Approximately 100 days into the COVID-19 pandemic, and there finally appears to be light at the end of the tunnel. The number of infections are falling daily, as are the number of COVID-19 related deaths. Most countries are easing restrictions and businesses are now in the midst of planning their re-entry strategies. Early indicators are showing that consumers are ready for a new normal, as well.
A significant consideration for brands planning their re-entry strategies is determining how to best communicate with and engage their customers in a post COVID-19 marketplace. Top brands will be thinking about how to generate better leads, nurture those leads, personalize customer journeys across channels, build 360-degree views of customers, further improve the relationship between sales and marketing and capture better data to make smarter marketing decisions.
Read More: Top Video Search Engines
Automation: the most significant tool in the marketers’ toolkit
Enter Marketing Automation Solutions or Platforms (MAS or MAP), perhaps the most significant piece of arsenal in the modern, post-pandemic marketers toolkit. An MAS/MAP is any piece of software or system that, in its simplest form, automates repetitive tasks. Marketers and marketing technologists use MAS and MAP’s to not only bring about more efficiency in their daily lives, but also to orchestrate advanced campaigns and workflows across channels (web, SMS, push, email) that are personalized to their end recipients. These personalized experiences build brand loyalty, improve the customer experience and translate into higher ROI for businesses.
“Marketers are adopting MAS to try and make sense of the unlimited amount of online customer data and turn this data into actionable, intelligent leads and lead scoring sales enablement,” said Melody Siefken, Research Analyst, Digital Transformation Practice at Frost & Sullivan[1]. “Additionally, marketers are opting for an omnichannel approach to reach customers from all sides of engagement to create a seamless and consistent customer experience and journey.”
The opportunity for brands
Some tangible opportunities that MAPs may provide businesses as they reopen post crisis include:
- Better Leads: Marketers can leverage the built-in capabilities of advanced MAS to improve lead generation. They can do this by capturing user website browsing behavior and using those insights to determine their preferences and interests. Communication can then be customized to those insights. Additionally, MAS and MAP’s can be used to capture browsing behavior and insights from other touchpoints (social media activity, downloads from websites, offline engagement) and automatically score leads to bring efficiency to lead qualification and prioritization. That can, in turn, trigger automated campaigns, messages or emails to push leads further down the funnel. Automatic alerts can also be set in MAS and MAPs to alert salespeople of fast-moving or qualified leads, who can then follow-up offline.
- Improved Lead Nurturing: MAS and MAPs can be used to send automated emails to leads, wherever they may be in their buying cycle, to nurture them and gently nudge them down the funnel. Automated lead nurturing programs can be set up to run in the background while salespeople focus on qualified leads.
- Personalized Journeys: Customers expect personalized communication delivered to them based on their previous behaviour and purchase decisions. Marketing Automation Platforms can be used to orchestrate advanced personalized journeys, or workflows, which self-correct (based on underlying Artificial Intelligence capabilities) to send the right message on the right channel to the right customer. This is the power of Marketing Automation Platforms!
- Better Data for Smarter Decisions: Marketing Automation Platforms are built on data. Their advanced personalization and decisioning capabilities run on data and marketers can leverage rich data sets to deliver personalized customer experiences.
Read More: Technology Sales Leaders: Get On Those Social Channels!
Brands looking to improve their marketing automation game post COVID-19 have many options when it comes to choosing the right Marketing Automation Platform. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Hubspot, Pardot and Marketo are designed specifically to help them orchestrate multi-touch communications and build better relationships with their customers — which will be critical to business success post COVID-19.