the result (10-30%, see McKinsey).

• Efficiency

  Personalizing relationships at the right time can only be done using smart technology and software. This brings together the "4 D's": Data, Decisions, Design-content and Distribution. But Marketing Automation also solves the automation of manual, error-prone organizational processes. Think of booking appointments or payment transactions. It delivers another 10-20% more efficiency (McKinsey) in the organization. Time that can be spent on optimization, savings or not having to expand in fte/employees or hire external freelancers and partners.

• Customer Retention

  In your customer data, all kinds of signals come in (real-time). From order systems, customer service notes, web visits to store (checkout) information. The proper registration and follow-up of an order, a complaint and follow-up offer are overcome with Marketing Automation. More upsell retention simply also means less pressure on generating new customers.

Marketing Automation software

There is a lot of marketing technology on the market. Sometimes software requires several complementary tools, so choose well. Some software stems from CRM systems, which has advantages and disadvantages. Other software has limitations that are fine for an SME but quickly limit growing organizations in their capabilities. In this article you will find a good overview of the most common options. Well-known Dutch and English software vendors are ActiveCampaign, Adobe Eloqua, Act-On, HubSpot, Marketo, Ternair Marketing Automation, Selligent and Salesforce Pardot/Marketing Cloud. Due to your organizational guidelines and GDPR legislation, pay close attention to where data is (indeed) stored.

More information on what exactly is involved in buying Marketing Automation software can be read in this article.

What does Marketing Automation software cost?

Small SMEs can purchase a Marketing Automation tool for as little as a few tens per month. However, the capabilities are out of proportion to advanced tooling. For these, you will count several thousand dollars per month, but they will offer you optimal growth opportunities in terms of return and save you full FTEs (employees).

The main drivers of cost are the number of relationships and customers, the ability to integrate your data from different sources (from simple and standardized to customization), the number of customer channels to be deployed and the number of users of the software.

Roughly speaking, you can use the following range:

What you can do with marketing software, you want to be able to compare well. In this article, read a comparison of the capabilities of different marketing technologies.

What does Marketing Automation software deliver?

Return, efficiency and customer retention. Obviously, Marketing Automation gives you more benefits the more customers you have, multiple sales channels, a larger assortment, higher order values. Yet your ambition to better serve your customers based on data is by far the biggest challenge. That's exactly what Marketing Automation helps you with.

Roughly speaking, you can use the following percentages:

Explore and calculate your own business case for marketing automation with our whitepaper. If you want to see examples of how marketing automation can work for you, check out our webinar.

Marketing Automation at Ternair

Ternair develops marketing automation software, We do so in conjunction with Customer Data Platform options so that your campaigns leverage all your data together, without having to set up a data warehouse or CRM first.

Our approach: Marketing Automation flows

All advanced Marketing Automation capabilities are standard in Ternair, such as creating (email) Marketing Automation flowcharts, performing A/B testing, contact pressure management, creating web services, but also sending newsletters and one-off campaigns are supported. The automation software includes a complete email software editor including sending. No technical knowledge is required. You yourself combine real-time all your data for every customer in every channel. Your entire Marketing Automation workflow is supported. Ternair has Marketing Automation specialists to train you and who are available at the time you want to outsource.

FAQ: frequently asked questions about Marketing Automation

• How do I choose the right Marketing Automation tool?

  With Marketing Automation, you are more likely to reach the right prospects and customers with less fragmented resources. But with power comes responsibility. If you choose Marketing Automation software based on wrong assumptions and expectations or do not deploy it correctly, your customers may become alienated from you. Proper preparation is therefore essential.

• What does a Marketing Automation tool cost?

  The cost of a Marketing Automation tool depends heavily on the exact deployment, your ambitions and the size of the organization. Thanks to a better offer per customer and focus on campaigns (+10-30% more efficiency), 5 times as many campaigns with the same capacity (+10-20% efficiency) and a better customer view with more targeted follow-up campaigns (+5-10% customer retention), the investment normally pays for itself.

• What organizations use Marketing Automation?

  We deploy Marketing Automation for both large and small(er) organizations. Thanks to our experience at companies such as KLM, VluchtelingenWerk, RAI Amsterdam, Springer Nature, Vesting Finance, Bouwmaat and small businesses, we understand what you care about and how we can help you with it.