A dispute has been going on between advocates of Marketing Automation and enthusiasts of ultimate personalization in sales – marketing activities. The essential question is: shall we focus on effective identification of individual clients’ needs or additional costs minimization and concentration on full automation of our marketing? The solution was developed with Marketing Automation becoming more and more popular tool in marketers daily work.
Pros and cons
Particularly in the beginning of strategy building, when our business is in infancy stage, it’s worth to investigate all options of communication with clients. Below, you’ll find a few most often quoted arguments in favor if automation and those mentioned in the context of personalization.
Marketing Automation
ADVANTAGES:
- reduction of costs related to the maintenance of staff dealing with communication with clients
- time saving
- possibility of reaching wide spectrum of recipients
- easy business scalability, detailed statistics and ratios
DISADVANTAGES:
- susceptibility to errors related to IT facilities
- lack of direct client – human being contact
- users conviction of being just one of the records in a database
- lower marketing messages personalization
Marketing Personalization
ADVANTAGES:
- comprehensive client servicing on every stage of sales – marketing activities
- client appreciate individual treatment, establishing the relations
- immediate feedback from service department, no response downtime
DISADVANTAGES:
- time-consuming and pricey
- hard to scale the business
How to merge automation and personalization through Marketing Automation
Apparently, it might look as if those two different issues are not possible to accommodate. However, skillful inclusion of personalization to marketing activities automation will allow to avoid choosing between quantity and quality in communication strategies.
Expanded behavioral profiles to be used in marketing messages personalization
Thanks to WWW visitors identification and building detailed behavioral profiles on the basis of collected data (subpages visits, purchase path, materials downloading, time per visit, etc.) you’ll be able to create top personalized trade offers and advertising messages. Using gathered information, you can also design detailed campaigns in the channels you choose by means of remarketing (after integration with RTB network). It allows to display custom-made message to a particular person, on practically any WWW page. Marketing Automation also means sophisticated educational cycles (Lead Nurturing) operating to prepare client for the first purchase but also works well as regards to client retention.
Combining personalization and detailed statistics
Apart from huge possibilities to personalize messages and offers, taking advantage of Marketing Automation system also allows to acquire detailed statistics related to conversion analysis and stating ROI (Return On Investment). Recognizing particular source of contact acquisition in the base, not only we know what marketing and sales activities it was subject to but also when and at what price contact made a purchase. Basing on this information, we can precisely measure conversion in particular marks and in the whole marketing – sales process.
Summary
It turns out that we don’t need to abandon Marketing Automation in favor of its personalization. An appropriate Marketing Automation system is able to merge business scaling needs, basing on commonly used ratings, not resigning from individual approach to the client.
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