Pauline E. Ranger Marketers who want to stay on top of the fast-paced world of online shopping today must adapt to all the different buying journeys created by digital. It’s not as easy as it sounds: To be adaptive, marketers must connect to, learn from, measure, and change based on digital breadcrumbs left by customers during their journeys.
Many companies are challenged by the fact that their digital marketing engines have not evolved as fast as the changing needs of marketers. They feel trapped as a result.
To get unstuck from the marketing rut, marketers must first identify their current level. This will allow them to identify growth opportunities and develop a plan for moving further along the curve.
Three common stages of digital marketing maturity are Email Marketers (email marketers), Multichannel Campaigners (multichannel campaigners), and Adaptive Marketers. When a company knows where it stands, it can strategize better for success.
Email Marketers
Email remains the most popular digital channel for many companies. Email is a direct way to communicate, is relatively cheap, and, most importantly, it works.
Email is a vital part of the digital marketing mix. However, those who are at the lowest level of maturity in digital marketing rely on it more than other channels.
These organizations often use an email service with limited and simple functionality.
Ask yourself the following questions to determine if your business is an email marketer:
- Does the marketing team do much of the manual scoring, data management, and GDPR compliance?
- Is there a lack of integration between CRM and digital marketing tools in your business?
- Does KPI reporting lack robustness and minimality?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you are likely an Email Marketer with advanced skills who would benefit from digital marketing tools and strategies to support this channel. These companies are doing the majority of their heavy lifting, but that doesn’t have to be the case!
To become a Multichannel campaigner, the first step is to automate email marketing. This will free up time for your marketing team to spend on strategic execution and less time on tactical tasks. Then, they can embrace other digital platforms, improve reporting, and create personalized content for segmented audience segments.
Take the example of Tower Federal Credit Union. The company decided to automate its email marketing and reporting in order to boost upselling to members of auto loans and mortgages. The marketing department could track emails opened and customize any follow-up communication accordingly. They chose which content to send members based on their actions in the sales funnel. The open rates of follow-up emails increased by up to 50% compared to pre-automation.
Multichannel Campaigners
At this level, organizations have moved beyond a -centric email marketing strategy and adopted a multichannel approach to digital marketing. Many companies are moving in this direction to better compete with their customers and meet their multichannel expectations.
Ask yourself the following questions to determine if you are a Multichannel campaigner:
- Has the company segmented its campaign strategy? Do we segment on the basis of behavior and profile data or other factors?
- Are we automating scoring, data management, and data enrichment?
- Does our CRM have our contact information?
- Do we have specific campaigns that are supported by a funnel with correlated reports of attribution?
This level is marked by more sophisticated segmentation and marketing technology that automates key processes. The majority of businesses that have reached this level on the marketing maturity curve have built up their marketing stack by identifying improvement areas through specific marketing cases.
GBG is an example of a company that makes technology that helps fight fraud and cybercrime. It generated leads through a variety of channels, but it needed to update lead scoring and nurture activities so that the Marketing team could better support Sales. It introduced automation to measure how prospects interacted and helped the team better understand where an opportunity was in the funnel. The company began tracking email campaigns and website visitors and synching that data with their CRM. This allowed Marketing to convert digital breadcrumbs into automated nurturing campaigns.
GBG could see all the buyer activity and how the prospects moved through their sales funnel by updating this information.
Adaptive marketing professionals
According to Peter O’Neill’s Vendor Selection Matrix: Top 20 Global Vendors for Marketing Lead Management SaaS and Software, 33.4% plan to migrate to a better system within the next 1 to 3 years. In other words, organizations are replacing their existing digital marketing automation solutions to personalize digital advertising, support Account-Based Marketing, and more.
Businesses that are Adaptive Market Pros have adopted technologies that allow them to personalize multichannel marketing and eliminate random marketing.
If these statements are true, you are an Adaptive Marketing Pro.
- Personalization for segments and personas is not our strategy.
- Segmenting customers by contact and account is part of our ABM strategy.
- Machine learning and AI-driven learning are adapted using behavior data, including information from third parties.
- Automated scoring supports multiple scoring rules and GDPR compliance.
- Our CRM is synced with our marketing stack.
- Our CRM has custom fields that are synced with Sales, and we use tools like email templates that can be customized.
- Our reports are easily shared within the organization. With integration between our marketing team and business intelligence tools, our analytics can be used to inform future actions and next steps.
At this stage, the main challenge for businesses is to remain at the forefront of digital marketing, updating their strategies constantly as new technologies are developed to support them. This is a huge challenge, especially in our fast-paced society.
Adaptive Marketing Pros, however, can use the available technologies to make small changes that will have a large impact. Predictive scoring, lookalike models, adaptive emailing, and content suggestions, such as subject-line optimization, can all result in small but significant improvements over time. Indigo Business Services, for example, increased its email clickthrough rate by 30% and increased its open rates by 20% just by experimenting with adaptive emails.
