Full Marketing Automation: 4 Technology Must-Haves

Full marketing automation: it’s the leap from sending a standard welcome email to delighting loyal customers with VIP discounts via text or alerts when their favorite items are back in stock. As 63% of companies using marketing automation outperformed their competitors, it’s clear full automation isn’t just in perfecting how you communicate. It’s about transforming the efficiency of your entire marketing orchestration and making every contact point a meaningful step in the customer journey.

Statista’s research reveals full automation’s undeniable advantages:

• 43% of companies report improved customer experience
• 38% see better use of staff time
• 35% benefit from enhanced data for decision-making

Moving from partial to full marketing automation aligns your strategies more closely with your vision to make your execution impeccable. To get there, you need to set your sights on where you want your company to be and how leveraging full automation can help you get there.

Our blog can help you determine the answer for your business. We’ll take you through:

• Map Out Your Marketing & Unify Data: Using your marketing map, you’ll understand which of your channels your customers interact with.
• Generating & Enriching Actionable Insights: Understand and anticipate customer behaviors, ensuring your campaigns are always one step ahead of your customers’ needs.
• Automate, Personalize, and Optimize: With the right technology, you’re equipped with a forward-thinking approach. See how your campaigns are ready to roll out and easily optimized based on real-time customer insights for relevance and timeliness.

So, let’s dig in!

Full Marketing Automation Only Works By Investing In the Right Areas

Chances are you’ve come across our reputation as the ‘insight gurus.’ If that’s news to you, we’ll take a hit to our pride, but we’re more than ready to share our expertise in marketing automation.

71% of customers expect personalized experiences, while 76% get frustrated when they don’t find it. This goes beyond content and seeps into the channel, incentive, timing, and frequency of your interactions. To nail these key components, data needs to sit at the core of your marketing to ensure a pleasant experience.

We call this insight-led marketing. 

To put this into action, a robust customer engagement solution that merges Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) with marketing automation and analytics needs to be at the center of it all. CDPs centralize customer data to help you generate insights, while marketing automation enables you to use those insights to tailor interactions in real-time. When you enhance this setup with predictive analytics, you’re not just keeping pace with customer needs but anticipating them through your marketing automation strategy.

It’s a potent combo: as many as 37% of businesses are eyeing CDPs and analytics, and 40% are keen on marketing automation. In fact, Mapp Marketing Cloud integrates these technologies and provides professional support to help you streamline your marketing into a smart, automated powerhouse.

Our eguide helps you weigh up your options >

How to Implement the Right Technology for Digital Marketing Automation

Now comes the time to review your MarTech infrastructure and see whether you have the technology and support to make the full marketing automation trip without a snag. It starts by looking at your vendors and support teams within your business to understand the support, integration smoothness, and whether the tech fits your action plan. This is because it’s not only about how well you automate; it’s the ROI numbers your senior stakeholders are interested in, which impact the investment potential in full automation. [👋 Our Director of Pre-Sales, Jacopo De Flumeri, speaks about making the most value of your MarTech stack in his blog.]

Here are our recommended steps for implementing marketing automation systems that work for you.

1. Map out your marketing

If you manage channels through separate solutions, you won’t achieve the cohesive map you need for an integrated cross-channel experience. For a seamless customer journey, it’s key to integrate your tools or invest in a solution that consolidates your core marketing automation needs, like Mapp Marketing Cloud.

We recommend mapping out all your data sources, technology, channels, activities, strategies, and workflows – let’s call it your marketing blueprint. This overview isn’t just about identifying gaps and opportunities for full marketing automation in the customer journey. It’s also about pinpointing efficiencies that can have a big impact with less manual intervention.

You’ll discover where to smooth out and advance your processes via marketing automation so each interaction becomes more seamless and personalized. This saves you time for your team to focus on innovation and creativity rather than getting bogged down in manual and repetitive tasks.

2. Unify your Customer Data

It’s tempting to mix and match existing systems for that perfect setup—like connecting your CRM with your email marketing. But this can get tricky. These integrations aim to streamline your marketing automation, but they’re not always easy. They demand time, a chunk of your resources, and a solid tech support team. And even with everything in place, you may struggle to smooth out a few wrinkles.

Your CDP should be the heart of unifying your different software, data streams, systems, and tools to help structure your data in a digestible and generate actionable insights.

Think MACH

Ever thought about composable technology? It’s pivotal in your technology’s transition and evolution. Adopting a composable approach through the MACH architecture gives you the agility to tailor your marketing efforts more flexibly. Microservices become your tech toolkit, enabling you to pick just the right tool for the job – email automation or slicing your customer base into segments. And thanks to APIs, all these specialized tools play nicely together for even better efficiency.

Going cloud-native means your technology can easily scale to meet any demand, big or small. With a headless setup, personalizing customer interactions across different platforms becomes straightforward, free from the usual backend limitations. By embracing composable technology, every part of your marketing strategy clicks into place, pushing your business toward achieving full automation faster.

3. Generating Insights

Once you have collected and unified data through your CDP, customer profiles are built and enriched with first-party data for a deeper customer understanding.

Following this, you’ll want to convert your raw data into easy-to-understand dashboards, reports, and metrics to identify notable product and customer trends and make informed decisions.  Depending on your software capabilities, you can also extract valuable insights from predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. Here’s how it would look via Mapp Marketing Cloud.

Mapp Marketing Cloud in Action: Generating Insights via Easy Data Analysis

Extracting these actionable insights helps you understand where your marketing needs to improve, how it impacts customer experiences, and how automation can help you achieve this quickly and efficiently.

4. Activating Customer Insights

Next is acting on actionable insights. Instead of switching tools and manually acting on these in a way that’s time-consuming, tedious, and prone to human error, implementing marketing automation programs through a customer engagement platform like Mapp Marketing Cloud helps you act instantaneously. You won’t need to worry about switching between different tools or dealing with a challenging integration that makes it difficult to act on these insights. Our solution encompasses all three key components to help you with:

• Strategic Audience Building: Quickly group customers based on attributes in your automation platform for targeted communications
• Personalizing Quickly: Dynamic content blocks bring in customer data to create your email, SMS, web, ad, and other cross-channel communications, e.g., abandoned cart products for higher engagement
• Orchestrating journeys: Trigger, schedule, and automate your communications on different channels to ensure you contact them at the right channel and at the right time to drive conversions
• Predicting and Reacting: Use predictive scoring to anticipate customer needs and automatically send relevant offers or information, enhancing the decision-making journey

Mapp Marketing Cloud in Action: Reactivating Churning Customers Campaign

APIs and pre-built automation flows play a huge part in seamless automation – and it’s what Mapp champions right now. Here’s how cross-channel automation would look in Mapp Marketing Cloud.

Don’t forget about what’s behind the tech

Nailing full marketing automation goes beyond flashy tools—it’s about smart implementation and sharpening your team’s skills. It’s essential to include education and continuous training into your strategy, empowering your team to unlock the full potential of these tools. This is not just for boosting sales but for innovation, too.

Your strategy needs commitment to extend beyond the initial setup through regular reviews and updates to automation processes. Whether you know it or not, the aim is to cultivate an automation ecosystem that’s inherently customer-centric, improving the customer journey and satisfaction. By placing the customer at the heart of automation efforts, businesses move closer to achieving full automation successfully.

Want to see what Mapp Marketing Cloud can do for your marketing automation?

Book a demo to see how we fit the bill:

• Unify Customer Data: Mapp Marketing Cloud simplifies the complexity of tracking customer interactions by providing native support for various channels. It effortlessly assimilates data from platforms like VTEX, Shopify, and Magento. From there, it enriches customer profiles responsibly with first-party data, ensuring compliance and relevance in every interaction.
• Leverage Predictive Analytics: Mapp Marketing Cloud isn’t just a repository of customer data—it’s an analytical brain capable of predictive insights and adaptive strategies. By harnessing both predictive analytics and AI, Mapp Marketing Cloud equips you to understand and anticipate customer behaviors, ensuring your campaigns are always one step ahead.
• Automate, Personalize, and Optimize: Mapp Marketing Cloud’s execution is where it shines. Whether it’s email, SMS, web push, or in-app messaging, our Whiteboard feature allows for creating and pre-setting your identified customer journey scenarios. This helps to easily roll out your campaigns and adapt based on real-time customer insights, ensuring relevance and timeliness.