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What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation makes a marketer's job lots easier. It is an umbrella term for technology that automatically manages marketing processes and campaigns across multiple channels. This makes it easy to send automated emails, texts, social media posts, and messages in chat apps. This ensures that you can implement a digital marketing strategy without manually having to press send on each and every email, text, social media post, or message in chat apps.
To send these marketing messages automatically, a set of triggers and tasks must be defined. These triggers and tasks are referred to as workflows. Workflows can be drawn up from scratch, but marketing automation software usually contains certain templates to easily define workflows.
How to store and centralize customer data
The most important input for marketing automation is data. Without data, it is almost impossible to use marketing automation tools, nor set up workflows.
However, data centralization might be a challenge within the company you work for. Data is often stored in several systems that might contain duplicate customer profiles. How to centralize, enrich, and segment your data to make it ready to use for your marketing automation campaigns?
To solve the problem of decentralized data, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is the best solution. With a CDP, data from different sources can be enriched to create personalized campaigns. Marketing automation is a tool that both needs data and generates behavioral data of your customers to further enrich its customer profile. This enables you to start conversations with people, not profiles.
Now you know how to centralize your data you can start creating automated workflows.
How to create an automated workflow
As mentioned above, workflows consist of triggers and tasks:
- A trigger is an action that a customer takes;
- A task is a task the system has to fulfill based on the trigger.
So: if [trigger], then [task]. For example: if a customer subscribes to a newsletter, then the customer receives an email with a discount code for his or her next purchase.
But also: if a customer clicks through in an email, then create an MQL, but if a customer does not click through, then send another email after 7 days with more informative content. This is an example of a so-called ‘branching workflow’: a workflow with multiple tasks originating from one trigger.
After visualizing these flows, workflows are easily built in a marketing automation tool.
Marketing automation with the Mobile Marketing Cloud
Marketing automation is the solution for all marketers that could use some more hours within a working day. It basically allows you to do more with less, how great is that?
After reading this, you’re probably more than ready to set up your own workflows and enrich your customer data. But do you have the tooling to start right away?
Well, we’ve got you covered! CM.com’s Mobile Marketing Cloud is an omnichannel customer engagement solution build for B2C marketers. What makes this tool so special, is that it is specifically aimed at mobile marketing. When your goal is to automate your mobile marketing activities, this is the tool to go for.
The Mobile Marketing Cloud helps you to collect data from multiple sources and build rich customer profiles with its own CDP. Create segments and workflows with an easy drag and drop editor.
Want to save time and work more efficiently? Check out our Mobile Marketing Cloud!
