Everything You Need To Know About Using an Automated Marketing Communication Platform 

To stay competitive in today’s business environment, companies need a reliable way to engage with their customers closely and effectively. While chatbots and other marketing automation tools have been helpful in select domains, “being there in the moment” can be a huge brand differentiator. A study by Forrester shows that 44% of online customers love to engage with live customer support when they have queries in the middle of their purchases. For businesses engaging with customers across multiple channels, automated marketing communication platforms come in handy.

These platforms give marketing teams a unified and more effective way to achieve their inbound and outbound marketing efforts with minimal hassle. More specifically, UCaaS and CPaaS-based platforms offer a seamless means to engage with customers, for instance, sending mass personalized messages to contacts from one communication platform. With so many capabilities to offer, it’s no wonder the global marketing automation industry is projected to cross $6.3 Billion by 2026.

What Is an Automated Marketing Communication Platform? 

True to the name, an automated marketing communication platform is a solution that helps digitize and operationalize different aspects of marketing, like communication, to streamline internal workflows and enhance customer experience. At the beginning of the customer lifecycle, companies can rely on automated marketing platforms to identify the leads more accurately, and then convert leads into sales. CPAAS technology then allows for the application of direct marketing automation across all stages of the lifecycle, improving KPIs all the while. 

Using a marketing automation platform solves most of the challenges you would otherwise encounter with the fragmented, slow, and costly manual processes. With the right communication platform, you can collect, analyze, and gain insights from customer data for more effective decision-making.

How Can Marketing Automation Impact Your Business? 

Personalization to deliver customer-centric experiences

Personalized communication and interaction are proven recipes for achieving higher user engagement. The right communication platform lets you take advantage of customer behavior across different channels so you can use the insights to curate personalized experiences for your leads and let them feel welcome in your space. Research shows that offering well-timed, relevant, and personalized messages boosts open rates by 82%, CTR by 75%, and lowers the number of unsubscribes by 40%. Personalization also comes in handy in standing out from the crowd, as most businesses share general messages with all their contacts.

Customer onboarding and retention 

Customer onboarding is very delicate; it can make or break your connection with new leads. One of the reasons is because customers never want to feel coerced into signing up for a service. Instead, they’re always on the lookout for value from one step to the next. Automated marketing lets leads seamlessly move from the introductory through to the advanced stages of the sales funnel. Combined with CRM capabilities, automated marketing communication platforms are able to enhance onboarding, lead nurturing, and customer engagement which ultimately helps drive higher customer retention and, consequently, higher ROI.

Effective marketing campaigns 

Automating marketing campaigns reduces human errors as most repetitive tasks are handled by the software, thus allowing the internal teams to focus on more strategic and productive work.

Marketing teams also gather insight about their customers through tools like chatbots, feedback forms, and rating systems – which are components of the larger automated marketing communication platforms. Using the collected and analyzed data, they can respond to customer needs more precisely. For example, a company can know what kind of content to distribute to appeal to a specific audience. 

Streamline internal processes 

Automated communication platforms eliminate communication bottlenecks that often arise using traditional legacy systems or manual processes due to a lack of centralized communication history. Coordinated communication ensures employees across all departments can easily engage with each other as well as customers for effective service delivery.

For example, a dispatch team can tell whether an order has been cleared for shipping. Customer service teams can also know whether a service ticket was settled or needs follow-up from the technical team. In case the customer enquires, conversations from whatever channel they’ve used before can be easily accessed and an effective solution offered.

Save time and resources 

Automation is a time-saver, especially in an environment that involves repetitive tasks. With fully deployed marketing automation software, marketing teams can schedule common tasks to execute at the desired time, which greatly impacts performance, productivity, reliability, and operating costs. 

Considering most cloud-based platforms today are offered on a subscription model, businesses don’t have to break the bank to leverage new technologies. Besides, businesses only subscribe to the specific solutions that delight their customers and those that will enable them to meet their goals without being charged for the other services offered by the platform. As the business scales, they don’t have to worry about upgrade or maintenance costs.

Steps to Implementing a Marketing Automation Platform 

Step 1: Selecting a marketing automation platform 

Research and select a marketing automation platform that aligns with your goals. Choose a platform that can easily integrate with your existing systems and supports B2B functions such as CRM, bulk messaging, email marketing, etc. Since your business is expanding, flexibility and adaptability should also be key considerations. For that reason, cloud-based communication platforms are recommended because of their agility.

Step 2: Linking the platform to existing systems 

This involves integrating the chosen marketing automation software into your existing core systems. In this process, CPaaS platforms have a competitive advantage over UCaaS platforms as CPaaS allows for customization to meet your specific business needs. They come with a wide range of tools so you can deploy what works for your business. On the other hand, UCaaS offers one-size-fits-all tools.

Step 3: Configuration to import the existing customer data 

To ensure a seamless transition to the new platform, all the existing customer data is imported, and backup copies made. Once imported, the data is available for analytics and other automation functions.

Step 4: Automate and personalize data

Automated marketing platforms make it easier to collect personalized data about your customers. They track and record helpful metrics about what the different categories of customers do when they visit your website. For example, the platforms not only let you know who visited but also from the site they visited from.  

Driving Change With iwinBACK CPaaS Marketing Automation Software 

As businesses expand to reach a wider market, gain more customers, and amass large volumes of customer data, keeping everything organized often becomes a great setback. However, today’s cloud-based marketing automation software allows businesses to expand and do more unrestrained. At iwinBACK, we have a CPaaS-based marketing automation platform to help you achieve your marketing goals fast, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Reach out to us today.