The Impact of Marketing Automation on Business Growth
In this exclusive interview Aswin Ravi, Director – MEA, WebEngage, talks about marketing automation and its core elements. The ambit of marketing automation is constantly expanding. How can it power business growth? The traditional ways of customer engagement and retention are not effective in today’s hyper-connected world. The ‘spray and pray’ approach to engaging with […]
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In this exclusive interview Aswin Ravi, Director – MEA, WebEngage, talks about marketing automation and its core elements.
The ambit of marketing automation is constantly expanding. How can it power business growth?
The traditional ways of customer engagement and retention are not effective in today’s hyper-connected world. The ‘spray and pray’ approach to engaging with customers results in dismal conversion rates.
It has become imperative for businesses to understand individual user-profiles and segments and send out relevant and personalised communication on time on the customers’ most preferred channel.
Marketing automation is enabling businesses to automate their marketing workflows and be better equipped to engage and retain their customers at scale. The rule-based approach and campaign orchestration help companies automate cross-sell, up-sell, and send timely reminders and nudges, leading to better conversion rates and reduced churn. This, in turn, increases customer lifetime value.
Also Read: When Enterprises Dare to Play
What, according to you, are the core components of a marketing automation hub?
Imagine the marketing automation hub to be a three-layered cake. The layers are interconnected and need to blend seamlessly to deliver optimal results. The three key components that make a powerful marketing automation hub are:
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) ingests real-time customer data from across channels and touchpoints on a single platform. CDP enables businesses to capture and organise multiple data categories (personal, behavioural) across the customer journey. Powerful analytics capabilities are then applied to the data to feed marketers with actionable insights.
The Engagement layer helps marketers develop cross-channel campaigns that adapt to user behaviour in real-time. Campaign Orchestration enables conversions across different touchpoints by seeding targeted engagement triggers in the customer journey based on behavioural analysis.
The Personalisation layer enables brands to craft personalised messages and deliver them on the users’ preferred channel at the right time, driving user engagement and retention. Personalisation technology has also evolved to fold in advanced techniques such as Web personalisation and App personalisation.
The three layers of a marketing automation hub together deliver on the promise of a delightful and differentiated customer experience.
How has WebEngage helped brands launch contextual and personalised campaigns?
WebEngage powers hyper-personalisation fueled by access to data and the use of a visual workflow builder.
Journey Designer helps marketers craft highly complex lifecycle marketing campaigns, leveraging up to ten channels, solving multiple use-cases effectively, and triggering conversions via intelligent user engagement.
Our Journey builder’s API call function allows brands to integrate data from multiple sources in real-time, select relevant segments, and send out targeted, dynamic, and effective communications to users. Journey designer also enables brands to run multivariate tests to determine which copy works best in converting their users.
In a nutshell, we help brands engage in one-to-one conversations with millions of users in a few clicks.
For instance, we worked with DSP BlackRock, helping them leverage user profiles, user events, screen data, and third-party data to deliver dynamic email communication at scale. This degree of hyper-personalisation in their email campaigns resulted in a 39 per cent increase in the email open rate.
Also Read: A Crowded Optimisation Landscape
Tell us more about RFM Analysis & the value it offers to customers.
RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) analysis provides one of the most reliable indicators of how long your existing user base will continue transacting with your business. It enables enterprises to identify user segments to run targeted campaigns quickly.
RFM Analysis helps identify essential segments such as champions, promising, potential loyalists, about to sleep, hibernating, and at-risk. Armed with this data, marketers can run a range of focused campaigns for different segment groups. For instance:
Brands can identify about to churn user groups and run promotional campaigns to bring them back.
RFM analysis also helps in identifying winning groups and run specific campaigns that result in high-conversions. Loyalty programmes can be extended to the best users group, thus bolstering the relationship further.
What are your plans for the MEA region?
It’s been three years since we entered the MEA region, and we have witnessed an encouraging growth curve. We are currently in the phase of setting up support and services based out of Dubai, which will cater to our existing and new customers in the region.
We actively engage with SMBs and startups in UAE and Egypt to identify growth opportunities by leveraging customer engagement.
We look forward to partnering with businesses in the MEA region to supercharge their growth journey.
