Marketing Automation is not simply an email sending toolbox. It is a truly strategic approach aiming to interact automatically and contextually with your customers, prospects, and collaborators throughout their journey by providing them with content, messages, and offers that will have a positive impact. Whether to smooth over a pain point or amplify a positive moment in the journey, Marketing Automation is intended to sustainably engage a company's different targets.
Strategy requires a team to conceive and deploy it, and this is another of the advantages of marketing automation: bringing together and assisting the various customer-facing departments: marketing, which generally leads the project, but also sales teams, customer support functions (after-sales service, customer service, etc.), not forgetting IT and legal.
The "in fine" strategy, translating to the implementation Intelligent multichannel scenarios which allow repetitive tasks to be transformed into automated action sequences across a range of channels (email, SMS, push, pop-in, webhooks, API…).
So these scenarios are triggered by events (inscription, click, purchase, inactivity…), allowing for differentiated customer relationship management and orchestration based on target audiences (personas) and their individual context.
From a marketing perspective, deploying Marketing Automation is strategic in that it allows a shift from mass «one-to-many» sending to a truly mass customisation, based on Conditional and behavioural pathways. This piloting is made possible by the unification of data. multi-sources (web/app, CRM, ERP, after-sales service, POS… ).
Some tangible benefits:
The impact of Marketing Automation is measurable and tangible. It's not just about saving time, but about gaining efficiency and incremental revenue. We offer you some very concrete examples of the benefits to expect from implementing a Marketing Automation strategy.
- Productivity Basic automations (welcome, cart/quote reminders, birthdays) free up marketing teams, allowing them to reallocate their time to strategy and content.
- Engagement and Conversion Personalised journeys generate an open rate +25 to +40 % higher to the general campaigns. Likewise, this allows for the recovery of 10 to 15 % of abandoned baskets and generate +20–30 % qualified leads.
- Customer knowledge Each customer interaction is used to enrich the CDP and continuously refine segmentation.
- Budget efficiency. The Lead Scoring allows sales teams to focus exclusively on «hot» opportunities. This ensures a Better control of CPA.
Implementation: The 3 pillars of a successful strategy
To succeed, your Marketing Automation strategy must be built on three fundamental pillars, each playing a decisive role in the success of implementing your approach.
Data: no relevant Marketing Automation that is not driven by data
- Upstream, it is necessary to be able to unify and de-silo all of your customer data. The integration of all sources (CRM, ERP, web, customer service) is crucial to create a Single Customer View (RCU) within a Customer Data Platform
- Live data enrichment: A large portion of customers' 0 and first-party data comes from their online journey. However, this data is too often collected by third-party tools and does not allow for enriching customer knowledge, and ultimately, the ability to intelligently segment and target a contact.
- The valuation of data, which undergoes an indispensable phase of cleaning, normalisation, and also enrichment.
Because of the processing carried out in the context of Marketing Automation and the volume of data processed, it is essential to think through your strategy GDPR by design taking care to integrate the history of the various consents.
Orchestration: From journey to sequence
No intelligent and high-performing scenarios without having thought beforehand about the customer journey. Scenarios must fit into a context and respond to challenges that will only emerge after mapping out the customer journey. We suggest a simple 3-step approach:
- Begin with the Life cycle mapping Acquisition → Conversion → Retention → Loyalty.
- Deploy Conditional workflows (Welcome, Abandon, Upsell, Reactivation) triggered by triggers, precise rules and deadlines.
- Adopt the’Pragmatic omnichannel Use email, SMS, push, but plan for backup strategies (e.g. fallback SMS if an email makes a Hard bounce).
Measurement and optimisation: a continuous process!
Sometimes, it only takes a small detail for a scenario to work or not work, and far too often the testing phase is overlooked. But how can you validate that a scenario works if it isn't tested or benchmarked? Therefore, you must adopt a test and learn approach to improve your sequences, because even if a scenario remains relevant, your customers' behaviour and expectations change. This means a continuous improvement process will be necessary to perform in the long term. We offer you 3 tips for this:
- Beyond vanity metrics: your KPIs should be Business. Measure the conversion per sequence, the Incremental CA, the CLV and the Churn avoided.
- Test continuously: A/B and multivariate on messages, channels, timing, and frequencies.
- Set up a Loop with your CRM : two-way synchronisation is essential to arm Sales with the best information (and provide Marketing with field feedback).
Small Japanese steps
Kaizen, taking one step at a time to move forward, applies particularly well to marketing automation. If you want a project to fail, there's nothing like launching all your scenarios at the same time!
So that your project is a success, it is imperative to pre-emptively identify the first scenarios to deploy that demonstrably perform and offer an immediate ROI:
- Welcome scenario (2-3 messages): Displaying an open rate +25 to +40 % superior to a generic shipment.
- Abandoned cart / quote: A targeted follow-up allows you to recover 10 to 15 % transactions.
- Lead Nurturing A 3–4 week educational series transforms +20 to 30 % from MQL to SQL.
- Reactivation of inactive users (90-day): An offer or useful content can re-engage 5 to 10 % from this dormant base.
- Upsell / Cross-sell Relevant recommendations after a purchase increase the average basket size by +10 to 20 %.
The Contribution of AI
To transition to the era of Data-Driven Marketing, it is necessary to be able to analyse a large quantity of data on your contacts to understand their behaviours, particularly their similar behaviours, as well as who is most likely to convert or churn. It also allows for an understanding of which offers they will truly have an appetite for.
At house Smartprofile, we are natively integrating Artificial Intelligence to increase the value of automation. AI allows us to go beyond simple triggering:
- Clustering: Create dynamic segments based on actual behaviours (navigation, purchase, preferred channels).
- Prediction: Anticipate the probability of purchase, the risk of Churn (disengagement) or the Propensity to respond by channel.
- Recommendation: Share content, product or service most relevant for each individual, in real time.
- Momentum The choice of timing is important for optimising a campaign's performance. Momentum-type algorithms allow messages to be sent at the most optimal time for each contact.
AI and the platform work to better said, less often, and to free up creative time: for example, by generating text variations per segment, ensuring the’automatic adaptation to the channels (mobile/desktop) and by testing the AI-assisted objects/titles.
Transitioning to the Data Marketing Era
Marketing automation reaches its full potential when integrated with a data-driven approach. However, for data to drive your marketing, you need to regain control of your connections, which involves three steps:
- Data collection: across the entire customer journey, from zero-party data to third-party data
- Unification and valuation within a CDP that is the foundation without which you will not be able to activate your data
- Exploiting your data by activating campaigns
- Continuous analysis
For your scenarios to be truly effective and performant, it is necessary to activate your campaigns responsibly, and for that, to think carefully about:
- Appetite We measure and model response preferences by channel (email/SMS/push) to know where and how to communicate.
- Consents: Asset management opt-in/opt-out by channel, purpose and frequency must be integrated natively to the scenariosRGPD by default).
- The 4Bs are operational: AI + Data orchestration is the key to achieving 4B without over-soliciting the client: Good message, good contact, good channel, good timing.
Choosing your Platform: what criteria to consider?
How to select the platform that will make a difference?
- Sovereignty & GDPR: Data localisation, portability, traceability, and access rights.
- Integrations: Connectors Solid APIs with your CRM, ERP, e-commerce, BI/ETL.
- Scalability & Governance Performance on volumes, management of roles & permissions, audit logs.
- Functional richness: Advanced segmentation, native AI (scoring, recommendation), and fine controls of pressure & frequency.
At house Smartprofile, we offer a modular solution focused around a Customer Data Platform to enable you to build scenarios from enriched and natively available data.
We are bringing together native analytics, data unification, AI (clustering, prediction, recommendation) and multichannel automation within a unique offering and sovereign.
To summarise:
Le Marketing Automation est un data-driven conductor who synchronises content, channels and timing while respecting contact preferences and consents, building trust with your brand.
But behind these scenarios, there must be a strategy devised with all stakeholders within the company in a bid to optimise the relationship. It is in this context that Smartprofile works on responsible marketing issues, notably through a partnership with INRIA to develop algorithms that allow for more virtuous campaigns for companies, customers, and the environment.
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