Tag: Marketing automation

Are you making the most of your Marketing Automation Capabilities?

Everyone understands that the future of marketing is a personalized experience for every user, and that having the ability to understand the customer journey and map key marketing communications at precise moments in that journey can result in a massive uplift in customer acquisition and retention. That’s why many companies consider automation capabilities as one of the important criteria when choosing their marketing platforms. Some even purchase advanced marketing automation platforms in hope of delivering an omni-channel 1:1 personalization experience. Assessing your maturity in marketing automation Let’s say you purchased a platform, painted a promising vision and set goals akin to a new year’s resolution. After months spent on platform integration, you kicked off by automating one or two marketing campaigns, such as welcome emails or manually curating a few segmented messages. Although things seem to be up and running, you realize that most of the time you’re still sending batch and blast communication on the platform, and the automation capacities are greatly under-utilized. Does it all sound too familiar? Don’t get us wrong. We are not over-advocating marketing automation as if it should be the centerpiece. However, there are certain aspects in your long-term strategy, like personalization at scale or consistent inbound pipeline, that can only be achieved effectively through the help of marketing automation. To give another perspective – you’ve invested in the platforms and paid for the capabilities, and know that a good return is out there which you should be able to capture. Not trying to fully utilize your automation functionalities is like joining an expensive gym membership exclusively for a single dumbbell. For someone who cares about ROI, won’t you have the itch to use it to its full capacity? Consider the following table, which illustrates different levels of maturity in marketing automation, to give yourself an indication of where you are against your target. Accelerating your marketing automation If you noticed a discrepancy in your assessment, don’t worry. This is a commonly heard scenario. Let’s face it – marketing automation by its nature is vastly detailed and complex. It is not as simple as plug & play and suddenly everything autopilots itself. The reality is, marketing automation success has a cascade effect. It takes a lot of upfront knowledge to set things right. Done poorly, one small mistake could create a snowballing effect. Not only do you need the right knowledge, but you also need a wealth of different supporting resources – data engineering to feed in data, marketing to curate communication, platform specialists to ensure logic flow and deliverability, to name a few. In most cases, the various resources are borrowed from other teams, and the speed of progress can really be dependent on required teams’ availability and priority. Complexity holds people back. It’s all too tempting to stick with what you know when it’s too hard to know where to start. Yet, if you are looking for a way to change it, it is important to acknowledge that although marketing automation is set to reduce manual effort, the implementation is not effortless. Leveraging external expert services earlier helps you overcome the friction faster and delivers the return you desire more effectively. Let’s get you a hand! At Ematic, we’ve built years of experience on marketing automation across many platforms. We understand your pain points, and can bring essential expertises to help all parts of your marketing automation process, from strategy planning, technical setup, campaign creation/management and analytics and optimization. Whatever problems you are facing, Ematic is here to solve. <<Contact us>> to explore how we can improve your marketing automation, or learn more about our service offerings.    

Marketing Automation is Not “Set it and Forget it”

You can set it and forget it with marketing automation, but you really should not. There has been a lot of hype around marketing automation and it might easily come across as the shortcut to success. When thinking about marketing automation, many people tend to imagine that post-setup, they can go hands-free and the mechanism will autopilot itself. From our experience, this usually brings you more damage than benefit. Setting up your marketing automation and leaving it unmonitored is a waste of insights and potential opportunities. No matter how much research you’ve put into understanding your users and making a reasonable flow, your first few campaigns usually won’t be home runs as they are only built on hypotheses. We’ve heard many stories where a brand offered an attractive discount at route A but more customers took route B, or a complicated, well-curated user journey was set up but there was only a small audience drawn into the funnel. The behavior of customers is only one of the challenges. Even when you seem to set up a well-functioned program and your audience follows the path you lay, after a certain period of time, you might still encounter problems like outdated content, data discrepancy, logic conflict etc. Even a Ferrari needs to go to a pit stop regularly. So do your marketing automation campaigns. Contrary to the small effort put into post-launch optimization, some companies spend a disproportionate amount of time in the initial campaign setup. With ambition they architect a masterplan and spend a great amount of time assembling an army of marketing ideas, data and content. What happens next, is that in order to make everything function seamlessly, the scope of work becomes bigger than expected, months go by, and marketing automation still remains no more than a plan. The heavy initial investment results in low ROI, and the business starts to challenge if any of this is worthwhile. The Ematic Way How Ematic approaches marketing automation is vastly different. Our fundamental belief is that marketing automation requires long-term attention and continuous optimization. With that in mind, we apply an agile methodology and design a flexible service model to support it. What our agile methodology means – We don’t “set it and forget it”. We create a hypothesis-test-learn process and add / subtract elements in the automation program based on the feedback and insights from the actual data continuously to find the optimal setting for your campaign. Quick start and lower initial investment. Instead of a big bang launch, we start with identifying good opportunities which can be activated quickly. Once a few flows are verified and steadily brings in activation or revenue streams, we can then build on this foundation into a full program. We run a monthly scrum to deliver impact based on the given allocation of resources To strengthen this approach, we also make the following commitments: A team of experts always at your disposal : Making various domain expertise in marketing automation available at any time is important and truly helpful to accelerate your progress. This means you can quickly execute an idea, no matter how big or small it is. Service flexibility : You need resources ready at any time, but not all the time. That’s why we charge by credits based on required hours with roll-over flexibility to the next period, to give you the confidence that your investment doesn’t go to waste. With our expertise and our special service model, we are confident that we can add value to your marketing automation. Contact us to talk about your optimization plan.

Reimagine marketing automation with Ematic

We are excited to share some really good news – announcing Ematic’s new marketing automation services to help businesses implement, accelerate and optimize their customer journeys, workflows and cross-channel messaging capabilities. What is the service about? Although marketing automation is meant to help simplify the process, setting it up properly might be more complicated than one would expect. To deliver the right content to the right person at the right time requires a matrix of domain expertises from business, marketing, data, design to operation intersecting each other. For many businesses, it is a significant undertaking to get everything in place. Therefore we are offering a set of new services to complement your marketing automation needs. We bring essential expertises to all parts of the process, including strategy planning, technical setup, campaign creation/management and analytics and optimization. Whether you want to simply compliment in designated areas or require end-to-end support, we are sure we can tailor an action plan based on your business objectives and current settings. Who is this for? Ask yourself if you have been in need of : Specialist knowledge and/or skill – You want to activate marketing automation but you are short of necessary skills or expertises to design/ set up a journey and ensure everything is logically correct Resources – You have amazing automation ideas, but there’s always a missing piece from the puzzle – be it the data, the creatives or content support Optimization – You have long since implemented an automation flow but aren’t seeing the returns you expect Challenges can come from any part of the business, and we are not limited to a single dimension of problems. For example, it may be that the challenges have stemmed from the business strategy, or the technical implementation, but we’ve got your back. What’s special about our approach? We don’t treat marketing automation as “set it and forget it”. We believe marketing automation and customer journeys need constant attention to really benefit your business. At Ematic, we apply an agile marketing approach to deliver your business objectives – starting with fast activation of high ROI opportunities, and continuously develop your marketing automation roadmap over time. Followed with continuous analysis, testing and optimization, we create a process to turn your marketing automation into a spinning growth flywheel. Additionally, our methodology allows you to kickstart more easily without an overly expensive, lengthy initial setup investment. Not only do we have a time-based pricing structure, but we also roll-over any un-utilized hours to the next period, so that it gives you the flexibility of managing any given fluctuation during the engagement. Ending note At Ematic, our mission has always been to deliver real results for marketers. Since our humble beginnings of being “the Mailchimp guys”, over the past 10 years, we have expanded and helped numerous businesses adopt the right technologies for their marketing endeavors. Learning from our customers and the state of the market, our new services are designed to tackle the broader underlying challenges beyond technology to drive real impact. We are able to curate this service by marrying the learnings to the expertise we readily have in-house. With so much to unlock, we hope you are as excited as we are to begin the journey with our new services. Check out our marketing automation service to learn more about how we are able to help you, or contact us directly.