Marketing Automation

Planning and roll-out guide

Contents
1. What is marketing automation?
1.1 Why is marketing automation growing? Why should you use it?
1.2 Getting buy-in.
2. The 5 key success factors
2.1 Set your objectives
2.2 Identify problems and opportunities
2.3 Be clear about your data
2.4 Customer journey workow planning
2.5 Get the content and creative right
3. Marketing automation in action
3.1 Webform sign-up automated emails
3.2 Anniversary-driven automated email programmes
3.3 Email engagement-driven programmes
3.4 Website engagement-driven programmes
3.5 Customer insight-driven programmes
3.6 Lifecycle marketing and nurturing programmes
3.6.1 Engaged prospects
3.6.2 Lapsed customers/clients
3.6.3 Engaged customers/clients
4. Making your content King
4.1 Your Content Audit
4.2 Lifecycle planning your customer journey
4.3 Mapping content to each stage
1. What is marketing automation?
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation can improve your performance in:
l Demand and lead generation.
l Prospect and lead nurturing.
l Lead scoring and management.
l Lead conversion.
l Customer loyalty building.
l Repeat sales, up-sell and cross-sell.
l Rescued sales eg abandoned baskets and website
searches.
l Data capture and enrichment.
l Advocacy and referral driving.
dotMailer.co.uk Marketing Automation Planning and Roll-out Guide
Marketing automation uses software to automate tasks
and processes, eliminate the need for high-touch manual
intervention, and deliver real scalability to any sales and
marketing operations.
With your marketing teams time free from laborious data
and campaign management tasks, you can focus on the
thinking behind the strategy and tactics the key areas that
help build revenue and business growth, such as:
l Strategic planning.
l Data analysis and segmentation.
l Split testing and campaign optimisation.
l Response analysis.
Whatever degree of complexity of automation you choose
to implement, there are marked benets.
Without marketing automation,
you are just guessing, just hoping
that people will take the bait and be
ready to buy your products.
John McTigue, Kuno Creative
In the context of this white paper, we are addressing marketing
automation as the process of automating and integrating tasks
relating to email based marketing campaigns and database
management, that previously would have had to be done manually.
4
1.1 Why is marketing automation growing?
Email marketing automation has been widely adopted by
both B2B and B2C companies, and is currently growing
rapidly. This trend has been given added impetus by:
l The dissolving of traditional boundaries between sales
and marketing departments.
l Changing consumer behaviour: Social media, user
generated content and mobile browsing are all
changing the way consumers research and make their
purchase decisions. Marketing automation provides
a scalable way of keeping pace with nimble-footed
consumers.
l Marketing automation platforms are becoming
increasingly sophisticated, accessible and affordable for
businesses.
So, should you use marketing
automation? Simple answer...
yes, because it works:
And here are some case studies to illustrate the point*:
l McAfee introduced automated processes to score leads,
segment its audience and provide right information,
right time triggered emails.
The outcome: Leads dropped 35% but were of higher
quality and conversion rates rose by 400%!
l Software company Opsview utilised automation
software to handle leads coming into its website,
identifying those that would use a free version of its
software or an expanded subscription version, then
sending targeted email depending on their preference.
The outcome: Company revenues increased by 178%.
l Stationary supplier PaperStyle.com automated its
email process to deliver targeted and timely emails to
customers who were planning weddings.
The outcome: Email open rate went up by 244%.
Revenue increased 330% per emailing.
l Acteva introduced marketing automation allowing it
to quickly build and adapt landing pages and deliver
targeted and personalised emails across 65 different
audiences.
The outcome: The business saw 350% marketing ROI
plus 100% annual growth in areas where marketing
automation was implemented.
* source, econsultancy.com
1. What is marketing automation?
1.2 Getting buy-in.
So now that youre persuaded, its going to be important for you get
management on board. Here are three useful suggestions to help you do so:
l Start small. If you try to build the ultimate marketing automation
programme all at once youll end up overwhelmed. Start with change thats
small and incremental, and ramp things up from there. Start small, think big!
l Set clear and achievable initial goals and objectives. Dont be over ambitious
at the start of the automation process. Give yourself time and set goals that
you are condent can be achieved. Then leverage the successful achievement
of your objectives to get buy-in on further automation.
l Sell the bottom line. Business is about making money, so to increase
co-operation and reach the level of automation you want, sell the huge
potential of marketing automation to save costs and increase revenue.
Produce a well-structured and logical report to show this, maybe utilising a
nice before and after automation graphic:
dotMailer.co.uk Marketing Automation Planning and Roll-out Guide
The argument for planning and rolling out
marketing automation are clear and compelling.
Graphic courtesy of www.marketingtechblog.com/marketing-automation-evolution
6
Are you in it for the long haul?
Email marketing automation can be a rich and rewarding process for any business.
This graphic will give you an idea of how the automation pathway can develop over time:
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Created 17.1.2014
Page 5 Who we are
The ve phases of marketing automation
The ve phases of Email Marketing Automation
LEVEL 1


LEVEL 2


LEVEL 3


LEVEL 4


LEVEL 5
Batch & Blast Smarter
Batch & Blast
Semi automated
Email Marketing
Fully automated
Email Marketing
Enterprise
Automation


Measured on emails
and campaigns sent.
Success
Criteria
Indicates how
platform complexity
and intelligence grows
The relationship
between the user
and platform changes
as the level of
automation increases
Success criteria ties
into business success
Becomes key channel
of acquiring / rening
customer insight
Moves to central hub
of businss comms
Costs and justication
change with time
Level of
Customer
Insight
Indicative
Features and
Services used
User job role
- Level of tech skill
- Frequency of use
- Typical use case
Adoption level
of Email Marketing
Automation
Business and
Marketing
Integrations
Spend
Justication

Measured on lead quality
and conversion rates.


Measured on ROI of
combined activities.

Easy Editor
Manual segments
Manual triggers
Creative studio
Transactional customer data
ROI tracking
Custom development
Data cleansing
Strategic consultancy
Auto segment creation
Lifecycle campaigns
1-to-1 send time optimsation
Predictive intent and rich
customer behaviour analysis.
Social media management
Fully managed service
Automatic content created
and share tools.
Self-educating platform.
Auto optimising campaigns.
Auto data enriching.
Blended, multi channel
lifetime ROI reporting.
Business consultancy
Junior Marketing Exec
- Technophobe
- Intensive user
- Create, test, send and
report on campaigns.
Marketing Executive
- Early adopter
- Frequent user
- Improve targeting,
tracking & list growth
Senior Marketing Executive
- Fast follower
- Light user
- Coordinate basic
multichannel marketing
Marketing Director
- Tech advocate
- Occassional user
- Manages bidirectional
multimedia campaign.
CDO
- Technophile
-Fleeting user
- Customer research
and innovation pipeline.

Strategic intelligence
fed to other business
systems.
Measured on contribution
to business objectives.
No insight. Time
based opportunistic
targeting used.
Basic behavioural
information and
marketing segments.

Broad understanding of
customer spending
and demographics.

Rich predictive
psychographic
customer proles.


Costs and resources
tightly constrained
Costs justied by
time saved
Costs justied by
increased ROI
Costs seen as a
business essential
No system integrations.
Email marketing activty
exists in a silo.
Website APIs.
Campaigns manually linked
to other marketing activity
All core systems connected.
Marketing assets easily
shared across other channels
Suite of automation tools
from dotMailer app store.
Multichannel campaigns
Proactively reaches out
to other systems to self
educate and enrich.
Value of the data harnessed
and rened outstrips costs


Measured on
pipeline volumes.

The ve phases of email marketing automation
2. The 5 key success factors
The 5 key success factors
dotMailer.co.uk Marketing Automation Planning and Roll-out Guide
Businesses that make marketing automation work, do so by
following a structured approach. If you dont cover off these
rst fundamental steps then you could be in danger of simply
automating for the sake of it, rather than automating to help
you achieve your business goals.
2.1 Set your objectives
You need to be clear about what you want to achieve from
marketing automation, and why.
So begin above all by dening your goals: Ask yourself,
your colleagues, your key stakeholders; what are the
drivers that will deliver your numbers? Is your key driver
repeat business? Increased average order value? Increasing
the value of initial customer spend? Reducing churn and
attrition? Winning more referrals and recommendations?
Prioritise these. You cant do everything all at once with
automation, so go for your top priority rst.
2.2 Identify problems
and opportunities
Now is not the time to be coy. Be very clear about the
problems and opportunities you experience with your
marketing.
Identify where the opportunities really lie for marketing
automation to have the most inuence and impact on
your numbers. Is it in your lead nurturing? Or in your post-
sale loyalty and retention nurturing, for example? Or is it
all about driving that online sale?
B2B and B2C marketers will be facing different
opportunities here different sales lead times, different
conversion funnels. Theres no cookie cutter approach.
List down the headaches that your marketing people face
that automation could help with: what are the manual
tasks that are taking too much of your hard-pressed time?
What do you wish you could do but simply dont have the
time to?
8
2.3 Be clear about your data
Your database will form the foundation of your marketing
automation. Data collected, via any customer touchpoint,
can be inuential in triggering an automation programme
decision.
Here are our 5 key database considerations you should
focus on in your planning stage:
l Data cleansing get your database audited and cleaned
up before you begin an automation programme. The old
adage rubbish in, rubbish out remains as true as ever.
l Data hygiene have a plan in place to keep your
database clean. Marketing automation can help with
this: for example, sending automated surveys to
customers after a set period of time, incentivising them
to update their details.
l Data capture and enrichment be clear about the
customer behaviour and prole data you need to
drive the automation you want. And have a plan for
collecting it.
l Data integration marketing automation can become
increasingly sophisticated and productive for your
business, depending on the level of integration you have
between your marketing automation platform and your
CRM and CMS data. You wont necessarily need third
party system and data integration at the start of your
journey, but think about building it in, down the line.
2.4 Do your customer
journey workow planning
Understanding your customers journey the route
they travel as they interact with your business for
example, from their rst visit as a prospect to your website
to their rst purchase and then onwards into customer
advocacy is a critical success factor in your marketing
automation planning.
We talk more about this on page 20.
2.5 Get the content
and creative right
Content is King.
Remember, to get the best use of marketing automation
you need to be sending the right message to the right
person at the right time. Good content that is interesting
to customers and relevant to their needs is an essential
tool to ensure you are delivering the right message.
We look at this in more detail on page 19.
3. Marketing automation in action
Marketing automation
in action
dotMailer.co.uk Marketing Automation Planning and Roll-out Guide
The aim here is to respond to
an initial website interaction
by introducing your brand
or your sales contact, saying
thanks, offering added value
and collecting more data
while the contact is warm.
In this example from dotMailer client Harveys, the lead is
rst incentivised to sign up via a website form, with the
promise of exclusive offers.
By capturing the subscribers rst name, dotMailer predicts
their gender and automatically populates the gender eld
when adding the record to the Harveys email list. Based
on gender, a different image is served dynamically in the
welcome email.
Then an automated thank you email is sent with a
further offer: enter our prize draw. Acceptance at this
point triggers another email, the lead can now enter the
draw after completing a short survey (built with dotMailer
Survey software) and handing over more valuable data.
3.1 Webform sign-up automated emails
10
3.2 Anniversary-driven automated email programmes
This is communication that is automatically triggered by the date of specic events:
l Birthdays. l Anniversaries. l Deadlines. l Renewal dates.
Heres a good example of a personalised renewal
email for Glamour magazine, reminding the
customer that renewal is due and incentivising
with two bonus issues if they renew now:
This birthday email from fabric.com, builds
engagement with the customer by remembering
his/her birthday and, of course, offering a birthday
gift of a discount on their next order:
3.3 Email engagement-driven programmes
l Automatic follow-up when a link is clicked, or a campaign opened.
l Automatic re-engagement emails where there are no clicks or opens.
These are email campaigns triggered by a contacts engagement with an email campaign you have already sent.
For example, a user opens a solus email campaign you have sent manually, and clicks on a link in the email
inviting them to learn more about your summer special offers.
This is your chance to reinforce the offers and calls to action on your landing page by sending a series of
automated emails, perhaps offering some additional incentives if they act now, or to click them through to a
deeper landing page with more detail and more added value.
You can trigger these forms of campaign off any range of email engagement behaviour. So for example you
could send a triggered campaign to everyone who opened a campaign, or clicked a particular link, or to all those
who didnt click a link, or didnt even open the campaign.
3. Marketing automation in action
dotMailer.co.uk Marketing Automation Planning and Roll-out Guide
3.4 Website engagement-driven programmes
dotMailer (for example), enables
you to send a dynamic email
to anyone who abandons a
shopping cart.
Its dynamic because the content is unique to each
recipient, depending on what items they have had added
to their basket, and what items they have previously
browsed or pages they have previously visited on your site.
You can use this opportunity to re-engage with the user,
offer them alternative purchases or promotional incentives
to get them back into the purchase funnel in a single click.
This works for B2B marketers too. You can re triggered
emails to users who have submitted one step of a two
step signup process, with the content tailored dynamically
around the previous pages they have visited, and the
webpages they have viewed.
This kind of email marketing automation can have a
dramatic and lucrative effect on your website conversion
rates, basket values and lead pipelines.
l Automatically follow-up on:
- abandoned baskets.
- abandoned sign-up forms.
- abandoned browse sessions.
l Automatically follow-up on pages or products
browsed, items in basket, form elds completed using
dynamically tailored email content.
Following up website visits and behaviour with tailored
real time email messages can be an incredibly powerful
marketing tool.
Again, this is where marketing automation can work hard
to inuence your contacts behaviour by sending the right
message, at exactly the right time, without you or your
marketing team having to lift a nger.
12
Here is an example of an abandoned cart email, in this
case from Zulily:
Notice that this email seeks to encourage
re-engagement by implying that the customer
has purchased a limited stock item and that the
reservation will run out in a day.
Heres another nice abandoned cart email from Nieman
Marcus:
In this abandoned cart email example from doggyloot,
they combine the nearly sold out message with some
great creative work and nice imagery:
Once again the customer is incentivised to action
with the reminder that items in the shopping cart are
popular, limited edition and sell out soon.
Its worth noting that abandoned cart emails are proven
to be highly effective in recovering potentially lost
business. In fact they achieve the highest ROI of any email
marketing messages. And email marketing is always your
best ROI performing channel.
In a related vein, you can also use triggered and
incentivised email to follow up on a potential customers
abandoned browse session or sign-up form:
In this abandoned browse session email the customer
is encouraged to come back to the website now and
receive free shipping on any order placed.
3. Marketing automation in action
dotMailer.co.uk Marketing Automation Planning and Roll-out Guide
3.5 Customer insight-driven programmes
l Dynamically tailored email content based on purchase history, recency, frequency, value, products
purchased and location of purchase.
l Dynamically tailored email content based on customer preferences or prole and changes to that prole.
l Dynamically tailored content based on lead status or lead score and changes to that status or score.
A classic example is the Amazon customers who bought also bought email:
14
dotMailer client, Spicerhaart, operates
a network of estate agencies, with
several distinct brands.
With dotMailer, they have created a customer behaviour
driven marketing automation programme that nurtures
home buyers throughout their lifecycle.
Because the whole process is fully automated, over 90%
of the emails are triggered by an applicants actions, as
Spicerhaarts iMarketing Manager, Matt Dale, explains:
Once an applicant has registered, we keep track of which
properties they have viewed and use that information to
ensure they receive priority notications when we take on
a new instruction. Each of the individual property details
that we send out has links to the properties on the website, so we can then monitor
open and click rates to see what is attracting their interest and use this information to
tailor other send outs.
Because the email marketing campaigns are designed to help improve customer
service, the process doesnt end when a customer makes an offer but moves into an
added value phase designed to provide support with critical decisions, such as nding
legal services and mortgages, moving on to setting up utility contracts, identifying and
managing removals once contracts are exchanged, then completing the sale.
At the end of the process of course well also do a welcome to your new home mail, and run a
satisfaction survey to get their feedback on how well we were able to help, Matt comments.
Were also keen to get customer quotes, both on Facebook and our own sites, and encourage
them to get their friends to use us, with vouchers for introductions. Email is a great way to help
generate that kind of user-driven content.
Read the full story at: dotmailer.co.uk/spicerhaart
3. Marketing automation in action
dotMailer.co.uk Marketing Automation Planning and Roll-out Guide
3.6 Lifecycle marketing and nurturing programmes
A customers lifecycle of
interaction with your business
can be complex and multi-
staged. For the purposes of this
Guide, were going to show you
the way to break any lifecycle
down into three basic, distinct
stages that enable you to
set up three email marketing
automation streams that will
deliver you results.
On a basic level, these three stages are:
l Engaged prospects.
l Lapsed customers/clients.
l Engaged customers/clients.
3.6.1 Engaged prospects
The aim with this group is to draw prospects further down
the sales funnel and convert them to customers. Emails in
this case represent part of the automated lead nurturing
campaign and will be designed to:
- Drive engagement through welcome programmes.
- Educate about your brand/products.
- Build trust.
- Drive conversion with added value offerings.
- Build a relationship.
For example take a look at this welcome email from
Freemans. Its a great example because its personalised,
says hello and thank you, carries over the Freemans
website navigation, offers the opportunity to share socially,
has a clear CTA and incentivises with a 10% discount:
16
3.6.3 Engaged
customers/clients
With engaged customers and clients we have a different
set of aims. Here emails are designed primarily to sell
more, to cross-sell and to up-sell by offering:
- Loyalty building added value offers.
- Exclusive offers and promotions.
- Cross-sell/up-sell product recommendations.
- User generated content and/or events.
- Refer-a-friend programmes.
- Renewal programmes.
For example, overleaf a DMA award winning automated
email campaign by dotMailer for Dove Spa, uses
a 6 stage programme. It includes a thank you, an
engagement building informative mail about the
benets of Dove Spa, followed by a cross-selling email.
3.6.2 Lapsed customers/clients
Here, the aim is to bring lapsed customers back into the
fold, to get them spending again. Communication might be
in the form of:
- Re-engagement programmes.
- Come back, we miss you offers and incentives.
- Surveys to nd out the reason for the loss of engagement
(particularly useful if you have a high churn rate).
- A reminder to lost customers of what theyre missing
via front of mind programmes.
This email from StarbucksStore.com offers the customer
15% if they start shopping again. Importantly it also
provides for the possibility of customer feedback by giving
the customer the option message direct. Note also the
carried-over website navigation and social sharing options.
Heres a bold and beautiful miss you email from
Interweave Store offering a 50% discount and reminding
the customer that this company has over 4000 products
to choose from: and look at that lovely big CTA button.
In 2012 Dove Spa built an email database that captured the email address of
every person buying Strength Within, its latest anti-wrinkle supplement.
The supplement had proven results, but took 14 weeks to
show, and over two thirds of consumers only bought an
initial 4-week course.
Through a multilayered email marketing drip campaign
using dotMailers email marketing automation and CRM
integration, Dove Spa achieved a 78% repeat purchase rate
for the product well over twice the industry average.
Read the full story at: dotmailer.co.uk/dove
4. Making your content King
Making your content King
dotMailer.co.uk Marketing Automation Planning and Roll-out Guide
Writing and producing the content for an extensive email
marketing automation programme can be demanding.
The mistake some marketing teams make is to start off
planning too large a programme, only to nd that they
simply dont have the time or resource to produce the
content needed.
Our advice is to think big, but start out small. Begin with
a short programme aimed at a single audience and then
build on this over time.
Content planning: things to remember
l Start small, think big.
l Take stock of the usable content you already have.
l Map out the content youll need.
l Plan your content production resource.
4.1 Your Content Audit
Chances are you are not starting with a blank page
when it comes to content for a lifecycle email marketing
programme.
Make an audit of the content you already have on your
website, your blog, in previous newsletters and email
campaigns even on Youtube. Re-purposing content is a
secret weapon used by savvy marketers.
Look for the content you already have that ticks any of
these boxes:
3 Inspires.
3 Enlightens.
3 Educates.
3 Helps and advises.
3 Entertains.
3 Builds trust.
4.2 Lifecycle planning
your customer journey
We talked earlier about the concept of your customer
journey the route they travel through their
interactions with your business, from rst contact to
conversion to sale, and onwards through post-sale
care, repeat purchasing, and advocacy.
Mapping out this route is an essential success factor
when youre planning your marketing automation
programme. Because you are mapping out your
customer lifecycle and all the key points during that
cycle at which you can use marketing automation to
help inuence their behaviour.
20
A dotMailer example
This is an example of a simple customer journey mapping that we undertook for our own dotMailer marketing base,
following a sign up to our 30 day trial. Here, we are tracking whether a user has logged in and whether they have
sent an email campaign through the dotMailer app in week one. You can see how each path and action or decision,
leads to an opportunity to send an important email marketing message that helps us to nurture our new trialists.
And it helps us to inuence the outcome at each stage.
Creating a map like this will form a clear, logical plan for your email marketing automation programme that will in
turn drive your data and your content plan.
4.3 Mapping content to each stage
We can use this decision tree to easily plan out the email marketing messages and content that we need to write
and the emails we need to produce for each event.
Event Interval Trigger Message type Desired outcome
Free trial signup 2 days No login Educational User logs into the app
Free trial login 3 days No test campaign sent Training video & webinar User sends a test campaign
Free trial login 3 days Test campaign sent Sales promotion User signs up to a paid account
Live account purchased 4 days No login Educational User logs into the app
Live account purchased 5 days No live campaign sent Training video & webinar User sends a campaign
Live campaign sent 1 day Invoice sent Educational User sends another campaign
Week 1
Live campaign sent
Test campaign sent
No campaign sent
Account login
Live account purchased No login
Trial Login
Free trial signup
No login
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22
dotMailer email and marketing
automation solutions
dotMailer provides leading email marketing and marketing
automation solutions for SMEs, retailers and big brands.
Our unique speed-of-use technology is completely unchallenged in the market place.
The tools our clients have to hand have changed the game empowering their marketing
teams to take their email marketing and marketing automation to the next level and beyond,
delivering outstanding:
l Efciencies and cost savings
l Levels of demand and revenue generation
l Levels of customer engagement and advocacy
l Marketing ROI
With dotMailer, advanced tasks become fast tasks, freeing up your and your teams time to do
much more of the strategy and analysis that drives growth.
And our exible technology it scales to t the requirements of SMEs up to big name brands
and multi-nationals, and integrates with leading CRM and CMS is supported by the very best
expertise, guidance, creative and strategic services.
Discover how dotMailer can help transform your business. Visit us at dotmailer.co.uk
About dotMailer
Technological innovation can be a huge catalyst for
change and growth within your business.
Weve seen this happen time and again with brands
that have introduced dotMailers email marketing
technology into their marketing function.
But it isnt simply about the technology.
At dotMailer, our entire team - from Account
Management to Managed Services, from our Creative
Studio to Development teams - are dedicated to
understanding your business needs and objectives, and
helping you meet them, then go way beyond them.
Discover how dotMailer can help transform your
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