Marketing automation sits at the heart of digital communication by integrating customer experience across all brand touchpoints. It addresses challenges like inability to track customer journeys across channels and deliver personalized communications. Marketing automation solutions do this by tracking customer behavior across channels, creating communication journeys based on personas, and delivering personalized digital assets like emails based on triggers and past customer behavior. This provides customers with relevant communications across all channels in an automated, rule-based manner. Marketing automation is a long-term investment that is important for brands to remain relevant to customers in the digital world.

1.
PEDRO MIGUEL CASIMIRO
www.tmcentre.co.za
Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/industry/why-­‐marketing-­‐automation-­‐is-­‐the-­‐
future-­‐of-­‐digital-­‐for-­‐brands/519718/
Why Marketing Automation Is The Future Of Digital For Brands
Marketing automation sits at the heart of digital communication and integrates customer
experience across all brand touch points. In 2012, Gartner predicted that CMOs would be
spending more on technology as compared to CIOs by 2017. Well, 2017 has arrived! And it’s
time to prove that Gartner’s forecast was indeed correct.
Let me start by sharing a short story. I have a credit card, and for the past ten years, every
month I receive an email asking whether I would like to avail myself of an equated monthly
installment (EMI). I have never done that in all these years, and I am not likely to in the next
ten years either. This communication from the brand seems like a waste of a consumer
engagement opportunity; my credit card company has access to information like where I
travel, my preference of hotels, where I shop and what I eat, which provides them with rich
brand data to create more relevant conversational opportunities.
Or, take the example of a retail store whose loyalty card I hold. Every season I get a standard
email communication from them, which probably goes to their entire database of several
million cardholders. The retail chain has a tremendous amount of information on my buying
preferences. So, why can’t I get a personalized email that displays products based on my past
buying behaviour, or my website browsing behaviour?
And this is the case for most brands. Here’s where the power of marketing automation comes
in. In our era of attention deficits, it’s incredibly important to be relevant to the consumer
and deliver a brand message in the short window of opportunity that digital communications
provides, whether via email or SMS or web banner.
Digital marketing has so far worked in silos and given rise to multiple consumer touch points:
social networks, search engines, email, SMS, app notifications and websites. However, there
are two key challenges that a brand encounters:
-­‐ Inability to track a customer journey (at a single-­‐customer granularity) across various
touch points, to ensure that the customer sees consistent brand communication.
-­‐ The true power of digital is the ability to talk to a customer as an individual rather
than using a one-­‐size-­‐fits-­‐all approach. How do I ensure that the communication my
customer sees is based on her past behaviour? This could be purchase behaviour, or
browsing behaviour when he or she is on my website (for example, which pages
they’ve visited, and therefore what they might be interested in). With engagement
behaviour, tracking the ad they clicked on informs how a brand could continue the
same conversation across other digital channels with that customer.
Marketing automation solutions help address this issue, as they enable a brand to track
customer behaviour across multiple channels, create customer communication journeys
based on customer persona, and build digital assets (emails, SMS, etc.). And then these digital
assets get delivered to the customer based on certain triggers and rendered on the
customer’s browser (or app or SMS window), depending on past behaviour. Thus, every
customer gets personalized and relevant communications across all channels. And this

2.
PEDRO MIGUEL CASIMIRO
www.tmcentre.co.za
happens in an automated, rule-­‐based manner. Marketing automation sits at the heart of
digital communication. It integrates customer experience across all brand touch points, from
websites to landing pages, email, SMS, app notifications and ads on social networking sites.
Once a marketing automation solution has been set up, it’s a plug-­‐and-­‐play for the digital
marketing team to use this solution to create customer communications. A typical marketing
automation team will comprise a campaign manager (a digital strategist), a technologist who
creates HTML or manages databases, and data analysts who analyse the outcome of
campaigns and recommend further optimization.
It’s also important to realize that a marketing automation solution is a long-­‐term investment
by the brand. Therefore, it’s very important to choose a solution provider with the ability to
scale up the solution and keep up with the fast pace of change as social networks and digital
marketing evolve.