CRM & MARKETING AUTOMATION AGENCY

Why data is so important in Marketing Automation

a magnifying glass over people representing data

When launching a marketing campaign, you must decide:

Who are you going to target?

What are you going to say?

How are you going to say it?

And how you will measure performance?

The answers are in the data. Reliable and insightful data is what drives automation.

It directly impacts three key areas that often determine how our campaigns perform.

Personalisation and targeting

Data can help us decide on who we target and how.

It can tell us where best to display our Facebook advert through insight.

It can tell us which contacts are most likely to open an email.

And it can guide us on what day of the week our campaigns will be most successful.

In short, it helps us to target our communications.

Marketing automation platforms make it easy for us. We don’t need to manually sift through thousands of spreadsheets to pick out contacts to target. Instead, it’s done for us.

Reliable data can help us personalise our campaigns too. Many brands now ask for data that goes beyond billing and delivery address.

Take Moonpig as an example. If you buy a birthday card, they’ll ask who it’s for and what date their birthday is. And, a year later, they’ll send an automated email to remind you.

Reporting and Insight

Do you know the most popular device your audience is opening your emails on?

Do you know the best hour of the day to send?

Your email platform will do.

In fact, some tools out there have predictive sending functionality. Meaning you can send an email to individual contacts at a time your email platform knows they’re more likely to open.

Like magic!

Google Analytics, CRMs and marketing automation platforms provide enormous amounts of data. And it takes away the element of guessing.

Imagine there’s a marketing team debate about subject lines for an email campaign.

A simple A/B test will soon give you the correct answer.

Or maybe you want to know which page of your website brings in most sales calls. With automated call tracking, you’ll be a click away from reports with all the answers.

Content

Content is one of the 4 Key Challenges with Marketing Automation.

But when you get it right, it can drive your whole strategy.

Good content engages your audience. It’s what keeps people reading your blogs, opening your emails and letters and picking up your leaflets… to name a few.

For online channels, platforms can be even more targeted when delivering content to their audience. There are website plugins available that automatically and dynamically deliver content based on user behaviour.

Let’s take a digital marketing agency as an example.

They want to deliver more relevant content to website visitors.

So if visitors spend time reading specific content – about Facebook advertising, say – they know the visitor has a specific interest. And as a result, the content of the pages they visit will automatically change to be more focused on the area of interest.

This gives the customer more of what they want to read about and keeps them on the website longer. It also emphasises the agency’s expertise in the subject.

Another way data is used to deliver relevant content is through tagging.

Tagging contacts is a popular way of tracking user behaviour and attributing sales. It’s easily done on most CRM and marketing automation platforms.

By tagging contacts, you can trace how they first contacted you and their journey since then. You can then use tags to understand the mix of channels customers use to find you.

Plus, you can deliver content that relates to their interactions with your business.

How to use data in marketing automation

There is so much data available. Some of it you will need and some of it you won’t.

If you’re unsure of how marketing automation can work for your business, then we’re here to help.

We’ll explain how data can drive your marketing activity for the greatest results.  

Get in touch today to find out more.

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