How to choose marketing automation platform?

Why do you need Marketing Automation platform?

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Before 5-10 years, There weren’t any widely used marketing automation platforms. The way email marketing worked is you uploaded a bunch of email list to your email marketing system and send a bulk message to all users every time you need manually. Whether you are on holiday or medical leave, you need to open the system to achieve whichever objective you need. So slowly marketing automation came into the industry helping people to automate the way they run the process.

The simplest example is you receive a welcome email when you subscribe to a blog. Another widely used advanced automation email is you receive an email when you abandoned a cart in shopping website. Currently, more than our imagination, the whole process of email marketing has been achieved by automation with very less human monitoring needed.

Why do you need a standalone Marketing Automation Platform?

A standalone marketing automation platform means when you use different marketing automation platform for email, SMS, Push Notifications, etc. For example, Localytics being used for Push notifications and in-app messaging, Hubspot for E-mail automation

Early stage companies, according to their need, they will only subscribe to standalone tools as it satisfies their specific needs and it is cost effective. Also, those standalone tools are expertise in their segment, as mentioned HubSpot is meant for its email automation.

Why do you need 360 Marketing Automation Platform?

So when companies grow big, the number of communication channel increase as well and it is hard to control each channel messages. Messages go to users on silo and communication are scattered, not consistent and sometimes confusing. Secondly, it is very hard to scale the communication when companies grow big as achieving things manually is hard. So companies wanted to

Streamlined communications to end users across multi-channels in their Owned Media ( SMS, Email, Push Notifications, In-App Messages, Social communication channels, etc)
This automation tools help to automate the marketing operations, personalized communications to clients, real-time reporting for all owned channels under one hood.

Some use cases need to look at marketing automation platform

1. Data Setup from multiple sources: As a marketer, it should be easy for marketers to use simple connectors and sync data from different internal(your CRM) and external systems to send more accurate and personalized data
2. Segment And Targeting granular level of the audience: As a marketer, he/she able to BUILD AUDIENCE on a granular level such as behavior, profile, LTV and thus provides marketers to send the right message to the right audience.
3. Real-time audience building: Advanced Segmentations: As a marketer, he/she able to get the data in real-time not just creation of audience but the audience need to be refreshed in real time and so the communication to client goes on RIGHT TIME
4. A simple in built templates for all email and landing pages: As a marketer, he/she shouldn’t spend too much time on coding or be developing landing page and email, it should simple and draggable elements to create the page. This allows marketers to test a variety of content frequently and thus improving the content freshness and quality to clients. one of the best examples of simple email building is MailChimp.
5. Dynamic contents in an email according to user behaviour: As a marketer, He/she would be better to have an automated system which can generate dynamic emails based on user behavior or on his personal details. And thus reduce the amount of human resource time on sending personalized emails to each user. one simplest example is you receive an email with “Hi Jackie, you got an item ABC in your cart”
6. Cross-channel workflow management: As a marketer, He/she should have the ability to send messages to SMS, email, mobile push via one cross-channel workflow system. Setup frequency of messages, stop and resume capability based on previous channel behavior. setup different scheduling according to different time zone (Localytics offers this when sending a push notification by selecting user timezone or our timezone).
7. Integrated Data for Reporting: CRM + Marketing Any data is useless if you can’t connect with start or end of a user journey. so having your sales data in your CRM database and behavior data in your analytics tool without connection is useless. As a marketer, He/She should have the system to see Performance of the campaigns by channel (email, SMS, mobile push, etc). After behavior of that campaign (Example: signup, viewed a product, added an item to the card, purchased an item and its transactional details). Performance by different dimension (region, Source of the lead, stages in user journey, etc)