Marketing automation is basically software that enables companies to target customers efficiently with automated marketing messages across several channels like websites, emails, SMS, social media, etc. This technology is a part of the CRM or Customer Relationship Management. The main objective of a marketing automation system is to remove repetition from the tasks of staff and to increase the efficiency of marketing.
Marketing Automation Software
The software of the marketing automation system can manage the online element of a marketing campaign. This includes data analytics, which is efficient in the creation of personalised content for the customer to improve engagement and revenue. Financial marketers prefer marketing automation to a great extent. It is popular because it helps in simplifying several daily tasks as well as the routine ones. As per recent research, about 79% of top companies use marketing automation for success and achievement of goals and targets. But still, there are doubts regarding the performance and utility of marketing automation.
Restrictions of Marketing Automation
There are some shortcomings in marketing automation too. Following are some of the disadvantages of marketing automation:
Difficulty in Setting Up Automation Rules
You will face many difficulties in setting different rules for automation. It will be a daunting task for you. This happens because you have to also decide about what each rule can bring for your business concerning a certain target or goal. It also takes up lots of time because each rule needs proper planning. In a big firm, creating rules with lots of planning and details is quite difficult because they have millions of customers. In such cases, financial marketers come out with a generic solution to avoid the usage of marketing automation.
Real-Time Segmentation
Financial marketers create segments with the help of marketing automation to sort out website visitors. But everyone knows that the users perform different digital activities. Hence, marketing automation fails to sort the visitors as it is not intelligent enough. For instance, when a cold lead comes up with renewed interest, the system will not be able to acknowledge it to the full extent. It may happen that the cold lead, instead of pre-inquiry, be put into the cold segment again. Financial marketers should opt for some real-time based intelligent segmentation instead of marketing automation.
Fatigue Due to Over Messaging
Marketing automation proves useful in delivering messages via several digital channels. But somehow, it may lead to over messaging if there are customers and prospects over every available channel. There may be certain channel preferences of the customers where they would like to engage. Therefore, it will be of no use to send marketing messages to all the channels. This will lead to fatigue and irritation.
Inconsistency in Messaging
If your company is targeting different marketing campaigns over different channels, your customers are not going to like it. They would be comfortable with the same marketing message on each channel. For instance, if a customer sees a credit card creation message over Facebook, other digital channels like email, SMS, etc. should show him/her the same message only. However, this is not the case with the marketing automation systems.
1:1 Personalisation Not Possible
The 1:1 Personalisation is a marketing strategy that targets personalised content to potential or existing customers by leveraging digital technology and data. If a company uses marketing automation systems, it cannot achieve 1:1 personalisation. To some extent, financial marketers may be able to customise and modify messages according to different customer segments. But it is impossible to deliver customised, personalised, and unique messages to each customer.
Error-Free Marketing Automation Does Not Exist
One cannot expect error-free results from marketing automation systems. Financial marketers need to be vigilant. Otherwise, a wrong message can ruin the image of the entire company. Hence, those who handle this department must be diligent and careful to avoid any kind of screw-ups.
Is There Any Perfect Digital Expansion Tool?
Since there are quite a few shortcomings related to marketing automation systems, therefore the financial marketers need a business tool which enables them to manage customer data, bring out valuable insights, mix up and bring together multiple systems, helps in creating unique user-profiles and so on. To achieve all these, the financial marketers have to look into and take help from other innovative technologies like a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Artificial Intelligence (AI) powers a CDP.
The function of a CDP is to ingest data from different sources and amalgamate them under one user profile. This helps each customer of the financial services company in getting a unified user profile. Thus a financial marketer gets to understand each client closely. When a marketer comes to know the requirements and needs of a client, he is able to tailor personalised campaigns for the client. He can also craft a unique user journey, and according to an individual basis. A CDP also enables marketers to bring together the channels with multiple systems. Hence, one can send personalised messages easily to customers via several digital channels.
Coming to the major advantage of AI-powered CDP, it happens in the area of channel orchestration and segmentation. Channel orchestration delivers personalised campaigns at scale on various customer chose channels at the time of customer engagement. AI can easily detect when a client is active and on which channel. This provides great help to the financial marketers to target users according to their preferred channels at a suitable time. And because of advanced algorithms and AI, the CDP can help in real-time intelligent segmentation. Financial marketers can conveniently target the users as Artificial Intelligence can segment the users automatically. It uses many industries oriented data variables.
Marketing Automation: The Conclusion
Marketing automation has certain shortcomings of its own. Financial marketers have to make a crucial decision. If their requirement is of a system that is much beyond the capacity of marketing automation, they have to invest in what is a customer platform, for instance, CDP. This will enhance and uplift their marketing efforts to the next level.
