Marketing Automation Design

Over the years I have enjoyed designing, deploying, measuring and improving hundreds of automated marketing initiatives for brands and businesses of all sizes. As a result, I’ve begun to frame these initiatives in a few simple ways, enabling me to quickly develop automated marketing campaigns to build customer-brand relationships and drive revenue. These automated campaigns form a baseline of activity personalized for each customer to drive revenue every day, automatically and without manual intervention or having to “reinvent the wheel” with ad hoc campaigns season after season. Here is the basic framework for the marketing automation designer.

• Design campaign “touches” around the customer life cycle
• Further design “touches” to optimize each “event cycle,” or “purchase life cycle” (trip cycle in the case below)
• Identify campaign touch point “triggers” via time-index from customer or brand events, external events relevant to the customer, and of course, specific customer behaviors such as a purchase or inquiry

Let’s take a hotel resort chain as an example…

1. A website inquiry (email opt-in for information or offers) from a person that does not match the existing customer database (by email address, for example) represents a prospect. A triggered email linked to a custom landing page would follow to convert this prospect to a first time guest.
2. Upon booking, this guest’s behavioral life cycle indicator (first time guest) triggers the appropriate “trip cycle” campaign – a time-indexed email campaign to up-sell the guest to a spa appointment between her booking and her arrival at the resort for her first stay.
3. After her departure from the resort (a behavior trigger) an email aims to convert the guest to a repeat stay and/or loyalty program.
4. Once in the loyalty program and periodically staying at the brand’s properties, an email might use the customer’s local weather report to trigger a message like… “… though it’s freezing in Chicago, it is nice and warm in Arizona right now!” to encourage another trip/stay for this regular guest. Especially if the time since last visit (time index trigger – # of days since last stay vs. this specific guest’s “normal” booking/stay cycle) is beyond the expected duration of time between stays as predicted by a “time to next visit” model processed against the database each night.

Across dozens of industries I’ve learned to quickly map the life cycle, event/purchase cycle and various triggers that the brand might use to engage customers as a framework for developing automated marketing via web, email, SMS, social media and other direct forms of customer investment (aka marketing). Having such a framework really frees up the marketing automation design participants to be creative while still crafting solutions likely to produce a high ROI. Finally, by having a marketing automation “system” processing multichannel communications every day, marketers are freed up to build on top of this “base” of revenue producing activity with innovation in the form of new products, services and other pillars of sustainable competitive advantage. In other words, marketers need to automate their service of customers with the obvious solutions to their needs that are triggered by their behaviors (purchases in the context of their brand relationship, or life cycle) so that they have time to focus on the harder challenge of innovation and winning market share one customer at a time.

I look forward to seeing the other examples, including yours, of successful marketing automation.