In this day and age where consumers are faced with marketing messages from every direction, creating a successful marketing campaign can be difficult and time-consuming. That's where a good marketing data-driven marketing automation strategy comes in.

Data-driven marketing automation is a technique that requires being able to create and run automations, taking the data collected and using that data to further advance your marketing campaigns. This means that even when you think you’ve got it all figured out, you still need to keep on analyzing your results.

If you want to personalize your marketing messages, whether it’s to send email messages tailored to your users, or SMS campaigns with specific coupons, a data-driven marketing strategy can give you a competitive advantage. It also helps you make informed business decisions as you will have more data at your disposal.

However, data by itself is not a tangible resource. In order to use data effectively, you need to establish realistic, measurable goals and then see how your data stacks up. 📚

So, this is, in short, how a data-driven marketing automation works. But what is a data-driven marketing strategy anyway? Keep reading to find out.

What Is A Data-Driven Marketing Automation Strategy?

There’s a common term that is often referred to in marketing automation strategy: “data mining”. Data mining is the practice of going through very large databases in order to generate new information from these sources. In other words, you process a bunch of inputs and transform them into actionable outputs.

Data-driven marketing automation refers to taking the data that you have collected from customers, their behavior, demographics, and similar data points, and using that data to improve the way your business operates through marketing task automation. For example, you can use a marketing automation strategy to improve your products and create better user experiences based on common customer behavior. 🗣️

When you have enough data, you can achieve mass personalization. Rather than reaching out to customers and prospects with a one-size-fits-all approach, you can target customers who exhibit certain behaviors and characteristics and send them personalized responses. You can create a better connection with your target customers by tailoring these messages to each group.

Platformly offers segments and tags to split your audience into relevant categories.

But how do you collect this data? Through your CRM software, of course. That’s just one of the reasons why Platformly is such a comprehensive tool – by creating automations based on CRM data, it’s easier to make informed decisions and use actionable insights.

For example, if you run an automated onboarding sequence for your new users, you could study the data of past emails (open rate, CTR, and other stats) to further improve your messaging. You can also A/B test each email to see which version is more effective.

What Can Data-Driven Marketing Automation Do To Improve Your Business?

Now that you know what data-driven marketing automation is, and how it shapes your business, it’s easy to see how it can make a difference in your conversion rate. It can also help increase engagement, lower unsubscribe rate, and much more! Let’s go through the main advantages of this marketing automation strategy. 🛎️

1. Enable personalized content

By focusing your efforts on a data-driven marketing strategy, you can use personalization on your target audience, as mentioned previously. And it’s not only about targeting different groups with different content: you can also send personalized campaigns to your customers or prospects.

Let’s say you have a cosmetics eCommerce website. You know this specific group of customers only buys cologne for men. So, it’s no use to send them discounts on makeup products. By personalizing, you can send these specific users offers that interest them according to previous purchases (and other buying behaviors). 💰

2. Enhance strategic decision making

As a business owner or C-level professional, you need to make decisions every single day. Collecting and analyzing data can make it easier for you to make these decisions. Data-driven decisions are a much more precise way to plan your strategy. By developing your data collection and mining, you can make educated guesses about your business, adjust your goals and create winning strategies.

3. Base new product development on data

What do your users think about your product or service? If you don’t know the answer to this question, it’s time to turn to your CRM data. Data allows you to figure out how you should further develop your product and what your customers already love about it.

You can get this information in different ways: surveys are ideal, but they need to be easy to fill in. Most customers don’t have the time to give you long and detailed answers to your questions.

However, you can promote your surveys by offering a discount code or a similar gift in exchange for participation. 🎁

You can also use data from customer behavior. This has the advantage of not requiring any effort on the part of your customers. It’s also sometimes easier to track this data than to analyze surveys.

4. Gives you a competitive edge

Granularity in consumer data can also give you a competitive advantage over your competitors. This means that the more detailed your customer data, the easier it is to design your marketing automation strategy based on that information.

Basing your decisions and strategies on data puts you ahead of the competition, in the sense that you can see trends and behaviors that will guide your decisions, and improve your customer experience.

5. Increases your ROI

Of course, when you speak your customers’ language and adapt your products and services to them, your sales will increase – and so will your ROI. It’s easier to sell using personalization than it is with a cookie-cutter approach. 🍪

It’s easy to understand why. Let’s say you sell golf apparel. If you know that your target customers are 40-65 years old, married, close to retirement or already retired, and in a good financial situation, it’s a lot easier to try to sell to this persona than it would be by just knowing your target likes golf. See the difference?

By understanding the personas of your customers and acting accordingly, you increase sales and ROI. It’s simple. Data should be the foundation for all your marketing efforts.

Create A Data-Driven Marketing Automation Strategy, Step By Step

Now that we know how data-driven marketing can improve your marketing strategy, the next question is: how do you build your own strategy based on data? We’ll explain this in this section.

1. Draw realistic goals

This comes down to knowing your business and your brand well. If the market for your product consists of 100 thousand users, you cannot hope to have 200 thousand customers buying it. Also, if your product lasts a long time, you need to figure out ways to upsell and cross sell. This implies using related services and products in order to keep users engaging with your brand.

Goals are essential when designing a marketing strategy. If you don’t know what you want or need, how can you plan for it? 🗓️

Realistic and clear goals, such as increasing engagement, improving customer experience, increasing monthly revenue and so on, make it easier to understand where you’re going and which steps you need to take in order to achieve those goals.

2. Carefully build a cross-disciplinary team

This step will depend on how many departments there are in your organization and the number of employees. If you run a small business, your marketing and sales tasks might be attributed to the same team.

However, if you have a bigger team under your wing, with marketers, public relations, sales representatives, and more, you can gather different professionals in order to create a dedicated task force. ✍️

This means getting employees from sales, data management, market research, digital marketing, etc., and assigning them the tasks we’ll mention in the following sections.

3. Collect and use the right data

Sometimes, not all the data you have from your CRM is useful. This means you need to go beyond pure demographics and get some information about your customers’ behavior. By selecting the right data, it’s easier to analyze it and turn it into actionable insights.

In order to collect this data, you need to probe your CRM and use that data in your marketing automation. 🦾

You also need to make sure that you are using recent data, so that you are acting on a short term. Stale data about your customers will lead you to make decisions that do not reflect exactly how your business is doing right now.

4. Analyze your data using marketing automation tools

Platformly makes it easy to analyze your data by keeping all the information in the same SaaS. You don’t need to transfer your data between different apps in order to analyze it thoroughly and apply it to your marketing automation strategy.

Keep on reading to learn more about our reporting features. In this article, we’ll show you how to analyze your data to create the ideal marketing automation sequences. ⚙️

5. Enhance customer experience through automation

Automation can also improve your customer experience. By automating your email and SMS messages, you prevent common mistakes that happen when you have to perform this kind of repetitive task often.

Using automation, you save time and reduce errors. This, together with personalization, enhances user experience and customer satisfaction.

6. Report and measure results

Of course, in order to enhance your data-driven marketing strategy, you need to report frequently and measure results. You have decided on your goals already, so you know what to measure.

Nonetheless, if you need ideas for your reports, Platformly offers several reporting options that can be fully customized. From business dashboards to email reports, we offer all the reports you might ever need.

In the next section, we’ll show you not only how to measure results, but also how to evaluate each customer using the data available. 🖥️

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How To Use Platformly For A Data-Driven Marketing Automation Strategy

CRM Data

The first place you need to go in order to create your own data-driven marketing strategy is your CRM. You’ll see this table at the left-hand side of each contact:

This table will give you a few insights into that customer’s behavior. First, there’s money spent by that customer: if he or she never purchased anything, you need to nurture this lead before pushing for a hard sell.

Then, you have emails sent, emails opened, and email CTR (click-through rate). These metrics allow you to understand if that user engages with your messages, how many times you have tried to contact them via email, and how many times they clicked on any of the links on your emails.

If you have a contact that does not click through, maybe you should ask if they are still interested in your product or brand (or both). This is a good approach because it puts the ball on your customer’s court, by showing you understand if they’re not interested anymore. It’s better to have fewer recipients on your mailing list than to have too many that do not respond or purchase anything.

You also have an SMS sent metric, which enables tracking of these interactions too. SMS is a very close and personal channel, so you need to make sure you’re not messaging your recipient too often.

Now, let’s jump to the last item on our list: your lead score. This metric is calculated in an automated manner through Platformly: the higher the score, the more likely it is that this user is going to purchase. This metric is calculated by attributing points to each action (such as subscribing to a newsletter, downloading an ebook, and so on) and adding the values attributed to each action.

Sales Reports

You might have many goals in your strategy, but ultimately all these goals boil down to sales. In order for your data-driven marketing strategy to work, you need to use reports. Reporting allows you to evaluate the results,see how your business is doing and change your strategy when needed.

Platformly offers several sales reporting tools that can help you make data-driven business decisions, starting with the sales report.

You can determine actionable insights from your recurring revenue and new sales. These metrics allow you to understand if your sales are consistent, or if you’re lacking customer retention.

Refunds also let you know if you are losing customers after they subscribe. A cancellation rate of less than 10% can be enough for some businesses, but it might be too much in another industry. However, if this number increases with no apparent reason, you need to tread carefully. There might be some hidden issues with your business model or your product itself.

Churn rate is also quite an important factor when it comes to sales reporting. It’s normal for churn to increase as your sales numbers increase, but you need to make sure you’re paying attention to the reasons your customers are giving for their decision to abandon your platform or your product.

Email Reports

Your email reports let you know how engaged your recipients are. By getting the number of sent emails, emails opened and emails clicked, you can get an idea of whether your content is resonating with users. The number of emails open shows if your subject lines are effective. Clicks show if your content is engaging, and can also tell if your design and CTA (call to action) is appealing.

Business Dashboards

Business dashboards from Platformly give you plenty of useful data. You have your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), average revenue by customer, new customers, new subscribers, and a few metrics related to churn. All these metrics give you insights into what you need to prioritize in your business. If your churn is high, something is wrong, for example, your onboarding process is too complicated, support is not efficient, or your product needs improving.

Automation Reports

Your automation builder shows you how many of your recipients went through to the next action in the automation, along with other relevant metrics such as emails sent, emails open and click-through rate.

Each of these automations also has its own metrics, as you can see in the image. Having access to the open rate and click-through rate is important to assess the efficiency of your current automations.

Data from these reports and dashboards lets you know if you’re making the right decisions for your business, and, especially, in your marketing strategy.

Wrapping Up

As we showed, data-driven marketing automation strategy can – and should – be used to increase sales and revenue using specific data. Platformly allows you to get all the data you need from your CRM and transfer it seamlessly to your marketing automation setup.

We also improve our service consistently using customer feedback, so if there’s anything you think we could add to our features, simply let us know.

Curious about how your data-driven marketing strategy can improve with Platformly? Sign up for your free trial today…
 

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