It’s time to declare Groundhog Day dead
While you may have looked with envy at the integrated technology applications used so successfully by your sales and financial teams, chances are that marketing hasn’t had the same advantages. Instead of a marketing platform imbedded within the core sales system, your team may rely on Mailchimp, Marketo, or other third-party products that are fundamentally separate from everything else in the business.
And therein lies the problem. When it's time to execute a marketing campaign, your executives chase down business stakeholders to supply Excel contact lists, import them into your standalone marketing solution, and manually de-dupe and clean up the data. Finally, the list is ready to use, and you can send out your latest messaging – hoping you’ve hit the right targets while avoiding those who aren’t in a happy headspace with your company. Then you repeat the cycle for the next campaign - it’s Groundhog Day all over again.
As CMO, you are accountable to many stakeholders in the business for campaign outcomes. However, instead of working smarter and more strategically to raise the bar, your team is tied to the unproductive processes adopted when forced to work with non-integrated marketing technology. And despite all good intentions, the results can be hit-and-miss, at best.
The case for a single integrated marketing platform, with all customer databases and information in one place (think age, location, communication preferences, emails opened, past transactions, customer issues raised and more), is strong.
By using a fully-fledged customer engagement platform with sales, service, and marketing embedded, executing your marketing campaigns becomes an efficient task, raising productivity and capacity. And communications to clients are more intelligently targeted, personalised, timely and meaningful – boosting conversion rates.
Now can you automatically create dynamic marketing lists based on target age, location, and more, but with emerging AI technologies like Microsoft’s new Marketing Copilot (starting to be released as we speak, with new features coming each month, check out the release plans here) – your marketing outcomes will improve dramatically.
With Copilot, preparing a list requires nothing more than a statement of intent, e.g., “I want to drive more interest from customers aged 18-25 who are already interested in X type of product and live on Australia’s East Coast. Go find!” Copilot will analyse everyone in your contact lists and suggest who to target to achieve your campaign objectives as well as recommend other regions to consider if there’s a general sales decline in that area. It can even spot individuals or groups who are experiencing negative sentiments about your brand and need extra love and incentives.
If a customer is unhappy with your service or support, Copilot will give you the option to exclude them from a campaign list. And it will let you know which customers are experiencing marketing fatigue (for example, they’ve received eight emails from your business this week alone – all from different departments and teams) and remove them from the list before they opt to unsubscribe totally. With bounce backs, unsubscribes, opens, did-not-opens, and more collected and automatically applied to a customer’s CRM record, Copilot can even prompt your sales team into action based on customer behaviour.
With powerful AI technologies like Copilot and a single integrated marketing platform, you can drive better outcomes through targeted, efficient actions, and leverage a complete view of everything that's going on with your customers. It’s goodbye to Groundhog Day, forever. And hello to marketing on steroids.
