2. Whitepaper | MMIT Marketing Automation 2
the right person, at the right moment and
through the right channel.
It’s not for everyone – but it’s close
Marketing Automation isn’t just for big
corporations, and it’s widely adopted by both
B2B and B2C industries. However, there are
organizations for which it’s particularly
interesting. Does your company:
• have customers with a high lifetime value?
• collect customer and prospect data?
• have a loyalty program, or do you wish
you had one?
• sell products with a high replacement
value, a long purchase cycle or that require
high contact pressure?
• have a multi-channel approach, combining
in- and outbound, on- and off-line marketing?
• wish to minimize waste and
customer irritation?
• need to eliminate errors arising from
heavy volumes of manual work?
If your answer to one or more of these questions
is ‘yes’, your company is very likely to benefit from
Marketing Automation.
Marketing
Automation
THE 3D CUSTOMER APPROACH
No matter how large your organization is,
consumers today expect personal and tailor-
made communication. They don’t want to
be treated like flat characters, but like the real
people they are. And when they reach out
to your company, they expect a conversation
partner that listens closely and speaks
consistently – across touch points and for
the duration of their relationship with you.
This calls for a multi-dimensional marketing
approach: the 3D Customer Approach,
based on Data, Direction and Demand.
Marketing automation
Now, as soon as your company has more
than a couple of thousand customers and
prospects, tailor-made marketing becomes
very hard to attain. Sending a mix of different
messages to different people at different
intervals, manually, is next to impossible.
That’s why more and more companies turn
to automation, to optimize their marketing
communication with their customers and
prospects. In short, marketing automation
helps them to send the right message to
3. Marketing Automation has many benefits.
It helps you identify and invest more in your
high-value customers and leave ‘well enoughs’
alone. Well-timed, personalized and to-the-
point communication with customers and
prospects can limit waste, reduce irritation
and improve your lead conversion as well
as your business revenues.
3
Most importantly, though, Marketing Automation
benefits your customers. It allows you to treat
them with respect, giving them the amount of
attention and communications they want, with a
personal touch. To arrive at this multi-dimensional
level, we recommend the 3D Customer Approach.
What do the three D’s stand for?
Data
First of all, Marketing Automation is data driven.
The amount and quality of customer and prospect
data your company has collected, and keeps
collecting with different campaigns, allows
you to coordinate and optimize your marketing
activities. You can begin small, an email address
here, an expected purchase date there. But start
collecting, because without data, you’re nowhere.
And when your contacts start to notice you are
listening to their needs, they’ll be inclined to give
you even more data.
Direction
In our opinion, Marketing Automation is much
more than boosting one single campaign or
one communication channel. It encompasses
campaigns that are part of customer programs,
telling stories across multiple touch points, stories
that are personal and relevant. An operation
like this clearly needs direction. This allows
your organization to coordinate the timing and
content of your communication on all levels.
To help you speak with one voice, across
departments, across time, across channels.
Demand
Thirdly, Marketing Automation must be
aimed at meeting customer demands.
This may sound obvious, but there are plenty
of companies that consider a product-driven,
one-size-fits-all, computer-aided email blast
‘marketing automation’.
In our view, Marketing Automation helps you
truly communicate with your customers and
prospects on a one-to-one basis. To get your
timing and your content right, for each and
every one of your contacts, the process
of receiving information is just as important
as sending it.
3D Customer
Approach
Whitepaper | MMIT Marketing Automation
4. When it comes to marketing, every company
is faced with two strategic questions: who do
we target and what is our overall message?
Based on the answers, a number of customer
programs – storylines, if you will – can be
developed and implemented.
4
Every customer program is a set of campaigns,
made to fit a specific phase in the customer life
cycle. Each program addresses different con-
sumer needs and demands: with specific goals,
target groups, sets of messages and data used;
also see page 6.
So: how does Marketing Automation help to
improve the results of these customer programs?
Clustering
First of all, you have to decide which customers
to enroll in which programs. This is done by
clustering: assembling groups of customers
with the same profile. For this, you need up-
to-date customer data. A customer that has
recently bought the latest model of your product,
should not get an up-sell mailing. If a customer
has indicated that he wants to receive emails
only, he should be excluded from call-center
campaigns. Marketing Automation helps you
compile and assess all the necessary data
to achieve this.
Contact pressure
If a customer is on several programs (for instance
cross-sell and loyalty programs), there are likely
to be more contact moments. This may enforce
the overall effect, but it can also lead to irritation.
So: how do you combine customer programs,
while at the same time optimizing the number
of contacts? How much time should there be
between contact moments? Contact pressure
is one of the business rule driven elements that
a good Marketing Automation solution takes
into account.
Variation
Companies that send only aggressive sales
campaigns are often seen as spammers,
making customers lose interest or even
opt out. In order to optimize the number of
contacts, it is good to use different campaigns,
carrying informative, inspirational, service
or feel good messages.
At the same time you tell a consistent story,
addressing consumers’ needs as well as
company goals. All this is not easy to coordinate,
even within one customer program, let alone
when your customer is enrolled in different
programs. Again, Marketing Automation can
help you out.
Whitepaper | MMIT Marketing Automation
Customer
Programs
AND MARKETING AUTOMATION
5. 5
Event-triggered
There was a time when companies reasoned:
we have a new product release, let’s send all
our customers a mailing! This may have resulted
in higher revenues, but also in a lot of waste
and irritation. Imagine, some of the customers
had just recently bought the old product,
others had indicated by phone that they had
no interest in product mailings. How do you
think they felt?
Marketing Automation makes it possible to
put the customer first. It makes it possible
to send him – or her – a mailing when their
product is up for renewal. Is this three months
before a new model release, then you can
adjust your communication. Perhaps you
can seduce the customer to wait for the new
product with a teaser or a pre-subscription.
This is only one of the many events that can
trigger communications; events that you can
all distill from your customer data. Just ask!
A/B-testing
Most companies have a desire to constantly
adjust and improve their marketing
communication. Marketing Automation
supports programs like these in several ways.
It makes it easy to test communication real-
time (from lead generation to inbound calls),
to send out different variations of the same
mailing and to keep track of response and
conversion rates. Moreover, well-organized
Marketing Automation makes sure that you
can easily compare to the data you already
collected, making each test a valuable addition.
3D approach
For years people have been talking about
1:1 marketing - now we can make it really happen.
Marketing Automation makes it possible to get
to know your customers and to use the insights
you gain in your communication strategy.
Especially when you use the 3D Customer
Approach, based on your customer Data,
overall Direction and customer Demands.
The results: happier and more loyal customers
for your company - not to mention a higher
share-of-wallet.
Whitepaper | MMIT Marketing Automation
Customer
Programs
AND MARKETING AUTOMATION
6. 6
CUSTOMER PROGRAMS AT A GLANCE
Lead acquisition programs In lead management the speed of follow up is crucial for success.
Therefore, lead and acquisition programs should be interactive. This enables you to gather profile
data that can be used to qualify leads.
Welcome programs The honeymoon period, just after the first purchase, is crucial for future
customer loyalty. Timely service is critical. Ask for motives, needs and background. This profile
data can be used to optimize the following customer programs.
Cross and up sell programs These sales driven programs must always be relevant, because
the risks of being perceived as a spammer are very high. For each sales campaign it is important
to identify adequate reasons to communicate: no relevance, no involvement, no sale.
Retention programs These reactive programs try to hold on to customers who are likely to
churn if no intervention takes place. Find out what is making them consider leaving and think
of ways to make them consider staying.
Loyalty programs Proactive programs, that are aimed at keeping the most valuable customers
for the company, for as long as possible. Loyalty programs can be costly, so it’s important to
differentiate between high potential and lower value customers.
Win back programs These programs are designed to bring back customers that have left.
Sometimes it’s not easy to decide if the customer has actually left, especially for companies
that sell products or services with a low usage/buying rate.
Customer
Programs
AND MARKETING AUTOMATION
Whitepaper | MMIT Marketing Automation
7. 7
Talking about the many advantages of Marketing
Automation is easy. But guess what: to actually
experience those advantages is not that hard
either. MMIT offers Marketing Automation
solutions in three different forms: basic, medium
and complete.
To give you an impression: the basic solution
allows you to manage relatively simple
campaigns, like sending teasers, reminders,
announcements and newsletters. Medium
includes the automation of email, social and
real-time marketing. It also offers specific
retail solutions, protecting franchiser-owned
customer data. The complete solution includes
groundbreaking services such as the interaction
optimizer. This provides your call-center with all
customer data they need to determine the
best offer for the customer, in real-time. If you
want to find out what Marketing Automation
can do for your company, just start by using
the basic solution. After that, you can always
upgrade to a more sophisticated system,
easily and seamlessly. Or talk to one of our
account managers for a customized solution.
Marketing
Automation
The possibilities are endless – not unlike
the diversity in your messages.
How can MMIT help?
MMIT is not a Marketing Automation software
developer/vendor. We are not interested in just
selling you a software license and leaving you on
your own at this point. MMIT provides a range of
services to enable clients derive business success
from the adoption of Marketing Automation
solutions. We host Marketing Automation soft-
ware within our environment and operate this
on behalf of clients or we are equally happy to
support clients with software installed in-house.
We provide Consulting and Project Management
Services to help our clients to implement the
software, design and configure marketing
programs and measure campaign success.
We are your Marketing Automation Partner.
Whitepaper | MMIT Marketing Automation
Like to watch?
MMIT produced a short animation, showing
the advantages of Marketing Automation.
Check out this video at MMIT.com
8. 8Whitepaper | MMIT Marketing Automation
Services and Solutions
Marketing Automation is
one of many services and
solutions that MMIT has
to offer. This chart gives you
a good impression of the
way they are connected.
Consultancy
9. MMIT Boston
MMIT Amsterdam
MMIT São Paulo
Independence Wharf, Suite 4032 | 470 Atlantic Avenue | Boston, MA 02210, USA | T. +1 617 261 9950
Nieuwe Teertuinen 25a | 1013 LV Amsterdam | The Netherlands | T. +31 (0)20 638 11 55 | mmit.com
Av. Paulista, 2300 - Piso Pilotis | Cerqueira César – São Paulo-SP | 01310-300 Brazil | T. +55 11 2847 4657
mmit.com
Whitepaper | MMIT Marketing Automation