Skip to content
All posts

Building Smarter Marketing Automation: Think Long-Term

Picture of Stijn Toonen By  Stijn Toonen  ·  2 minute read

Everyone understands that marketing automation is a core driver of success for every marketing department. It sounds simple: You buy a tool and program it to do marketing tasks for you that you did yourself before.This is a recipe for disaster. Without proper thinking and preparation, you could have to re-do an implementation or switch systems when your investment for the old one hasn't paid off yet.

Before you start, consider your endgame. What level of marketing automation are you aiming for? That choice is vital for designing your martech stack and the people and partners you work with. There are three choices you need to make before you start:

1. Level of orchestration 

Are you just automating campaigns? Or are you creating entire customer journeys or even customer lifecycles? Choose between three levels:

  1. Campaign automation: automate one or multiple flow(s) that share the same conversion goal
  2. Customer journey automation: automate the entire journey of a product or service, including awareness, conversion, execution, and service. 
  3. Customer lifecycle automation: automate the entire lifecycle of a customer by combining multiple customer journeys in full.

2. Personalization

The level of personalisation is very important to understand the level of customer data you need to be successful. You don't need much if you aim to create emails with personalised fields based on contact information. But if you aim to treat your recipients differently based on how they behave across multiple channels, you'll need a different way of capturing, stitching and storing customer data. Choose between three levels:

  1. Contact information: basic data points such as names, prefixes and addresses.
  2. Preferences and interests: gathered from customer input and previous interactions and purchases.
  3. Behaviour-based: based on browsing data and recent interactions with all channels.

3. Channels and integration

Marketing automation can happen in one channel or can be used across various. This impacts what you need regarding systems and support. Choosing only to automate email campaigns isn't hard, but combining email flows with landing pages, ad campaigns, webinars, and offline interactions creates the need for a complex and integrated martech stack that can deliver these requirements. Choose between four levels:

  1. Email: Easy; a simple CRM and email marketing engine will suffice
  2. Email and Web: Medium; you'll need a CRM, CMS and (email) marketing automation platform that integrates and shares information.
  3. All online channels: Difficult. You'll have to add data from ad campaigns (which means programming your CMS data layer and implementing advanced tagging to make this available), chat systems, webinar hosting platforms, etc.
  4. Omnichannel: Hard, You need a fully integrated MarTech stack and ensure you capture information from offline interactions. That is not just a technical challenge; it is also a challenge to get your people to do it. 

Make the right choices today for a smarter tomorrow

The decisions you make in the early stages of marketing automation greatly impact the chances of success later on. Many organisations jump in too fast without a clear end goal, often leading to wasted time, budget, and frustration.

If you want to ensure you're on the right path from the start, I’d be happy to help you map out a strategy that fits your needs and choose the tools and integrations that support your growth. Feel free to contact me via the form below, and let’s build a smart, scalable, and future-proof setup together.

Related posts