Introduction to the Marketing Automation guide

Create more effective email marketing using a graphic interface with drag-and-drop functions to develop multi-step campaigns based on action- and event-based mailings. These campaigns are perfectly adapted to a highly diverse set of target groups, using automated distribution cycles.

Optimizely Campaign's graphic editor lets you create elaborate campaigns for your customer database, then refine them after the campaign is running. This guide provides actual examples that you can use "as is" or with minor adjustments.

Email content should be oriented to a recipient's interests and personal circumstances. Lifecycle marketing shapes each customer relationship by communications that pass through a series of phases. Each phase is characterized by changing expectations that can be divided into segments, such as new customer, regular customer, and inactive customer.

You want to draw potential consumers to your company’s brand and products, and transform general interest into a willingness to purchase, supported by appropriately targeted inducements. When a consumer becomes a customer or a long-term regular customer, you want to provide new impulses through well-defined and properly-dosed emails. By applying the right analysis strategy to an ever-expanding database, you can obtain a better picture of your customers and target measures such as periodic incentives or post-profiling. When you win back inactive customers, the lifecycle marketing strategy is complete.

Lifecycle marketing tries to cultivate customer lifetime value (CLV) into a viable concept that benefits your company and its products. To do this, Optimizely Campaign creates a series of automated mailings for events and target groups. CLV is the profit contribution that a customer realizes during his "lifetime" as a customer. In addition to past revenue, it considers anticipated future revenue and customer potential. CLV thus exceeds conventional campaign performance measurements. Moreover, this indicator includes customer sales trends, allowing for targeted email marketing aimed at generating appropriate purchasing inducements.

You want to find a profitable means of addressing a variety of customer scenarios over the long term. For example, an automated reactivation campaign is preferable to a one-time effort at winning back regular-but-currently inactive customers. Such a campaign systematically solicits this customer group over an extended time period. This approach also helps ensure that no customer “falls through the cracks,” preserving customer value. Marketing managers can devote considerably more time to the content of their promotions and continued development of campaigns.

Maintaining customer relationships is more complex than winning over new customers. Customer care in lifecycle marketing means consistently addressing the customer according to their status and interests. A contact strategy should be evolutionary, methodical, and forward-looking. Direct prompts and incentives toward obtaining desired responses and targeted feedback are initiated. Effective Marketing Automation improves customer care. Successful campaigns produce higher customer satisfaction and provide for targeted responses to the needs of regular customers.

While conventional approaches can support a few standard segments and customer lifetime phases, Optimizely Campaign makes more effective use of your customer data to customize implementation. You can decide to display an entire customer lifetime cycle in a central campaign, or roll out several individual campaigns.

A user-friendly interface lets you turn an idea into a campaign. Use your computer mouse to mark starting and ending points. Then, with the aid of nodes and branches, retrieve your parameters in Optimizely Campaign and incorporate them into a campaign.

Each node stands for an action or event (such as sending birthday email as trigger-mail), or for filtering addressees by target group. By linking two nodes, you create a sequencing plan that anyone can follow. You can assign parameters to any node, such as click profiles, target groups or individual mailings. Marketing Automation automatically checks link logic among nodes and verifies that no nodes lead to dead ends.

You can add partial or intermediate steps for specific addressee groups. For example, if you want to communicate with only addressees who opened their discount mailing three weeks earlier, select the appropriate target group as parameter. Other addressees in your distribution list are unaffected but may be considered for a different discount mailing. As you get to know you customers better through additional campaigns and analyses, you can create additional segments and reconfigure the way you communicate benefits.

Developing the perfect campaign takes time and analysis. You can modify and refine a campaign to properly align your marketing goals while moving toward perfection. You can save modifications as drafts then transfer them to a running campaign with no downtime.