Can marketing automation combine creativity and robotics to help businesses prioritize customer satisfaction and significantly boost their ROIs?
As humans living alongside numerous tech innovations, we fear one thing – losing control over their functionalities. We pride ourselves on the hard work alongside the tech tools we invent to make the same task more convenient.
Where does the extent of our demands lie?
AI—a step forward like no other—was developed to help us. It makes innovating, i.e., thinking and doing processes, easier. Machine learning, algorithm-based personalization, and AI, among others, are transforming the market dynamics.
Efficiency is significant in helping boost productivity and generating revenue, but customer experience is essential.
In B2B marketing, automation can take care of your repetitive daily tasks and allow you to focus on tasks that require your utmost attention, human strategy, and creative juices. Because efficiency enhances the quality of your work.
Even eBay’s Director of Advertising, Phuong Nguyen states “Making an inefficient market more efficient is at the core of why people should embrace the notion of automation.”
Automating your processes requires understanding your audience.
In a landscape where customers are the largest assets for a B2B brand – they can make or break you. Once you outline their preferences and needs, and streamline your operations and services according to them, it can lead to imminent success in the market.
This is why almost every B2B business has leveraged personalization. Because in marketing, the customer is at the center of all your “next steps”, operations, and planning.
Automation helps streamline your strategies to make them customer-centric. It makes the processes effortless for the marketing teams and reduces additional prospect/customer effort.
But this is a simple guide for why we seek out automation to improve marketing efforts and mundane tasks. From employees to stakeholders, we all possess this single rulebook.
And the most fascinating aspect of automation? Its practical application has been long since tried and tested.
Have you ever heard of Charles Saunders? He introduced the first mechanical automation or automated grocery shopping vending machine, back in 1936.
This automated machine’s name was Keedoozle or as everyone assumes, just a nonsensical way of saying – the key does it all.
Source: https://time.com/3880751/keedoozle-americas-first-automated-grocery/
But in the early 20th century, every case study or news story covering the timeline of this machine will tell you one thing.
Saunders reasons this was because the workings of his machine were ahead of the public thinking during that time.
What was the ultimate vision behind this innovation?
Eliminating the need for clerks and checkers. However, in a capitalist society witnessing a fight between humans and machines, what was the actual purpose?
Yes, automation in this case focused on customer-centrism. The goal was to make the shopping experience seamless and fast without the need for a middleman. The underlying problem was the lack of space for shortcomings if the machines failed to cater to the consumers.
And it did fail their expectations. The “key” cannot do it all but requires a balance.
An equilibrium between the human attributes (consumers) and the machine becomes necessary.
As fascinating as this invention was for the marketing landscape, the resources required to confront consumer challenges were scarce. With their increasing demands, the speed and efficiency of the machine involved were the biggest obstacles here.
The customer perspective holds immense potential. Your buyers should accept your marketing messages. If not, the strategies are deemed hollow and wasteful.
The overall technological expense to keep up-to-date with the changes required in the Keedoozle to improve the self-service customer experience was on the heavier side.
Where the automated machine was supposed to reduce any customer effort, it caused delays and resulted in incorrect orders. This resulted in an impaired brand reputation for Saunders and a loss of engagement.
The same applies to Amazon’s Dash Buttons.
Source: Amazon Dash Button
It was quite revolutionary to develop a stick-on button (available for $5) that placed an order for detergents, paper towels, and other similar products to be restocked. Reordering common household products, a repetitive task, highlighted consumer loyalty.
But with the growing tech landscape, and the advent of Amazon’s Alexa, this became obsolete. Simply, because Alexa was more adept at making reordering effortless than the dash button. However, it could not disclose the price of an item, and while there were safeguards in place, a slight touch could place an order that wasn’t necessary.
These minor challenges seem major in the face of tech innovations that can do the job better.
Fascination with tech advancements is not enough to keep your customers loyal. When new installations, such as automation, are integrated into the workflow and overall operations, the need is to weave them across your entire brand and streamline the workings optimally.
Automation’s objective is to substitute human efforts, not human beings themselves.
One that can also identify and address gaps in the automation processes itself. Because then how else do you refine customer relationships if your teams’ systems might potentially face disruptions?
The Founder and Managing Director of Intelligencia Limited rightfully mentions how unimpressive the average 1% campaign response rate is. Even with up-and-coming marketing solutions, 99% of messages are unresponsive.
For consumers, making purchasing decisions in their day-to-day lives works as a psychological script.
If they trust your brand enough, they will repurchase your services. And there is a huge bridge between repurchasing and actual brand loyalty.
Automation is the foundational brick bridging this gap.
Marketing efforts should focus on improving customer interaction and purchasing processes. In B2B brands, customers hold a high profile and most of them themselves are well-established brands. This is why consumers often require instant gratification in the most cost-effective way possible.
The second purchase holds more significance than the first one.
Your customers are not merely passive pawns but active players in the value-creation process of your brand. So, with the help of automated workflows, marketing teams personalize campaigns and carry out intense research on the market.
The first simple step in any marketing processes is understanding your customers. To do this successfully, your marketing teams are required to collect, segment, and analyze raw data before any of it becomes obsolete.
Data is at the core of why marketing automation has become paramount.
This data – in the form of contacts or numbers – has to be convoluted into a unified system for starters, to make sense of it all.
How do we do it?
In Salesforce’s partnership with Vonage, a cloud communications platform, Salesforce addresses how automation helped develop a unified but comprehensive view of their customers’ data profiles.
They established how Slack helped them enhance their customer experience.
Executing automation also assists in gathering and analyzing data, bringing the teams together. This could be the step that should be executed before we focus on automating the workflow. It is integral to making automation smoother, resulting in improvised marketing efforts.
Having all data in one space is crucial and relieves your team of manually, searching for each customer’s information. Platforms such as Slack, where your teams can access databases and organize content in one place, facilitate this.
It saves you time by helping you escalate and prioritize tasks.
And Slack offers you space to execute this strategically.
Slack allows the user to set up specific triggers. A ticket is tagged urgent or high priority on a channel that usually comprises a keyword acting as a trigger.
The first step is setting up a trigger defined by specific criteria. This input is given by the user.
If the criteria match the input, Slack’s automated workflow kickstarts an escalation sequence where if the task marked “high-priority” remains unresolved, the marketing automation workflow escalates it.
After this trigger, an automatic message is forwarded to the engineering team which contains the details of the issue, and the link to the prioritized but routine task.
The ticket management system in Slack tracks issues that require immediate attention and updates ticket statuses.
Lastly, if an issue remains unresolved within a specific period, there are automated and scheduled reminders sent to the concerned party, keeping the priority issue in focus.
The advantage of this automation technology is enhanced employee expertise on your marketing team, driving more value than general.
Further, marketers should demonstrate the value their strategies gain to the stakeholders. This requires as little friction as possible. Hence, marketing automation is the steering wheel to foster conversion rates and customer lifetime value.
This same trigger formula works for your customers.
Have you noticed that Amazon sends you a notification as a reminder when you abandon a cart with a certain number of items?
This is one of the ways to enhance marketing automation ROI – assisting your business in taking the ideal marketing action based on specific customer behaviors. In B2B, these triggers could include website visits, clicks, form-filling, registrations, etc.
Marketing automation proactively helps facilitate higher conversion rates by optimizing lead management strategies and streamlining them with other marketing objectives.
But in marketing, no matter how adept your strategies are, most often, one cannot determine which strategy might work best. This is crucial to understand before executing it definitively.
This is where A/B testing is a savior. To elevate positive ROI, take it one step ahead.
By adopting this, your brand can improve the reach of valuable and high-quality content.
According to HubSpot, inbound marketing centers on three specific elements – attract, engage, and delight. And as marketers, we understand the wonders that valuable and informative content can do.
But how do we know when and where does a prospect interact with the marketing content? What is the proof that one headline on a landing page performs better than the other?
Your marketing leaders want proof that your strategies will add value before they expend any resources. Hence, they prioritize marketing automation ROI because it highlights the cost-effectiveness and profitability of the automation processes.
Marketing Automation ROI = Total Net Returns on Investments/Total Costs
The average ROI of marketing automation realized is a return of $5.44 for every $1 invested across three years.
Beyond instincts, A/B testing offers evidence of your marketing strategy’s effectiveness because the numbers are your hidden gems.
For example, you are deciding the size of the download button for your whitepaper landing pages. How do you know which size is preferred? Marketing automation platform like Zoho CRM come to your rescue.
Your measuring metric is the number of clicks. So, you differentiate two sets of users, A and B, for both sizes of the download button. Here, marketing automation software offers you leverage where you can demonstrate different buttons for different users randomly to gather accurate data.
Marketing automation tools refine A/B testing by offering tools for fostering marketing effectiveness, especially while developing email campaigns.
Kaiser Fung, in a Harvard Business Review article, states that A/B testing is the most basic experiment, and with the increasing demands, wouldn’t it be better to conduct more complex tests?
Much like A/B/C/D testing, which is called multivariate testing, given the huge and diverse customer base. For example, what if, along with the size of the download button, one has to consider its color as well?
This is why marketing automation platform plays a significant role in reducing friction during decision-making processes.
Its benefits don’t merely focus on the customers but also the employees and decision-makers. Hence, due to its immense adoption, the latest trend in this field concerns generative AI revolutionizing marketing automation tools.
AI and automation are two of the most widespread tech that is being adopted by brands. There is no doubt about that. IBM reports that three out of four CMOs believe that generative AI is set to transform marketing permanently.
Understanding why automation is necessary is not a challenging task here.
Even focusing on just optimizing the marketing automation ROI can dilute your efforts. However, what comes next is what is inherently vital.
While the tech handles repetitive tasks, marketers can focus their attention elsewhere – on the customers, in a way that dismantles marketing myopia.
Over-reliance on automated processes cannot help eliminate this. If there are shortcomings in the analyzed or represented data, automation can still continue to result in misguided decision-making.
The lack of strategic vision and too narrow an understanding of who your customers are leads to this myopic vision.
Attempting to improve customer satisfaction and customer journey, marketing and sales teams may utilize AI to create high-end content for increased efficiency and productivity. In an article titled “How Automation Is Reshaping the Industry” in Forbes, Krishan Arora, the CEO & Founder of The Arora Project, asserts:
“What I think will happen is that there will be two cohorts of marketers: one that uses AI to increase productivity and results and one that does not. Those who do not will have a hard time keeping up with the AI-boosted marketing teams.”
The sort of parallel drawn above can take away the essence of this debate. AI versus humans has become the cliché in domains that still stick to the traditional platforms while aiming to stand out in the increasingly tech-savvy world.
One cannot avoid human errors, no matter how meticulous the workflow is. Hence, the use of automation processes in repetitive everyday tasks is understandable, but the discussion regarding implementing its use in the field of creativity, which underscores marketing, is yet to come to an end.
The annual Christmas Coca-Cola advertisement faced severe backlash. Why?
Source: Coca-Cola Christmas Ad 2024
It had viewers fuming and mockery the motions and “artistry” included in the video. The reception, in short, was a hugely negative one. While the New York Post covered how this was a “dystopian nightmare”, other publications mentioned the deep uncanniness that left the audiences unmoved.
Coca-Cola wanted to pay homage to its “Holidays Are Coming” 1995 advert, but all in vain.
The advertisement was labeled “ugly” and “lazy”: the terminologies used for AI’s “creative” aspirations. Or, as Forbes described it – “grotesque distortions, eerie facial expressions, and unnatural movements.”
Have we lost the plot?
Tech advancements such as generative AI were supposed to be used for these tasks. So, when Krishan Arora underlines that there will be a stark difference between marketing and sales teams that use AI and those that don’t, we hope this is not what she inherently means.
Yes, AI is increasingly new and requires certain developments in its functionalities.
Additionally, we know that as creatives, our vision carries weightage that AI doesn’t recognize. We seek personalized experiences and dynamic content. And even when it does, it spits out an uninspiring copy of what was done by humans decades before.
So, the marketing domain where automation and AI become significant is entirely isolated from this sphere that has always entailed creativity.
Instead of expression, it plays a significant role in customer engagement. While it will offer you ample space to thread your creativity into a piece, AI is the copilot, and automation can identify patterns and gather relevant data.
Focusing on improving marketing automation ROI is not merely a juggle with numbers. Streamlining the process adds transparency to your business and elevates profitability. But automation isn’t limited to robotic processes that make the job efficient.
It is all about finding the delicate balance between human creativity and mechanic strategizing that can add value to your content and operations. Thus, increasing the ROI of marketing automation.
