Best Practice Guide

– REPORT
Marketing Automation
Best Practice Guide
This report provides best practice guidance on implementing
marketing automation and the key ways in which it can benefit
both businesses and customers.
Marketing
Automation
Best Practice Guide

Published July 2022 Econsultancy London Econsultancy New York

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Contents
1. Introduction 6

1.1 Executive Summary 6

1.2 Methodology 7

1.3 About Econsultancy 7

2. Defining Marketing Automation 9

2.1 What is marketing automation? 9

2.2 What is the function of marketing automation within the wider marketing strategy? 9

2.3 How are marketing automation platforms different from other martech tools? 12

2.3.1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 13

2.3.2 Customer Data Platform (CDP) 14

2.3.3 Email Service Provider (ESP) 14

2.3.4 Data Management Platform (DMP) 14

2.4 What are some of the key features of marketing automation platforms? 14

3. Why Use Marketing Automation? 19

3.1 Improved customer experience and engagement 19

3.1.1 Improves the customer experience 19

3.1.2 Improves customer engagement 20

3.1.3 Increased customer retention 21

3.1.4 Supports the increasingly online customer experience 21

3.2 Gains in efficiency and effectiveness 22

3.2.1 Fewer human resources required 22

3.2.2 Improved internal communications 23

3.2.3 Ease in scaling marketing 23

3.2.4 Improved ROI on marketing activity 24

3.3 Centralised and organised data 24

3.3.1 Easier to adhere to privacy regulations 24

3.3.2 Data becomes more insightful and predictive 25

3.3.3 Ease of access to first-party data 26

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 3

 3.4 Marketing automation enables omnichannel marketing 27

3.4.1 Why marketing automation is important for delivering omnichannel marketing 27

3.4.2 Marketing automation enables organisations to adopt omnichannel marketing at

an advanced level 28

4. Challenges of Marketing Automation 31

4.1 Internal adoption and integration 31

4.1.1 Budgetary challenges 31

4.1.2 Inadequate strategy and internal alignment 32

4.1.3 Challenges resourcing and training teams 32

4.1.4 Issues with integration into current systems 33

4.2 Data quality and volume 34

4.3 Potential for misuse 34

4.4 Challenges in content creation 35

5. Lay the Strategic Groundwork for Marketing Automation 36

5.1 Understand your audience and the challenges 36

5.2 Consider data and legacy tools 37

5.3 Involve the correct internal teams and individuals 38

5.4 Set up a plan to review 38

6. The Steps to Implementing Marketing Automation 40

6.1 Set clear goals and objectives 40

6.2 Select the most relevant marketing automation provider 41

6.3 Create a timeline for transition 42

6.4 Clean and prepare data 43

6.5 Organise content and identify gaps 43

6.6 Train internal users and stakeholders 44

6.7 Launch and test 44

6.8 Measure the results and optimise 45

7. The Future of Marketing Automation 48

7.1 Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) continue to fuel innovation 48

7.1.1 AI and ML allowing for deeper personalisation 48

7.1.2 AI and ML changing the ways marketers communicate 48

7.1.3 AI and ML creating opportunities for dynamic content 49

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 4

 7.2 A continued drive to mobile-first marketing automation 50

7.3 Will marketing roles be replaced by ‘customer journey engineers’? 50

8. Conclusion 52

9. Further reading 53

9.1 Econsultancy reports 53

9.2 Other resources 53

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 5

1. Introduction
Marketing automation refers to a software or set of processes that organisations can use to automate
marketing actions such as sending emails, managing customer data or posting social media content
that might otherwise be done manually.

Marketing automation has been around since the 1990s, when the first automated email campaigns
were executed. Since then, the technology has expanded to offer automation across a variety of
functions and channels.

1.1 Executive Summary

This report looks at the growing importance of marketing automation, how it can support business
objectives, and what brands need to know about implementation. The key areas covered include:

• The key benefits of marketing automation are:

– Improved customer experience, acquisition, engagement and retention across the entire
customer journey as marketing automation allows a deeper level of personalisation to make
interactions with customers and leads more relevant and useful. It improves customer
engagement by helping to nurture leads and provide content at the right point in the customer
journey to move them through the sales process.
– Gains in efficiency and marketing effectiveness as fewer human resources are required and
marketing can operate at a larger scale, with better results and ROI, than can be achieved
without automation.
– Centralised and organised data. Marketing automation helps brands use their data more
efficiently, making it more insightful and valuable which is especially important as third-party
cookies are declining and privacy regulations mount globally.
– Enables omnichannel marketing to optimise communications across channels and
touchpoints. Without automation, marketers cannot reach an advanced level of maturity for data,
technology and channel integration.

• There are also some challenges of marketing automation to consider:

– Internal adoption and integration are challenges as the software can be costly, in addition to
internal struggles around training, alignment and strategy.
– Marketing automation is only as good as the data that feeds it, so ensuring there is enough
data and it is of good quality is challenging, especially to brands with less first-party data.
Likewise, ensuring there is enough good content to feed the system is important.

• Before implementing marketing automation, it is crucial to lay the strategic groundwork to improve
the chances of success. This includes the following steps:
– Be clear on the audience and the challenges, creating personas and customer journeys to
better understand the role automation can play.
– Evaluate the current tools and data to ensure the right fit for any new tool or process.
– Involve relevant stakeholders from teams across the entire organisation.
– Create a plan for reviewing success.

• Following this strategic groundwork, implementation of marketing automation breaks down into
eight steps:
– Set clear goals and objectives, initially focusing on one goal with SMART objectives.
– Select the most relevant marketing automation provider across seven key considerations.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 6

 – Create a written implementation plan with individual roles assigned.
– Clean and prepare data and create rules about data entry going forward.
– Organise content in a grid and identify gaps.
– Train internal users and stakeholders and create layers for access going forward.
– Build and launch, testing carefully and thoroughly during roll out.
– Measure the ROI and optimise through dashboards and qualitative approaches.

• Future developments in marketing automation will be driven by advances in AI and ML to create

deeper personalisation and dynamic content creation, with a mobile-first mentality.

1.2 Methodology
This report is based on three sources of information:

• Desk research including many of the reports listed in Further Reading (Section 9.1).
• Econsultancy’s 2022 Future of Marketing survey of 716 client, vendor and agency-side marketers.
The survey was fielded to Econsultancy and Marketing Week’s audiences from 25 March to 19 April
2022.
• In-depth interviews with industry experts.
Econsultancy would like to thank the following interviewees for their invaluable contribution of time and
expertise to this report:

• Phil Boon, Head of Digital, Coventry Building Society, UK

• Robert Gassmayr, Digital Marketing Manager, Envista Holdings Corporation, Czech Republic
• Rachel Leist, Senior Director of Marketing, Automation & Demand Generation, HubSpot, USA
• Jane Musatova, Product Marketing Manager, Wix, Israel
• Jakob Naumann, Head of Digital Experience, Green Hat, Australia
• Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director – Consumer Products, SAP, USA
• Lindsey Pickles, Managing Partner, Bright Dials, UK
• Yanina Vidal, Senior Industry Manager, Google, UK
• Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director UK & Ireland, SAS, UK
• Ciaron Zanelli, Marketing Automation Specialist, Green Hat, Australia

1.3 About Econsultancy

Econsultancy is one of the world’s leading thought leaders in modern marketing excellence and digital
transformation. We are the trusted partner of more than 600,000 marketing, digital and ecommerce
professionals, providing businesses, brands and teams with the essential resources to validate
decisions and apply learning.

From strategic guidance and pioneering thinking to in-depth analysis and practical advice – we have
helped some of the world’s leading organisations transform their digital and marketing capabilities. Our
approach looks to address the three drivers of modern marketing: Knowledge, Skills and Mindset, and
regularly reflects the Econsultancy M3 Model, the world’s first competency framework to fuse classic
and digital marketing skills into one end-to-end model.

We assess, design and deploy tactical projects to full-scale digital transformation, and our EconLearn
hub provides a central location for all our learning resources, featuring in-depth skills assessments and
fully structured personalised learner journeys.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 7

As part of Xeim, a family of businesses dedicated to Excellence in Marketing, we have access to a
professional community with more than 3.8 million interactions per month, award-winning global events
and media exposure. With offices in London and New York, we are a global team with a local mindset.

To find out more how we can help you and your organisation, get in touch with our team today:

Tel: +44 20 7970 4322

[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 8

2. Defining Marketing
Automation
2.1 What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate a set of processes or marketing actions that
would otherwise be done manually, such as sending emails, posting social media content, or managing
customer data. Marketing automation not only lightens the manual burden for employees but also harnesses
computing power to allow practitioners to carry out actions that would be impossible to accomplish
manually, such as personalising marketing at scale or predicting customer behaviour and preferences.

The language around marketing automation is not strictly defined. Thinking of marketing automation in
its loosest terms, this can mean just applying any automation to a task that was previously done manually
in any tool or platform. As Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director – Consumer Products at SAP, says:
“Marketing automation is very broad for me. It’s a transformational exercise involving processes, technology
and people that optimises marketing, planning, content and consumer engagement and minimises
human intervention. I think of it more as an ecosystem of capabilities supported by processes.”

However, there are specific software products that are labelled ‘marketing automation platforms’.
Marketing automation platforms have existed since the early 1990s, when a tool named Unica, later
acquired by IBM, was founded in 1992.1 Exactly thirty years on, in 2022, the marketing automation
market is now estimated to be worth $4.4bn globally and is projected to reach $6.3bn by 2026. 2

Alongside the specific marketing automation platforms, many tools in the martech stack also offer
some kind of automation functionality. For many professionals, this capability is more than sufficient.
Phil Boon, Head of Digital at Coventry Building Society, explains: “I don’t think it’s necessarily about
going out and procuring a tool that will allow us to automate absolutely everything. We automate quite
well using existing tools. For example, we have an analytics tool and there’s automation capability
within it and that has been very effective for us.”

2.2 What is the function of marketing automation within the

wider marketing strategy?
Marketing teams typically work towards common core goals, such as increased brand awareness or
increased sales, as demonstrated in Figure 1.

1
[Link]
2
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 9

Figure 1: Primary goals for running marketing campaigns in 2021

Source: HubSpot | Not Another State of Marketing Report 2021

Marketing automation is just one of the tools available to the marketer to help deliver these wider goals.
Importantly, marketing automation is not limited to a single goal or channel and rather can be used
across a variety of functions, as Figure 2 illustrates.

The role of automation in the wider marketing strategy is to deliver the overall goals more efficiently
than manual execution could achieve, as Rachel Leist, Senior Director of Marketing, Automation &
Demand Generation at HubSpot, points out: “There are many goals of marketing automation. You
can use marketing automation to drive demand for your sales team, increase usage of a product, or
decrease the number of human hours required on a project. These metrics go beyond understanding
how many people are engaging with a chatbot or clicking on a link in an email. Marketing automation
can influence your core business metrics.”

Figure 2: In which of the following areas do you currently utilise marketing automation?

Email marketing 65%

Social media management 47%
Landing pages 30%
Paid ads 28%
Campaign tracking 25%
Content management 23%
Seo efforts 18%
Account -based marketing 18%
Sms marketing 17%
Lead scoring 17%
Workflows / automation visualization 16%
Sales funnel communications 14%
Push notifications 13%
Live chat 13%
Dynamic web forms 12%

Source: Ascend2 | The State of Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 10

Marketing automation creating true insight to the marketing mix

“Think of the total amount of benefit or ‘pipeline’ that marketing delivers a company as being an iceberg. A
certain amount of that pipeline is ‘above the water’ and is easily seen. This has traditionally been leads, which
are then qualified and handed to salespeople, etc. But we’re seeing that the fastest growing part of the
marketing mix is happening ‘under the water’.

“We know that customers will initially interact with a marketing event or web content, and then a few months
later will surface as a ‘lead’ by directly interacting with the salesperson. Marketing automation can detect this
and track the ‘under the water’ pipeline to see where the individual interacted with other touchpoints within a
predetermined time limit before surfacing as a lead. It’s this ‘underwater’ part of the pipeline that is growing
the fastest, meaning that touchpoints such as web content are now an incredibly important part of the
marketing mix, which wouldn’t be the case if we were to measure only the ‘above water’ elements.”

Figure 3: Marketing automation can track marketing activity that develops sales leads that later
surface above water

Source: Econsultancy

— Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director UK & Ireland, SAS

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 11

2.3 How are marketing automation platforms different from
other martech tools?
Marketing automation platforms are just one of a number of different martech tools being used by
companies. Between 25 March and 19 April 2022, Econsultancy conducted a Future of Marketing survey
among 716 client, vendor and agency-side marketers. Figure 4 gives an insight from this survey into
which tools are currently being used or considered by respondents. Marketing automation platforms
are currently used by 42% of respondents but are in consideration by 30% of respondents, making
them one of the top three tools that marketers are thinking about adopting.

Figure 4: What martech tools is your organisation/your key clients organisations currently
using or considering adopting?

Customer relationship management 75%

(CRM) 16%

Email service provider (ESP) 67%

12%

Content management system (CMS) 63%

18%
Marketing analytics/measurement 62%
platform 18%
Search engine optimisation (SEO) 61%
platform 19%

Social management platform 57%

20%

Digital commerce platform 44%

18%

Marketing automation platform 42%

30%

Digital asset management (DAM) 36%

27%

Data management platform (DMP) 34%

28%

Marketing cloud 33%

27%

Customer data platform (CDP) 29%

29%

Digital experience platform (DXP) 22%

31%

Journey orchestration engine (JOE) 9%

40%

Currently Using Considering

Sample: 341

Source: Econsultancy | 2022 Future of Marketing survey

However, as discussed in Section 2.1, it is important to remember that marketing automation at its most
general is a way of doing things that relies less on humans and more on technology. Indeed, many of
the above martech tools integrate elements of marketing automation into their features.

This section explores how marketing automation platforms relate to other categories of martech software.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 12

2.3.1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) systems have a lot in
common as both tools manage data known about customers and help companies process that data. In
fact, many CRM systems offer some automation functionality. However, there are some key differences:

• Historically, CRM systems are primarily used by the sales team and marketing automation platforms
by the marketing team. Marketing automation is more focused on ‘top of funnel’ activities, and CRM
systems more on ‘bottom of funnel’ actions, as illustrated in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Where marketing automation and customer relationship management fall in the buyer
journey

Source: Econsultancy

• CRM systems are used more specifically to store and manage data about activities with customers
or leads, whereas marketing automation does this alongside creating actions such as sending
emails or personalising web content.

Marketing automation platforms and CRM systems often work together to enable the effective management
of customer data throughout the buyer journey, and integration between the two platforms is key.
Rachel Leist, Senior Director of Marketing, Automation & Demand Generation at HubSpot, advises:
“Marketing automation should work alongside your CRM. Your CRM will house all of the data you have
about your contacts, and your marketing automation platform can use that data to help someone move
along their customer journey. It is also important for marketing, sales, and customer success teams to
understand what actions prospects and customers are taking and when. By having your CRM and
marketing automation platform work together you are able to organise your data and automate
communication off that data.”

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 13

2.3.2 Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Marketing automation platforms and customer data platforms (CDPs) again share traits in managing
customer data, as CDPs are specialist tools that bring together data from many different sources into
a centralised engine. In fact, they are so similar that it has led some to question if CDPs will replace
marketing automation platforms.3

However, there is one main difference, which is based on the core purpose of the tool and therefore
what each does best. For CDPs, the main purpose is to ingest data and to create a unique and unified
customer ID.4 Marketing automation platforms, conversely, focus on taking away repetitive manual
tasks from people and make it easy for these processes to be repeated many times over.

For more information on CDPs and their role in marketing, see Econsultancy’s Customer Data
Platforms Best Practice Guide.

2.3.3 Email Service Provider (ESP)

An email service provider (ESP) is a tool used solely to send emails and track their effectiveness.
Marketing automation platforms incorporate this functionality and go way beyond by offering other
features such as lead nurturing and those outlined in Section 2.4. For companies looking only to send
and measure emails, an ESP may be the correct tool for their needs, but if a marketer is looking to
automate additional actions and nurture leads through the sales process, a marketing automation
platform could replace an ESP.

2.3.4 Data Management Platform (DMP)

Data management platforms (DMPs) are most often used for digital advertising, to manage data known
about people online and allow for more targeted advertising. Conversely, marketing automation can be
applied to paid ads, emails, web content, SMS and beyond. So, while DMPs and marketing automation
platforms may be connected to each other, they serve different roles for the marketer.

Importantly, marketing automation platforms typically work in conjunction with other tools in the martech
stack. Integration is a key feature offered by marketing automation platforms, allowing marketers to use
marketing automation platforms alongside others in their martech stack.

2.4 What are some of the key features of marketing automation

platforms?
Marketing automation platforms have a suite of tools or options (otherwise known as features) that
the user can engage for different actions or goals. There are some core features that every marketing
automation platform will offer that are the ‘bread and butter’ of marketing automation, however there is
also some variation between providers as some may offer more niche or innovative features. Figure 6
gives an insight into the features of marketing automation platforms that marketers use the most.

3
[Link]
4
[Link]
platform/

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 14

 Figure 6: What features do you currently use in your marketing automation platform?

Email Marketing 79%

Integrations 68%

Lead Nurturing 63%

Segmentation 61%

Analytics & Reporting 58%

Lead Management 56%

Personalisation 55%

Lead Scoring 52%

Multichannel Marketing 26%

Account Based Marketing 26%

Social Media Automation 18%

Other 3%

Source: Demand Spring | Marketing Automation Platform Insights

Research conducted by Demand Spring found email marketing to be the most used feature. Marketers
can use marketing automation to create email campaigns that are more personalised (such as including
first names), timely (such as being triggered by an item being left in a cart), or targeted (such as only
being sent to recipients in a certain segment).

The second most used feature among marketers is integration with other tools, which as covered in
Section 2.3 is an important part of what marketing automation platforms do. This enables organisations
to connect, for example, their marketing automation platform to a CRM, CDP or other martech tool, to
pass data between the tools and make sure there is a seamless connection of information about the
audience across all these platforms.

Lead nurturing is the third most used feature, and one of marketing automation’s USPs when compared
to other tools. Marketing automation helps marketers manage leads by creating specific communications
plans designed to send the right messages at the right time to a lead across their purchase journey,
ideally ultimately resulting in a conversion. Similar features marketing automation platforms offer are
lead management and scoring, which help marketers organise and attribute information to leads to help
understand their status across the organisation.

These features are particularly useful to B2B organisations due to generally longer sales cycles. Jakob
Naumann, Head of Digital Experience at Green Hat, explains: “In B2B, we have clients with lead cycles
of 18 to 36 months. There’s no way a salesperson could keep track of a good engagement there without
marketing automation.” The case study below from Charles Schwab exemplifies how marketing automation
can help B2B marketers working in sectors that have typically longer sales cycles.

Case study: Charles Schwab

Aim: Charles Schwab, a financial services company, has a network of independent investment financial
advisors under the Schwab Advisor Network. The network’s marketing team was tasked with bringing more
advisors into the group. The marketing campaigns needed to take into account the long buying cycle, as it
can take two to three years to establish an independent financial advisory business.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 15

Action: The marketing team implemented marketing automation to replace heritage systems, and brought in
expertise in this area. Using these tools, the team created a ‘nine-touch nurture campaign’ where prospective
advisors were better organised according to their firm’s position in the business lifecycle. The marketers
began properly capturing inbound leads for the first time, and also started systematically tracking and scoring
leads which is particularly useful during the lengthy sales cycle. Both leads and current advisors also received
better targeted content relevant to their precise needs as a result of implementing marketing automation.

Results:

• $1.1bn asset value contribution to pipeline

• $100m closed business via nurture programs
• 500% increase in engagement rates

— Adobe | The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation

Similarly, account-based marketing (ABM) functionality is particularly useful to B2B users, allowing
data to be kept and used at an account level, not just individual level.

Marketing automation platforms offer segmentation features that allow marketers to split audiences
into groups based on shared traits such as demographics or behaviour, which enables more targeted
communications. For more information on segmentation, see Econsultancy’s Segmentations and
Personas Best Practice Guide.

Analytics and reporting is another ‘bread and butter’ feature allowing marketers to understand the
effectiveness of the campaigns they are running and organise the data to analyse patterns and create
insights. Personalisation and multichannel marketing are some of the increasingly popular features
of marketing automation platforms, as practitioners discover the power of improving the customer
experience across channels and on an increasingly one-to-one basis.

Demand Spring’s research reveals that social media automation is only used by 18% of marketers
(see Figure 6), but this can be useful for managing social media messaging or to automate when social
media posts appear. For more information on social media automation, see Econsultancy’s Social CX
and Customer Service Best Practice Guide.

In fact, marketing automation is useful for automating content across not only social platforms but many
other digital properties such as websites and apps. This includes creating content that is personalised,
for example, to include a name or previous purchase information, across emails, digital advertising, blog
content or webpages.

Other features not included in Figure 6 include the assistance which marketing automation platforms
can offer in workflow automation and project management, 5 giving users tools to automate business
processes.

Figure 7 is just one visual example from one of the many tools available to illustrate what these
workflows look like in the interface. These flows can be organised in almost unlimited ways to achieve
the specific goal of the marketer.

5
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 16

 Figure 7: Example of interface

Source: Oracle6

Also, many marketing automation platforms will offer mobile-specific capabilities such as automating
SMS and in-app notifications which are increasingly integral ways to communicate with customers.

Applying the learning: Use cases for marketing automation

Below are some example use cases to illustrate how marketing automation can be applied to meet the goals
of an organisation. There are countless use cases for marketing automation, but these examples are intended
to exemplify how marketing automation technology can be applied in commonly found situations both in B2C
and B2B marketing.

Organisation Use case Potential actions that can be automated by

marketing automation platforms

B2C Shopping cart ● Web pop-up upon cart page exit

reminder ● Reminder email after cart abandonment
● SMS reminder

B2C Repeat purchase ● Personalised emails based on previous

purchases
● Newsletter
● Product launch campaigns

B2C & B2B Feedback gathering ● Surveys on website

● Follow-up surveys post purchase
● Record feedback data in customer
preferences
● Social media polls

6
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 17

B2C & B2B Cross-selling / ● Personalised emails based on previous
Upselling purchases
● Newsletters
● New product launch campaigns

B2B Onboarding ● Personalised introduction emails

● Manage inbound queries to relevant teams

B2B Lead nurturing ● Understand the true intent of each prospect

● Create lead scores to identify high priority
leads
● Build adaptive journeys based on previous
activity

B2B Whitepaper download ● Personalised email campaigns to segments

most likely to be interested
● Host the form to capture data

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 18

3. Why Use Marketing
Automation?
Marketing automation offers many benefits to organisations of all scales, across both B2C and B2B
sectors. Figure 8: How do you expect marketing automation to benefit organisations over the next two
years? details the biggest expected benefits of marketing automation among respondents to
Econsultancy’s 2022 Future of Marketing survey. This data shows that respondents can clearly see the
benefits both to the organisation using marketing automation and, importantly, to the end user. This
section will go into further detail about these benefits.

Figure 8: How do you expect marketing automation to benefit organisations over the next two
years?

Improved overall customer experience 61%

Improved personalisation and targeting of

60%
messages and content
Improved effectiveness/ROI of marketing
51%
activity
Enabling an omnichannel customer
44%
experience
Ability to use predictive analytics in
38%
marketing activity

Improved reporting functionality 34%

Internal cost/resource savings 33%

Increased alignment between sales and

32%
marketing teams

Improved lead scoring and nurturing 25%

No Benefits 1 1%

Sample: 341

Source: Econsultancy | 2022 Future of Marketing survey

3.1 Improved customer experience and engagement

As 60% of respondents in Figure 8 predict, marketing automation can bring great benefits to the overall
customer experience. This section will explore this in more detail.

3.1.1 Improves the customer experience

The modern customer journey is rarely a straightforward path from point A to point B, as Figure 9
demonstrates. Customer journeys include many touchpoints across multiple channels, and customers
have high expectations of companies to understand their needs at each of these interactions.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 19

 Figure 9: The evolved customer journey

Source: Econsultancy

Marketing automation is an invaluable tool enabling marketers to optimise the customer journey. Without
the computing power of marketing automation software, it would be impossible to provide the customer
experience that has come to be expected by users across the entire customer journey. Marketing
automation helps marketers to optimise the customer experience in the following ways:

• Create personalised communications. Customers increasingly expect personalised interactions

with brands, with content tailored to their individual needs or preferences. As 58% of respondents in
Figure 8 indicate, marketing automation enables personalisation on a one-to-one basis to create
targeted and relevant communications.
• Map and predict customer journeys. Marketing automation platforms offer features for marketers
to lay out and predict customer journeys, so they are ready to answer their customer’s needs before
the customer has even embarked on a journey.
• Segment audiences to serve relevant content. Marketing automation improves the relevance of
communications as it can be used to segment customers and leads into similar groups, to create
campaigns that are relevant and timely.
• Create seamless omnichannel experiences. Customer journeys rarely happen across just one
channel. Marketing automation helps organisations put the customer at the centre of the marketing
strategy and create a personalised experience across channels and touchpoints. In Figure 8, 43%
of respondents see marketing automation’s role in enabling this omnichannel experience as a key
benefit.

3.1.2 Improves customer engagement

All the benefits that marketing automation brings to the overall customer experience positively impacts
the ways customers and leads engage with brands. Marketing automation is a key tool for organisations
to improve customer engagement in multiple ways:

• Enables faster response times to customers and leads. Marketing automation allows organisations
to respond to customers and leads in a way that is impossible manually. Jane Musatova, Product
Marketing Manager at Wix, highlights: “If you don’t have marketing automation, what happens? If
a lead fills out a form, how can you be sure that someone speaks to them within the day or even
the hour? How can you guarantee that if you don’t have automation? The alternative is you get a
list, maybe you analyse it through a BI platform or team. This process could take a week and in
that time the lead has probably requested a free trial from another company while you were sorting
out the data. When you have marketing automation in place, then all this data is being processed
automatically.”

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 20

 • Supports the monitoring and nurturing of customer journeys. Similarly, marketing automation
allows marketers to provide content that is relevant or useful based upon the customer’s needs at
any given point in the journey, with the hope of promoting a quicker velocity through the sales funnel.
• Facilitates conversations with customers. Marketing automation also offers features that can gather
customer feedback through forms and enable two-way conversations through technology such as
chatbots. This gives the customer a more interactive experience but can also create cost savings in
customer service resources for the organisation as it benefits from an improved feedback loop.

3.1.3 Increased customer retention

According to Harvard Business Review, companies that cultivate the most loyalty among their customers,
i.e. those that top their industry in Net Promoter Scores or satisfaction rankings for three or more years,
grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their competitors and deliver between two and five times the
shareholder returns over a 10-year period.7

Customer retention is a crucial and often overlooked benefit of marketing automation. Marketing automation
can help customer retention strategies in the following ways:

• Improving the overall customer experience. Marketing automation can improve the overall
customer experience in many ways. Happier customers are more likely to be loyal customers over
a longer period.
• Orchestrating cross or upselling strategies. Marketing automation can help orchestrate proactive
cross or upselling campaigns to current customers to help retain them in an organised and strategic
manner.
• Turning customers into advocates. By using marketing automation to create an overall customer
experience that surpasses expectations, customers will not only be more likely to buy more products
but will also likely become advocates to recruit others to engage with the brand.
• Creating meaningful feedback loops. Retained customers are an extremely useful source of
feedback on current or potential products. Marketing automation enables these conversations via
forms, feedback surveys, or chatbots, making it very easy to gather information.

For more information on customer retention, please refer to Econsultancy’s Customer Retention Best
Practice Guide.

3.1.4 Supports the increasingly online customer experience

The Covid-19 pandemic changed the way business is done across the world as many countries and
cities went into lockdown. People were forced to replace everyday activities with online alternatives,
from work to shopping, socialising and entertainment.

Marketing automation allowed companies of all types and sizes to maintain consistent communications
and customer service during a time of uncertainty. The benefits of improved internal communications
(as detailed in Section 3.2.2) also became more crucial as teams dispersed out of the office.

Organisations with an ecommerce presence, and in some specific categories, saw a period of intense
growth in sales during the pandemic. Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director – Consumer Products at
SAP, says: “The pandemic saw ecommerce grow at this huge hockey-stick rate. Likewise, we saw
consumer preferences change and some massive category shifts towards things like comfort food and
loungewear. But I think what’s important is that some of these categories are now swinging back and
the learning is that marketing automation can allow organisations to be ready for these kinds of swings
in the future.

“Importantly automation is not just about marketing in isolation. If your supply chain isn’t set up and
you’re not able to deliver, it’s more important than ever that your marketing is integrated with the back
office and the whole organisation.”

7
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Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 21

 B2B marketers also saw one particular use case of marketing automation rise in importance because of
the pandemic, which was to facilitate webinars and online events. Webinars became an important way
to connect with customers at a time where in-person events were not an option, but they also became
an excellent way to generate leads and capture data.

Ciaron Zanelli, Marketing Automation Specialist at Green Hat, explains: “Webinar attendance rates
have been through the roof since the pandemic. If your high-value leads are attending your webinars
and learning more about your brand, you can begin to create personas as you know what content they’re
consuming. This allows for more personalised targeted communications through email, display, and
other marketing channels, and empowers sales teams with the knowledge of the leads’ buying intent.”

The case study below details how one B2B organisation pivoted from an in-person event to a virtual
conference and made use of their entire tech stack, including marketing automation, to optimise the event.

Case study: nCino’s nSight event

Aim: nCino is a fintech company that offers financial institutions a cloud banking platform. Each year they
organise the nSight conference which brings over 1,000 attendees together to learn and network. The
pandemic pushed the 2021 event online, so nCino created a bespoke virtual event with fewer keynote
speakers and increased interactivity such as roundtables and Q&As.

Approach: nCino’s marketing team employed marketing automation to create a targeted and personalised
five-month campaign. Email was the key promotional channel, and initially the messaging was fairly general,
such as invitations to save the date. As the conference drew closer, the messaging became more
personalised, with individual recommendations for sessions based on the job role and industry of each
recipient. The entire tech stack worked seamlessly together to relay information about attendees allowing for
a post campaign of follow-up emails after the event.

Results:

• 90% registration-to-attendance conversion rate

• 42% total email campaign open rate
• 30% email clickthrough rate

— Salesforce | 6 Inspiring B2B Marketing Campaigns

3.2 Gains in efficiency and effectiveness

Econsultancy’s Future of Marketing survey revealed that 51% of respondents see the improved
effectiveness/ROI of marketing activity as a key benefit of marketing automation, as detailed in Figure 8,
while 33% see internal cost/resource savings as a key benefit. This section explores these gains in
efficiency and effectiveness.

3.2.1 Fewer human resources required

By definition, marketing automation means that actions that were previously undertaken by humans
can be done by a computer. Therefore, there is an immediate saving for companies in the amount of
time staff would otherwise dedicate to certain activities, for example, overseeing the execution of email
campaigns. These freed up human resources can be used to do other more useful or creative tasks that
benefit more from human intervention, or, in the case of the Plus Accounting case study below, lead to
greater efficiencies while reducing office hours.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 22

 Case study: Plus Accounting

Aim: Plus Accounting wanted to move away from manually managing leads and create a streamlined
process for onboarding new clients.

Approach: Instead of using paper and legacy systems, Plus Accounting worked with Bright Dials to
implement marketing automation and used this system to manage and qualify incoming leads, convert
through the sales process and onboard new clients.

Results:

• An average of 30 unbilled hours per month saved per fee earner

• The average time to convert leads dropped from 15 to 5 days
• Reduction in office hours – employees able to leave the office at 5 o’clock instead of 6 o’clock

— Bright Dials | Plus Accounting Case Study

3.2.2 Improved internal communications

Marketing automation can act as a central tool across many internal teams. Though the tool itself
will most often be owned by the marketing team, the data generated by marketing automation can be
shared easily through integrations with other martech platforms providing many different teams with
accurate records on their customers and leads.

Beyond access to data, marketing automation can automate internal communications as part of the
functionality it offers. Notifications can be automatically sent to sales teams when a new lead enters
the system allowing for a quick response.

Jane Musatova, Product Marketing Manager at Wix, describes how integrating the marketing automation
platform Marketo with the messaging platform Slack enabled real time communication between the
sales and marketing team: “We integrated Marketo and Slack and set up specific channels on Slack
that notify the sales team when a new lead comes in, depending on where in the funnel the lead is.
This means the sales team can communicate back to us in real time if they have any questions. That
provides great value because we get really quick feedback and if there is an error, we can fix it fast.”

3.2.3 Ease in scaling marketing

Another benefit of moving marketing tasks that were previously performed manually to a marketing
automation tool is the opportunity to do these tasks at a scale that would have been impossible for a
human to execute. This scalability has many benefits for marketers including, for example, the ability
to send emails to more people, track more leads, and create more personalised content.

Furthermore, this scalability does not just apply to marketing activities within one team or organisation;
for large multi-national organisations there are huge benefits in scaling across territories in a controlled
environment, as Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director UK & Ireland at SAS, highlights. “A well-implemented
marketing automation system allows companies to have central control over some of the important
things like branding, budget control, forecasting and measurement but at the same gives local teams
the tools to do the job to increase their productivity and output,” explains Yeo.

“Building libraries of pre-built campaigns hardwires in brand guidelines or local data legislation compliance
and offers design templates for newsletter, email campaign or advertising campaigns. The beauty of
this is that you’ve just helped that local person to be more productive because they don’t have to go
through all the menial work and can go and quickly create something in their own language for their
own market.”

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 23

3.2.4 Improved ROI on marketing activity

Across most industries, marketers are united by the great pressure they are under to get more return
for their marketing budget. Marketing automation creates efficiencies in marketing spend by creating
savings in terms of resources, but it also leads to an increased overall return on investment (ROI) by
more accurately tracking and measuring the effectiveness of campaigns, allowing marketers to optimise
marketing activity more effectively.

The below Algonquin College case study exemplifies the improvement in ROI that can be achieved by
implementing marketing automation, by both lowering costs and increasing sales.

Case study: Algonquin College

Aim: Algonquin College in Ottawa, Canada wanted to improve how it reached and engaged potential
students. It needed to move away from batch emailing and gain a better understanding of the effectiveness
of its marketing activity, in addition to more information on how leads behaved in the pipeline.

Approach: Algonquin College implemented marketing automation to develop an ‘advanced nurturing’

approach. This allowed the college to create intricate campaigns based on a lead’s behaviour and serve
relevant content at the moment interest was expressed. Furthermore, for the first time, the marketing team
gained insights into how prospective students navigated the website and interacted with marketing campaigns
in real time.

Results:

• Improved lead generation by 28% year-on-year and increased sales by 18%

• Lowered the overall cost of distribution and marketing
• Created insights on how to shift prospective students from consideration to conversion
• Enabled precise ROI measurements on a campaign and overall level

— Adobe | Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation

3.3 Centralised and organised data

3.3.1 Easier to adhere to privacy regulations

The strengthening of privacy regulations across the world – for example, Europe’s General Data
Protection Regulation, Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteçao de Dados (LGPD) and California’s California
Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) – has meant that organisations must be very careful with the data they
hold about customers and leads.

Marketing automation platforms can help businesses adhere to these privacy laws in several ways.
They can:

• Set and store baseline customer/lead data permission levels. Privacy regulations emphasise
the rights of users to choose what data they consent to sharing and how they are communicated
with when interacting with organisations. Marketing automation allows these consents to be recorded
and kept up to date in a centralised place, providing an overall record of each customer or lead’s
permissions.
• Manage individual data permission preferences. Privacy regulations also require that individuals
are able to manage their preferences on an ongoing basis. For example, an individual must be able
to opt out of an email marketing list, a channel such as SMS, or indeed turn these permissions back

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 24

 on. Marketing automation makes the management of these preferences easier for both the
customer and the organisation by automating the functionality and recording these preferences.
• Ensure only compliant data is collected. To avoid too much data being retained about an
individual, privacy regulations steer companies away from holding unnecessary data about their
customers and leads. By using a centralised tool such as marketing automation, there is a clear
overview of the data held about individuals making it easy to see if there are any actions that need
to be taken to review that data to make it more compliant. 8

It is worth noting however, that marketing automation platforms are not the only tools that can perform
this functionality. A customer data platform (CDP) is also a useful way to manage and centralise privacy
data. For more information on CDPs, see Econsultancy’s Customer Data Platforms Best Practice Guide.
Likewise, customer relationship management (CRM) systems or marketing cloud solutions can also
fulfil these needs.

The importance of using marketing automation to adhere to privacy regulations

“There is no faster way to lose a customer than to undermine their trust, that is a real cost of getting privacy
wrong. There is also the threat of legal action creating huge costs for noncompliance, and this is probably
going to increase as companies learn the hard way about compliance and regulation… It’s hard to manage
the different regulations across markets such as GDPR in Europe, state laws in the US, and more regulations
in other markets, so a system that can operate seamlessly in these different regulated regions is very
important.”

— Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director – Consumer Products, SAP

3.3.2 Data becomes more insightful and predictive

Marketing automation enables practitioners to use the data they have more effectively. Computing
power can be applied to a database to organise the data to make it easier to analyse and draw insight
from. Increasingly, marketing automation uses machine learning to help process the huge amounts of
data available and to predict future customer behaviour, allowing marketers to create more effective
marketing that is more relevant and useful to customers and leads.

Yanina Vidal, Senior Industry Manager at Google, explains the growing power of machine learning:
“Machine learning improves 2x every four months. At this rate of improvement, machine learning will
improve by 30,000x in five years. This technology allows marketers to make the most of each opportunity.
When optimisations were performed manually, marketers needed to rely on past data and averages
to gain insights. But the truth is, there are no average users, and this approach misses opportunities.
The computing power of machine learning supercharges the marketeer’s efforts.”

Econsultancy’s Data-driven Marketing Best Practice Guide details several ways machine learning can
be applied to marketing actions to improve and augment them.

Augmenting marketing capabilities with machine learning (ML)

• Customer segmentation and understanding: ML can support the rapid analysis of existing customer
segments to create deeper insights and to identify new segments through clustering.
• Content recommendation: ML can be used to target more relevant content to individual customers
based on their previous actions or behaviours. For example, preferences shown by one person (from a
single customer view) can be combined with the behaviour patterns from large groups of users that have
exhibited similar behaviours.

8
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 • Performance and efficiency: ML can be used to identify areas of potential improvement in executions
to create gains in effectiveness and efficiency. This could, for example, mean automating and optimising
notifications, or simple rules-based processes.
• Prediction: ML can be applied to data to predict future customer actions in journeys, and to test for
certain behaviours to support better modelling of future scenarios.
• Content optimisation and personalisation: ML can learn which content is likely going to be most
engaging for any one user. This manifests as the dynamic creative optimisation of ads and web content
such as website content personalisation which is a common application.
• Customer service: Chatbot and AI customer support tools can be used to answer customer queries,
for example, via voice search or virtual assistants for customer use, or can provide recommendations
to assist human customer support.

— Econsultancy | Data-driven Marketing Best Practice Guide

Econsultancy’s AI, Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics Best Practice Guide gives advice to
marketers on the fundamentals of these new technologies and how to apply them to marketing.

3.3.3 Ease of access to first-party data

The decline of the third-party cookie is a much discussed and important change to the information
available to marketers about their audiences. 9 To overcome the absence of third-party data, marketers
need to build a robust first-party data strategy by collecting information about their customers and leads
directly as much as possible.

This is more challenging for some brands than others, but this is important for everybody, as Sunny
Neely, Global Solution Director – Consumer Products at SAP, says: “Currently, 86% of digital marketing
relies on third-party cookies, which may as well be all of it. CPG companies in particular are feeling real
pressure to put a CDP in place and start populating it with first-party data. If you don’t have first-party
data, it’s a real problem. It’s not a ‘nice to have’ or some qualitative measure. Companies are going to
lose money fairly rapidly if no one is thinking about a platform where first-party data can all be gathered
in a unified record and across brands.”

For brands that can establish direct relationships with customers and embark on collecting first-party
data, marketing automation is an extremely useful tool for:

• Capturing first-party data. Marketing automation can capture data directly from customers through
features such as automated web forms, chatbots and surveys that collate the data and attributes it
to a single record, ready for use by the marketer.
• Ensuring first-party data is privacy compliant. As discussed in Section 3.3.1, marketing
automation can help ensure that data is treated in a manner that is compliant with privacy regulations.
• Managing first-party data. Depending on the company, huge amounts of first-party data may be
generated daily. This is especially true of companies with a strong online presence and a direct
relationship with customers, where multiple data points can be recorded. Marketing automation
provides a way to manage, understand and act on this data, as detailed in Section 3.3.3. The Sky
case study below is a good example of how first-party data was used with success to improve the
effectiveness of marketing activity.

9
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 Case study: Sky

Aim: The broadcaster, media and telecommunications company Sky wanted to reduce churn by reinforcing
the value of its subscription service to customers.

Approach: Using 1.6 billion rows of first-party data, including customer viewing habits, Sky created a
campaign of hyper-personalised emails. Sky built customer segments most likely to abandon their subscription
(depending on how close to the end of their contract they were) to inform a personalised email campaign. The
email content was unique to each individual and included a summary of the content customers had enjoyed
from Sky since subscribing and personalised call to actions such as encouraging recontracts or upgrades.

Results: The hyper-personalised emails enjoyed significant uplifts compared to non-personalised emails:

• 38% uplift in open rate

• 64% uplift in click rate
• 3% uplift in conversions

— Marketing Week | How Sky used data to change consumers’ perception of value

3.4 Marketing automation enables omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is a topic of growing interest among marketers, defined as a marketing
approach where the customer is put at the centre of the strategy and brands deliver a seamless
experience for that customer across all channels and touchpoints, both online and in real life.

3.4.1 Why marketing automation is important for delivering omnichannel marketing

Modern customer journeys are complex with many touchpoints that are rarely linear. For a marketer to
deliver a truly omnichannel experience for each customer, it is challenging to manage these variables
and interactions without the power of automation to assist them.

Marketing automation platforms can organise the information known about an individual across all
these channels in one place, which is key to delivering an omnichannel experience. Furthermore, as
marketing automation is designed to deliver communications across channels such as email, social
and mobile messaging, it therefore allows the marketer to deliver and tailor content to individuals
across these channels and enable an omnichannel strategy.

Marketing automation platforms can play a role in delivering this omnichannel experience across each
stage of the customer journey. Below are some example touchpoints to illustrate this. 10

• Research phase: Marketing automation can trigger content related to the product that is being
viewed across channels such as email, mobile messaging, social media or advertising.
• Intent to purchase phase: After a customer adds a product to the cart, marketing automation can
help with any abandoned carts by sending reminders to the purchaser regardless of the channel
where they started the interaction.
• Purchase and post-purchase phase: Post purchase, automated follow-up campaigns can help
cross or upsell, again across channels, using predictive analytics to create personalised
recommendations.

The below Ferrara case study shows how a B2C brand benefitted from repositioning to adopt this
omnichannel approach.

10
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 Case study: Ferrara

Aim: Ferrara Candy Company wanted to personalise experiences for its customers across channels,
but legacy software was preventing this from happening.

Approach: Ferrara created a customer-focused strategy, supported by new automation technology, to

delivering an omnichannel approach and improve customer engagement. The below image illustrates
how these tools worked together to create the foundation for Ferrara’s omnichannel strategy.

Figure 10: Ferrara’s omnichannel approach was supported by automation technology enabling
a customer-focused strategy

Source: SAP

Results:

• 59% increase in contactable customers

• 20% open rate increase in email campaigns
• 3x registrations per day vs. average sweepstake campaigns

— SAP/Deloitte Digital | Ferrara Case Study

3.4.2 Marketing automation enables organisations to adopt omnichannel marketing at

an advanced level

Although marketing automation platforms offer support to marketers looking to embark on an

omnichannel approach, it is not to say that every marketer is at the same point of the journey in
adopting these strategies internally.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 28

Table 1 provides a useful maturity model across the key areas involved in delivering these seamless
customer experiences: data and technology, personalisation maturity, campaign planning and execution,
and testing and optimisation. This demonstrates how marketing automation can enable a true seamless,
omnichannel approach when executed at an advanced level.

Table 1: A maturity model for CX data, technology and channel integration

Basic Enabled Advanced

Data and technology Siloed technology and Joined-up data and Advanced segmentation
data sources which are tech stack and a single models and cross-device
not joined up; customer customer view. Use of targeting, cross-platform
profile is fragmented; profiling, remarketing data integration, and ID
basic level targeting, and lookalike audiences, linking enabling seamless
mainly separated by cross-channel interaction omnichannel. First and
channel; isolated data and targeting is second-party data used
approaches. integrated but may not for custom segments and
be truly actionable or personalisation at scale.
real-time. Customer data is free-
flowing and actionable
in real-time.

Personalisation Point solutions for Partial integration of Highly individualised

maturity personalisation personalisation personalisation,
technology, available technology, execution is algorithms using different
in limited individual cross-channel with some modelling techniques for
channels. Execution and proactive personalisation, real-time decisioning and
decisioning is opinion statistical modelling, next optimisation, wide
or basic rules-based, best action. deployment of machine
restricted and channel learning, joined-up and
specific. seamless experience
with data-driven and
customer-centric
approaches throughout
the business.

Campaign planning Channel-based planning, Good variation of content Joined-up and seamless
and execution focused on products, based on segments or experience. Universally
fragmented customer personas, a more customer-centric, joined-
experience which is consistent experience up CX, integrated data-
not joined-up, basic which is channel and driven planning and
segmentation and customer-centric, data- approaches, highly
delivery, campaign driven planning across personalised content
rules determining next some channels, offers optimised to channel
interaction, content not which are specific to but consistent to brand,
entirely consistent across segments, some orchestrated decisioning
channels. integration of messaging. delivering the right
message at the right time
over the right channel.

Testing, automation Limited test-and-learn Fully programmatic Highly automated and

and optimisation and content optimisation, buying, with some sophisticated workflows
automated trading/bidding dynamic content and designed to optimise
but not much dynamic ads optimisation, and content, bidding and
content optimisation. automated delivery targeting against clear
of content. outcomes, human layer
of interpretation and
strategy.

Source: Neil Perkin, Econsultancy | Implementing a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy Best Practice Guide

Lindsey Pickles, Managing Partner at Bright Dials, describes how even for relatively small or ‘immature’
companies, omnichannel marketing is becoming a more realistic approach thanks to the availability of
data and technology: “We are working on a pilot with a small bricks-and-mortar retail chain that has a
digital presence and a decent database of around 30,000 customers. It’s important to remember that
‘omnichannel’ is used all the time in the industry, but for smaller businesses it’s not yet on their radar.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 29

 “We are working with our partner with [predictive analytics company] iota and used its technology
combined with marketing automation to tie the in-store purchasing to all the client’s online activity and
do some really clever things. It was an example for us of how data science and marketing automation
can enable this omnichannel approach for smaller companies that delivers way above what they’d
normally be able to do.”

Checklist: Could marketing automation benefit your organisation?

There are many benefits to marketing automation. The checklist below provides helpful questions to consider
internally if marketing automation could help solve internal issues or improve current approaches. If the
answer is yes to several of these questions, it is likely time to consider implementing a marketing automation
strategy.

• Are current communications lacking in personalisation across the customer journey?

• Could customer journeys be better understood internally?
• Are audiences treated homogenously with little segmentation?
• Do customers receive disjointed communications across different channels?
• Are response times to enquiries slow?
• Is it challenging to understand where a lead is in the customer journey?
• Are leads moving slowly through the sales funnel?
• Is facilitating conversations with customers a challenge?
• Are customer retention rates low compared to industry averages?
• Is there little cross or upselling occurring?
• Are customers rarely advocates for the brand?
• Is getting meaningful customer feedback a challenge?
• Does marketing activity currently require a lot of human resource?
• Is communicating about customers and leads internally a challenge?
• Are there challenges with scaling marketing activity?
• Is there room for improved ROI on marketing activity?
• Is handling customer data in a privacy compliant manner a challenge?
• Is there an opportunity to gain more insights from customer data?
• Would it be helpful to collect more first-party data and organise it better?
• Is it challenging to implement an omnichannel strategy?
• Is there opportunity to progress from being a basic omnichannel marketer to enabled or advanced?

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4. Challenges of Marketing
Automation
As with all new tools and technologies, the path to adopting marketing automation is not without
challenges. Respondents to Econsultancy’s 2022 Future of Marketing survey foresee a variety of
issues in implementing marketing automation, as illustrated in Figure 11. This section will explore
this in more detail.

Figure 11: Which of the following will be the biggest challenges in implementing a marketing
automation strategy over the next two years?

Limited budgets 36%

Alignment across different

35%
teams in the organisation

Lack of clear strategy for

34%
marketing automation

Challenges integrating with

34%
current systems

Lack of skills/capabilities 32%

High costs of implementation 26%

Limited/poor-quality data 26%

Unsuitable internal structures 23%

Challenges in outputting the

13%
volume of content needed

Lack of suitable marketing

11%
automation tools on market

Sample: 338

Source: Econsultancy | 2022 Future of Marketing survey

4.1 Internal adoption and integration

4.1.1 Budgetary challenges

Respondents to Econsultancy’s Future of Marketing survey reported limited budgets to be the biggest
challenge (36%) when implementing marketing automation. The size of the budget required will depend
on the provider that is selected, the features needed, the number of users and the volume of data in the
system, creating a wide range in fees for the use of marketing automation software. Furthermore, some
providers will require an upfront payment upon signing a contract alongside a monthly fee.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 31

 SharpSpring’s 2022 Marketing Automation Comparison Guide11 is a useful document to get a feel for
the potential costs that can be expected when implementing marketing automation.

However, it is important to consider the savings that marketing automation offers, as detailed in Section
3.2. Additionally, as the tool becomes more established, there may also be further cost savings. Ciaron
Zanelli, Marketing Automation Specialist at Green Hat, says: “There comes a point where you can drop
other services that may incur a fee. For example, a global company may consolidate all their platforms
into one to create a centralised communications platform.”

4.1.2 Inadequate strategy and internal alignment

The second and third biggest concerns for respondents to the survey were alignment across different
teams in the organisation (35%) and lack of a clear strategy for marketing automation (34%), which are
intrinsically related.

As with any software project, without a clear and defined strategy being established from the outset,
it will be unclear how the tool could benefit teams across the organisation, resulting in misalignment.
Investing in the strategy upfront is key. Section 5 details how to do this to avoid strategic issues further
down the line.

Internal alignment can be an ongoing and challenging issue to address. Often teams will have different
priorities or goals, as Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director – Consumer Products at SAP, points out:
“CIOs and CMOs often have conflicting interests. A recent study revealed only 23% of companies report
a healthy and productive CIO to CMO relationship. That’s really important, because the marketing team
just want to reach the consumer and the CIO’s team just want to organise things and run a tight ship.
If you don’t find a way for those two teams to line up, you’re not going to be able to easily simplify the
martech stack.”

Yanina Vidal, Senior Industry Manager at Google, describes the struggles that siloed teams face when
implementing automation: “Most clients are very siloed, which makes it harder to scale as each team
needs to try automation individually to convince different internal stakeholders. Hierarchical organisations
are going to struggle more than others to make the most of automation. The best approach is to test
and let the data tell you the story. Move away from opinions and move away from hierarchy.”

4.1.3 Challenges resourcing and training teams

Marketing automation is a technology that needs to be implemented by humans, and one of the most
common challenges to implementation is changing human behaviour and facilitating the adoption of
this technology.

There may be issues in educating teams about the benefits of marketing automation, or ensuring the
right expertise is available in-house. Many organisations will recruit marketing automation experts to
handle the tool, but not every business has the capacity to do this.

11
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 32

 Patience is a virtue

“It is not always easy with legacy systems in financial services to automate everything, therefore you need to
provide teams with the right support. We started training small teams of ones and twos, and as they progress,
it’s all about staying patient. Particularly when people are learning something new and growing, you need to
have patience and you need to be the leader to help unpick any human blockers to get new technologies
embedded.”

— Phil Boon, Head of Digital, Coventry Building Society

Investing in the onboarding process and thoroughly training teams both from the outset and on an
ongoing basis will help. Marketing automation providers should offer some level of support to ensure
end users are getting adequate training, and as detailed in Section 6.2, this should be a consideration
when choosing a marketing automation provider.

4.1.4 Issues with integration into current systems

Integration with other tools in the tech stack is one of marketing automation’s key features. However,
there can be challenges in managing these integrations as each one will take time and resource to
complete. A US-based survey conducted by Ascend2 found that the vast majority of respondents were
using marketing automation that was not entirely integrated with the rest of their tech stack (see Figure
12), so this is not an uncommon situation.

Figure 12: Which best describes the integration of your marketing automation solution(s) with
the rest of your technology stack?

39%

29%
25%

7%

Entirely integrated Mostly integrated Somewhat integrated Not at all integrated

Source: Ascend2 | The State of Marketing Automation

It is advisable to take a step-by-step approach to integrating marketing automation tools with others
in the tech stack. Create a priority list of the tools that are the most important to integrate with first. It is
likely that a CRM system will be the at the top of the list due to the very complementary way the platforms
work together. Next, integration with the organisation’s website (or websites) is key, as this is an important
source of data to feed into the marketing automation platform. From there, each company may have a
different priority of tools to integrate with such as social management, analytics, advertising platforms,
webinar software, and so on.12

12
[Link]

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4.2 Data quality and volume
Dependant on the maturity of the organisation in managing and organising data, implementing marketing
automation may reveal some fundamental issues with the data that the business owns or has access to.
In some cases, there may be so much data, that it is overwhelming and challenging to organise. In others,
there may not be enough data available, and therefore marketing automation will be limited in its
capabilities until more data is collected.

Data quality and volume

“If you don’t have enough data, then it becomes very difficult to run a marketing automation campaign and
it becomes even more difficult to justify the spend on it, as setting up a good marketing automation platform
is not the cheapest thing to do. If you’ve got a hundred people in an audience and a 20% open rate, you only
get twenty people looking at it. But in saying that, data quality is more important than size. You could have an
audience of one hundred of the highest influential politicians in the world. If you get five of them opening your
email, that would be pretty good.”

— Jakob Naumann, Head of Digital Experience, Green Hat

Beyond volume, the quality of existing data can present a challenge. Data may be out of date, there
may fields missing or incomplete. Marketing automation cannot on its own address fundamental issues
with data, and resources may be required to address these problems to ensure that marketing automation
can run to the best of its capabilities.

Section 6.4 offers some tips on how to make sure the company’s database is ready before implementing
marketing automation.

4.3 Potential for misuse

According to the Pew Research Center, consumers are increasingly aware of how their data is being
tracked and used online. A 2019 survey by the think tank found that 72% of Americans report feeling
that all, almost all or most of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or
other companies.13 This is not entirely welcomed, as 79% of adults said they are very or somewhat
concerned about how companies are using the data they collect about them.

With this increased consumer awareness, it is important that brands do not overstep the mark in how
personalised marketing messages are, as overly personalised messages could be unsettling and appear
‘creepy’. While relevance is the upside to marketing automation, the ever-increasing computing power
of these systems runs the risk of knowing ‘too much’ about people, both from the data that is currently
available and from predictive analytics.

Similarly, automation platforms allow organisations to send out a higher volume of marketing messages
than ever before, creating the potential to send too many and irritate audiences.

To overcome these challenges, human intervention and planning is key. Creating a clear marketing and
content plan should give an overview of the content needed cross channels to avoid overcommunication.
It is key that a human eye assesses that both the volume and amount of personalisation are appropriate.
An omnichannel approach to marketing will provide a customer-centric perspective, which will give a
bird’s-eye view of what they are receiving to inform decisions about how many times a person should
be contacted.

For further guidance on content planning, see Econsultancy’s Content Marketing Best Practice Guide.

13
[Link]
their-personal-information/

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 34

4.4 Challenges in content creation
It can be a challenge creating enough content of a high enough quality to feed the machine of marketing
automation. Marketing automation allows firstly for a higher volume overall of communications than a
manual approach, and secondly allows for many more segments to be created that need unique messaging.

Robert Gassmayr, Digital Marketing Manager at Envista Holdings Corporation, says: “Content is very
important and can be a challenge. There is always a need for fresh content, but if you really want to think
about the story it’s a good idea to undertake some A/B testing. But this means you need to create double
the content. This is particularly challenging if it’s very technical subject area such as the medical industry.
You need to know what you’re talking about because the audience will recognise if you don’t and it’s
just a marketing email.”

Dynamic content creation is helping marketers with some of these challenges, which is explored more
fully in Section 7.1.3, but this may not be a realistic approach for someone starting out with marketing
automation.

Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director UK & Ireland at SAS, sees the opportunity to do this despite it not
yet being mainstream. “Automating our content creation is a new frontier. We are experimenting with
technology where we have general video delivered by our salespeople or an executive in which, for
example, they hold up a whiteboard and we insert a specific message relevant to that individual,
creating the impression of 1-2-1 communication.”

Applying the learning: Watchouts for marketing automation

• Be aware of costs and be sure to explore all the options as prices of marketing automation tools can
vary widely.
• Consider any internal challenges between teams, and what needs to be done to get everyone aligned
and a strategy laid out.
• Internal education can be a challenge, so prepare teams with adequate upfront and ongoing training.
• Despite being a key feature of marketing automation, integration with other tools is not always easy.
Approaching these one at a time will help overcome issues.
• Marketing automation is only as good as the data that feeds it. It cannot fix any problems with lacking
or subpar data on its own.
• Be mindful of the power of marketing automation to send out a great volume of highly personalised
communications. Be prepared for all the content needed by creating careful marketing and content plans.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 35

5. Lay the Strategic
Groundwork for Marketing
Automation
To effectively execute a marketing automation programme, it is important to spend time upfront scoping
out the role marketing automation could play in an organisation. Building a clear strategic foundation
makes it easier to create any necessary internal business cases and move to the next step of
implementation.

This exercise can help create an internal alignment and a wider sense of purpose for any automation,
as Phil Boon, Head of Digital at Coventry Building Society, says: “I’d advise people considering automation
to just immerse yourself in the topic more. So don’t necessarily invest in it, but first immerse yourself in
understanding the topic and have an opinion on it, be that at a personal or company level. This means
when it comes to an investment decision everyone is clear about what it means for you and your
customers, and everyone is driving towards the same thing.”

5.1 Understand your audience and the challenges

The first step to understanding the role marketing automation can play in any organisation is to think
about it from the customer’s point of view. Marketing, automated or not, cannot be personalised without
an in-depth knowledge of the businesses’ customers and leads. Building buyer personas can be a useful
way to bring audiences to life and understand them at a fundamental level. 14 For more information on
personas, see Econsultancy’s Segmentations and Personas Best Practice Guide.

Once a clear picture of the audience has been created, customer journeys for each of these personas
can be mapped out to bring to life the touchpoints at each stage of the journey. Figure 13 is a useful
framework to help organise this information and can be used to plan where marketing automation can
and cannot play a role along this journey.

14
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 36

 Figure 13: An example customer journey mapping canvas

Source: Econsultancy | Customer Journey Mapping Best Practice Guide

By building these personas and customer journeys, the role of marketing automation will be much
clearer, and this will help to build a business case to persuade any internal teams why marketing
automation is needed.

5.2 Consider data and legacy tools

Part of the planning process for marketing automation includes a phase of evaluating what is already
in place. As discussed in Section 4.2, it is important to ensure that there is enough data available for
automation systems to work with. Lindsey Pickles, Managing Partner at Bright Dials, says that in
general a minimum of about 25,000 customers are needed to effectively implement a data driven
marketing automation strategy.

Beyond the volume of customers, it is wise to check that the types of data needed are available to enable
marketing automation. It will depend on the objectives of each brand, but if there is a plan to automate
the customer journey across email and SMS, for example, the company will need to check that email
addresses and phone numbers are already in the database. Marketing automation can help generate
more data as time goes on, but before implementation it is a good opportunity to evaluate what is
currently available and identify any major gaps to be sure of the feasibility of the project.

The data will likely need to go through a cleansing process as part of the implementation, which is
detailed in Section 6.4, but at this early stage it is important to ensure that there is enough of the right
type of data before any significant investments are made.

It is also a good idea at this time to review the other tools that are in place and determine whether they
can integrate with marketing automation or if there are any potential barriers or complexities that might
arise as part of this process. Robert Gassmayr, Digital Marketing Manager at Envista Holdings Corporation,
advises: “It is important to think about the integration of marketing automation with other software.
Consider webinar, ecommerce, CRM systems, SMS, and paid media platforms. Can marketing
automation software be added as a native integration? Or will it require a more personalised, bespoke
integration where an agency might be required? It is important to consider the setup beforehand.”

This upfront scoping stage is important in understanding if marketing automation is the right addition to
the current martech stack, and if so, can give some indications about which platforms will be the best fit.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 37

5.3 Involve the correct internal teams and individuals
Before the implementation of marketing automation, it is important to involve key teams from across
the business. This gives stakeholders a voice and means that when moving onto the next step the
needs of teams across the organisation have been considered which helps offset the risk of internal
misalignment, as detailed in Section 4.1.2.

The first step is to decide who will be running the project internally. Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director
UK & Ireland at SAS, advises that this is not a task to be assigned to a junior employee. “You need to
ensure you have enough senior executive support for the project. The implementation of marketing
automation really should be driven from CMO or marketing director level, in my opinion.”

Involving and aligning with the sales team early in the development of the plans is crucial. Beyond the
sales team, individuals from customer service teams, business intelligence, strategy and operations are
also key stakeholders. It is advisable to form a dedicated team of key people from across the business
at the initial scoping and strategy stage. This ensures all voices are heard and the impact of the system
will be understood across the business.

Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director – Consumer Products at SAP, explains how its increasingly
important to involve operations teams and integrate with their systems: “Remember, this is not just
about marketing. You can communicate as much as you like, but if you’re not able to deliver, say if
your supply chain isn’t set up, that’s a huge challenge. I think we’re going to see it more often where
marketing automation really is going to be contingent on supply chain automation or supply chain agility
to complete the loop. So, it’s key to be aligned with the back office and the entire organisation.”

A key job of this cross-functional group is to agree on the semantics of the project upfront. This includes
being clear on definitions such as what exactly marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified
leads (SQLs) are, and when they are passed between teams. It also includes agreeing on key lead
scoring definitions such as what the key behaviours are and what the weights that should be applied to
those behaviours are, as this will avoid confusion later.15

5.4 Set up a plan to review

The overall marketing automation strategy will need to flex over time as customer personas and journeys
change too. As part of laying the groundwork for implementation, it is wise to set up a plan to review the
overall marketing automation strategy to assess if the tool can be applied to other areas of potential as
features and options expand, and internal teams become more comfortable executing the tools.

The dedicated cross-functional team mentioned in Section 5.3 will play a key role in reviewing the
strategy of marketing automation. It is important to bring all the stakeholders together to gather
feedback from across the business and optimise the approach. Initially these reviews may be more
frequent, perhaps every month or quarter, but as marketing automation becomes more established,
these reviews could be scheduled for every six or 12 months.

Checklist: Building a marketing automation strategy

• Build buyer personas to fully understand audiences, and create customer journeys for each of these
personas.
• Assess the volume and types of data currently available in the database to ensure there is enough
to work with, as well as the quality of this data.
• Review all the current tools in place and determine if there are any potential barriers or complexities
to integrating marketing automation with these tools.

15
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 38

• Recruit internal stakeholders from across the business into a dedicated cross-functional team.
• Be clear on funnel and lead scoring stages and definitions.
• Set a timed review of the marketing automation strategy, and involve the team to get qualitative
and quantitative feedback.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 39

6. The Steps to Implementing
Marketing Automation
Once the strategic foundations of a marketing automation approach have been laid, an organisation
may progress through to implementing the strategy, by following these eight steps.

6.1 Set clear goals and objectives

Setting clear goals on what implementing marketing automation is seeking to achieve is a crucial first
step in the implementation. As Figure 14: What does your organisation wish to achieve with their
marketing automation platform? demonstrates, there are a range of potential top-level goals that
organisations may have, with the most common among these being increasing sales revenue (56%),
improving lead nurturing (53%) and improving customer experience/engagement (52%).

Jane Musatova, Product Marketing Manager at Wix, offers some advice: “When planning to implement
a marketing automation platform, first you must understand what your goals are today, in a month, in a
year, and in two years. Talk with the sales team to understand what kind of funnel they want today and
how they plan to scale. Planning for scaling helps avoid the possibility of having to rebuild the entire
infrastructure in the future.”

Figure 14: What does your organisation wish to achieve with their marketing automation
platform?

Source: Demand Spring | Marketing Automation Platform Insights

Though it is tempting to choose a few of these goals, it is wise to start out with one and then drill down
into the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) objectives of this goal. As
an example, if the primary goal is to increase sales revenue, a SMART objective could be to increase
sales revenue by 5% in the next six months or to reduce costs of sales by 10% in the next twelve
months.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 40

 Marketing automation can help achieve both objectives, but it is important to lay them out and prioritise
objectives as much as possible to help streamline where the work is focused.

Table 2: SMART objectives

Criteria Purpose

Specific This defines exactly what the business wants to achieve and to what extent. A good
objective should set out to answer who, what, where, why, when, etc. It must be clear
to everyone involved.

Measurable Tracking activity and measuring the outcome is vital. It is a good idea to quantify
objectives and agree what evidence is required to confirm it has been achieved.

Achievable Set challenging objectives but make sure they are relevant to the business and
realistic to achieve; if something cannot be achieved, it is a pointless objective and
may demotivate the people involved.

Relevant The objective must be relevant to business goals and the overall strategic marketing
plan.

Time-based Set a time limit within which the objective needs to be realised. This timeline must
also be realistic based on resource available and the complexity of the objective.

Source: Econsultancy

With so many potential uses of marketing automation, it is wise to start small. As teams become more
familiar with the tool, its usage can be advanced.

6.2 Select the most relevant marketing automation provider

With a clear understanding of the goals of implementing marketing automation and a strong strategic
foundation laid from the previous steps, the next phase is to select the marketing automation provider
that can best help deliver these goals.

It is important to consider the following factors when selecting a provider:

• Current organisation size and sector. The needs of an enterprise-level marketer will be different
from an SME marketer, and it is important that the marketing automation provider is the best possible
fit for the overall size of the company and the database that it owns. Some marketing automation
providers also specialise in a specific vertical, such as travel or finance.
• Whether the features available match the organisations’ needs. As explored in Section 2.4,
there are many different features of marketing automation, and not every company may need to
leverage all these features. As Lindsey Pickles, Managing Partner at Bright Dials, says: “It’s important
to purchase software that you’re able to use. Don’t buy a Ferrari when you need a Mini Cooper,
there’s no point.” Most providers offer different packages which allow access to certain feature sets
and/or users at different price points allowing customers to choose the best solution to suit their needs.
However, even if price is not a primary consideration, it is important to consider the complexity of the
platform as this might make it harder or more time-consuming to implement.
• If it integrates well with existing tools. A key feature of marketing automation platforms is their
ability to integrate with other tools. However, some are more compatible than others. As an example,
an organisation may already be using a CRM system operated by one of the large marketing clouds,
so it could be beneficial to consider the marketing automation platform that the cloud owns as the
integration is likely to be better. This is not to say platforms owned separately do not work well
together, as they often do, but it is key to ask questions of providers about the ease of integrations
with any tools that are currently in use.
• Customer support available. Providers should offer a level of customer service and training that is
matched with the organisation’s needs. This is critical at the onboarding and initial training phase,
but it is also important on an ongoing basis. Having a clear picture of the support included by the
provider for the specific package that is being considered will help overcome challenges of internal
adoption.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 41

 • Usability of the platform. Each provider offers a different UX, so it is wise to engage in some trials
to demo the usability of each platform to ensure that the primary users find it easy to manage and
assess what the tool can do.
• Scalability into the future. A key consideration is how scalable the platform is not only now,
but into the future, as a core function of marketing automation is to help a business grow.
• Ability to deliver regulatory compliance. Platforms must provide the tools that enable international
compliance with local regulations, which are often disparate and may require the data to be handled
differently. Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director UK & Ireland at SAS, explains: “[Marketing automation]
must be designed for the legislative and compliance environment. For example, a multinational
organisation will need to put their global audience in compartmentalised buckets or workplaces in
their marketing automation system to avoid leakage between regions. This topic needs deep thought
because global legislation for data compliance will have a very strong impact on how systems are
designed and set up. Not every platform can do this, so it’s something that needs to be asked upfront.
When choosing a supplier, ask: ‘How can I ensure that my data can be compartmentalised into
legislative domains?’.”

Selecting a provider will always be an exercise in understanding internal goals and involving stakeholders
and finding the tool that best matches the needs of the organisation making the choice.

6.3 Create a timeline for transition

Laying out a timeline for the implementation of marketing automation can help manage expectations
and create internal clarity. As Figure 15 shows, the amount of time required for implementation is quite
varied, from 0–3 months for 15% of companies to over 12 months for 12% of respondents.

Figure 15: How long did it take to implement your current marketing automation platform?

25%
24% 24%

15%

12%

Less than 3 3-4 months 6-12 months More than 12 Unsure

months months

Source: Demand Spring | Marketing Automation Platform Insights

Though it may be challenging to predict exactly how long the transition will take, writing a rough plan of
when each step of the implementation will happen, along with who is responsible, will create a central
record. Furthermore, it can help prioritise which functions are automated first, as it is unwise to try and
automate all processes at the same time.16 A step-by-step approach will reduce confusion and enable
some testing and learning before it is rolled out more widely.

16
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 42

6.4 Clean and prepare data
Before launching a new marketing automation system, it is advisable to examine the data that will be
fed into the system to make sure that it is fit for purpose. If there are inaccuracies, missing data points
or misspellings in the data, this may impair the ability of the system to properly function.

Econsultancy’s Data-driven Marketing Best Practice Guide suggests the following five steps to clean
and prepare data:

Steps to cleaning and preparing data

1. Remove duplicate or irrelevant observations: Duplicate observations can occur during data collection
or when data from multiple sources is combined, making the process of ‘de-duplicating’ data an important
part of data cleansing. Irrelevant data points, for example, could include data relating to an audience that
is not part of the segment being created, and can be removed from a dataset. This process can improve
accuracy as well as performance.
2. Fix structural errors: This may relate to inappropriate naming conventions or typos that affect data
quality.
3. Filter unwanted outliers: It is important to note that outliers can be useful for drawing a conclusion or
proving a hypothesis, but when an outlier does not fit within a dataset it should be removed to improve
accuracy.
4. Handle missing data: Missing data points or values can potentially hinder good outcomes, so making a
careful choice on whether to drop these data points, input substitute ones (being careful not to disrupt the
integrity of the findings), or change the way in which the data is being analysed is important.
5. Validate the data: Validating the quality of the data at the end of this process should mean that the team
is able to be comfortable that the data they are using is appropriate for the task that they need to achieve,
that it follows suitable rules and brings the required insight.

— Econsultancy | Data-driven Marketing Best Practice Guide

Once the legacy data has been cleaned, it is also important to set up best practices for maintaining the
quality of the data going forward. Parsing tools which monitor emails for new data points can directly
feed into marketing automation systems. It is also advisable to create rules about how data is entered
into the system, such as always checking for duplicates before creating a new contact. 17 Standardising
data entry in this way will help maintain a clean and easy-to-use database.

6.5 Organise content and identify gaps

Before the implementation of marketing automation, it is important to identify all the content that is
currently available and contrast this to what is needed for the particular use case or workflow that has
been identified as a priority. Relevant content for each persona at each stage of the customer journey
must be created to enable the personalised customer experience that a marketing automation platform
offers.

Grids which provide a timed overview of all the different content that is available and needed can be
a good way to provide a bird’s eye view of the content plan to identify any gaps. The headings of the
matrix will depend on the use case and the content needs of the marketer, but to name a few could
include language, place in the customer journey, device, or product interest.

17
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 43

 Think about the value exchange for the consumer when creating the content. This is particularly true for
content that requires something in return, such as the user’s personal information. Make sure that the
content is not overly sales focused, but truly of use and relevant when asking for something in return.

6.6 Train internal users and stakeholders

Before the launch of the new platform, training key users on what the benefits of marketing automation
are and how to use the tool is a key step. This may involve assigning some individuals as internal
experts that others can go to with questions. The marketing automation provider is also a useful
resource and will be able to provide training support before launch.

Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director UK & Ireland at SAS, describes the approach and some of the training
tactics he has found to be successful. “We invested a tonne of time in training. We had SWAT teams
going around Europe, sitting by the desks of people to help train them. We had weekly call-ins where
people could come and ask questions and created forums where people could share problems or good
ideas.”

As part of the training, creating rules for access and usage is a good way to overcome challenges around
potential misuse. Depending on the size of the company, this may involve creating different layers of
access for different individuals. For example, a more senior employee may be able to create a campaign
from scratch and send it out, whereas someone more junior may only have access to the reporting.

Levels of access to marketing automation tools

“Marketing automation is a super powerful tool, but in the wrong hands there is a high risk for error on a large
scale. We implemented a strategy of dividing users into four layers:

• Level 1: most basic access, capabilities such as being able to load lists from an event.
• Level 2: somebody that could create a campaign, design it and build it from a template, but not send it out
to the database.
• Level 3: a super-user that can clone, design artwork and create messaging and send it out to the
database.
• Level 4: top-level access across the entire system.

Using this approach, we were able to send out 6,000 campaigns without a single [major] error.”

— Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director UK & Ireland, SAS

Crucially the training should not end after the rollout of the platform. Beyond accounting for the usual
staff turnover, continued training will allow marketers to execute more advanced programmes as they
become more comfortable with the tool.

6.7 Launch and test

The previous steps of the implementation should provide the groundwork from which to complete
the build of the technology, ensuring:

• SMART objectives of the project are defined.

• Provider is selected and running.
• Data is clean and migrated.
• Integrations with other systems have been completed.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 44

 • Content is ready for distribution.
• Teams and trained and prepared.

There will be a period of building to bring this all together, and once this is finished, the platform can
launch and the first campaigns can be tested. This phase of test and learn is key, scaling up the ambitions
for the platform gradually means that errors are avoided and learnings can be made based on real data.

The importance of testing during rollout

“It is vital to go through a journey of testing. It can be really confusing for people to do testing so it’s necessary
to do some training around this first and provide really clear documentation. There might be three or 30 use
cases that need testing, and this requires a lot of focus. Often there is a time window for when the test has to
happen, and if it’s missed, then you have to start again. It takes skill to understand how to test, but it’s really
important for getting buy-in and for getting people to understand what they need to do. We find the testing
phase is where the learning really beds in. It creates the ‘aha moment’ where clients start to ask for lots more
work as they really start to understand the detail and possibilities of their new platform.”

— Lindsey Pickles, Managing Partner, Bright Dials

6.8 Measure the results and optimise

Directly after launch, monitoring the results relative to the SMART objectives will allow users to tweak
the system on an ongoing basis to optimise activity and learn what is working most efficiently. Some
example metrics that might be used on an ongoing basis to measure the effectiveness of the strategy
include:

• Number of new leads generated.

• Uplifts in visits to the website.
• Email open rates or clickthrough rates.
• Number of marketing qualified leads (MQL) generated.
• Uplifts in conversions.
• Uplifts in revenue generated.

Most tools will offer a measurement dashboard to help facilitate reporting and will become the backbone
of the measurement and optimisation at a campaign and overall level.

“To measure the effectiveness of marketing automation, you need to create a dashboard and every
campaign you do needs to be measured on that dashboard,” explains Robert Gassmayr, Digital Marketing
Manager at Envista Holdings Corporation. “Here you can track KPIs such as how many leads were
generated, or sales qualified. Or how many opportunities have been created due to those sales and
what is the lead time between created leads and when they were picked up by sales. You can also
break down the reporting by reach or by time or by brand/business unit if the company has multiple
brands to see the reporting from different angles.”

Figure 16 shows an example from just one of the many tools available to bring to life what this
dashboard can look like. Filters and setting options can be adjusted to create specific insights that
match the SMART objectives laid out at the start of the project.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 45

Figure 16: Example measurement dashboard from Oracle’s Eloqua marketing automation
platform

Source: Oracle18

Despite the many features available, it can still be a challenge to justify the costs of implementing a new
system. Research from Demand Spring found that 47% of marketers are unsure of the ROI attributable
to their marketing automation, as can be seen in Figure 17. Creating a method early on to measure the
ROI of the marketing automation platform overall will help justify the cost of the investment internally
and overcome any future budgetary challenges.

Figure 17: Please identify the ROI you have been able to attribute to your marketing automation
platform

47%

29%

15%

5%
2% 2%

Less than 10% Between 11- Between 50- Between 100- More than 200% Unsure
49% 99% 199%

Source: Demand Spring | Marketing Automation Platform Insights

18
[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 46

 It is worth noting that there may be some more qualitative measures beyond ROI metrics that can
indicate whether the automation is having the desired effect. For example, if automating one task is
leading to other improvements in process or approach.

Phil Boon, Head of Digital at Coventry Building Society, reflects: “The interesting thing about automating
tasks is it always forces a next best step or next action. So, we don’t necessarily see results like ‘we’ve
got loads of time back because we’ve automated something’, rather it always kicks out a progression.
For us, this progression is important because we don’t want to just ‘do’ marketing automation for the
sake of it, instead we simply look to automate processes that will add value.”

Checking in regularly with stakeholders across functions can provide some of this feedback and help
the business understand more qualitatively how automation is improving capabilities across the
organisation in some ways that might be more difficult to measure.

Checklist: Implementing marketing automation

• Initially, set one key goal and a few supporting SMART objectives to work towards.
• Select the marketing automation provider that best fits the organisation’s needs by asking the following
questions:
– Do other companies in the same sector and of similar size use the tool, and are the reviews positive?
– Are the features available a good fit for the organisation’s needs? Neither too many nor too few?
– Does it integrate well with other tools already in place?
– What is the level of customer support and training available, both upfront and on an ongoing basis?
– After carrying out demos of different platforms, which is the easiest to use and has the best
functionality to meet requirements?
– Can the provider scale as the organisation grows?
– Does the platform have the ability to compartmentalise data to adhere to privacy regulations?
• Create a written implementation plan with steps and the roles of team members.
• Clean and prepare data:
– Remove duplicate data
– Fix structural errors
– Filter any outliers
– Handle missing data
– Validate the data
• Create rules about how data is entered going forward.
• Organise content in a grid to identify any gaps.
• Train users and create rules for access.
• Build and launch marketing automation, testing very carefully as it progresses.
• Measure the effectiveness against the SMART objectives by creating dashboards in the tool.

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7. The Future of Marketing
Automation
Marketing automation is an established tool among data-driven marketers, and this trend looks likely
to continue as estimates predict the global marketing automation market will rise from $5.2bn in 2022
to $9.5bn in 2027.19 Increased uptake, particularly on a global level, is attributed to pushing this growth,
but changes and improvements in the tools’ features and technology also will play a role. This section
covers some of the forecasted advances within the industry.

7.1 Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)

continue to fuel innovation
As discussed in Section 3.3.2, machine learning (ML) is already in use in many marketing automation
platforms to augment and improve the marketing strategies of many organisations. There is still undoubtedly
more opportunity for AI and ML to continue this trend into the near future as marketers and platforms
leverage the technology further, and this section explores this further.

7.1.1 AI and ML allowing for deeper personalisation

One key application of AI and ML technology is to allow for even more personalisation in automated
marketing campaigns. Personalisation is already one of the key benefits of marketing automation,
but the opportunity to do more is noted by experts such as Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director –
Consumer Products at SAP, who says: “I’ve seen the opportunities with AI change in the last ten or
even five years. We see deeper personalisation, going beyond just putting someone’s name at the
top of an email, toggling in their age or a product recommendation. AI can enable really deep
personalisation that offers more meaningful engagements with customers.”

It is likely that AI and ML will fuel a move from personalisation to ‘hyper-personalisation’, which uses
predictive insights across several data points to create communications that are personalised at a
deeper level. For example, these technologies can be used to conclude that a customer prefers to
browse between 8am and 9am on their mobile device; that they have bought a particular brand before;
or that they have the highest interaction rate with email communications. A message can then be
sent out during that time period, by email, optimised for mobile, and about that brand to encourage
interaction.

Although some market leaders are at this level of maturity, such as Amazon, Starbucks, Spotify and
Netflix,20 most brands are not currently implementing this predictive hyper-personalisation, but in
coming years a broader uptake can be expected.

7.1.2 AI and ML changing the ways marketers communicate

AI and ML can create opportunities for marketers that would have been previously unimaginable. The
example below from Jane Musatova, Product Marketing Manager at Wix, shows how AI is creating a
new type of target audience beyond the usual category of lead or customer. AI is allowing such deep
analysis of data that a new ‘pre-lead’ target can be created and catered to.

19
[Link]
20
[Link]

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 AI changing the way marketers communicate

“Nowadays there are different software solutions that use AI to help you analyse data prior to even being
stored in your platform. There are ways to identify anonymous visitors and to cater to those visitors prior to
them even filling out forms, which has really changed the way we communicate. For example, using AI
technology, we can create very specific target audiences such as ‘anonymous visitors that came to the
website in the past week and have previously researched customer support more than five times’.”

— Jane Musatova, Product Marketing Manager, Wix

Another example of AI opening new ways for communication is the growth in chatbots. It is estimated
that in 2021 the global chatbot market was worth $525.7m, but it is expected to grow at a rate of 25.7%
from 2022 to 2030.21 Chatbots use computing power to enable immediate one-to-one conversations with
customers. This contributes to an improved customer experience by creating a sense of personalisation and
availability of the brand to the customer. Chatbots can also be a useful data stream for marketers to
learn more about customers and leads, creating another data source and feedback loop.

These technologies are in use today by many marketers, and the adoption of these tools is likely to
accelerate in the future. On the topic of chatbots, Rachel Leist, Senior Director of Marketing, Automation
& Demand Generation at HubSpot, says: “Years ago marketing automation used to be about automating
your email communication. Today it is so much more. One of our most successful automation channels
is conversational marketing. We have found that our website visitors are more likely to interact with a
bot than a live agent.”

7.1.3 AI and ML creating opportunities for dynamic content

One area of growth is the role of AI and ML in creating the content itself. Sunny Neely, Global Solution
Director – Consumer Products at SAP, reveals: “Something I see growing is dynamic content generation
which leverages AI to create, for example, 10,000 different versions of a banner ad that is personalised
in thousands of different ways… In the future it’s going to have very eye-opening implications for copy
generation and creative content creation. I don’t think AI will replace humans altogether in content creation,
but I think we’ll see it increasingly help scenario plan and quickly assess the impact of different creative
options without marketers having to, for example, go film a TV spot and edit it, etc., and then wait
months before they get any feedback.”

This has potential to solve the challenge of creating enough content to feed the marketing automation
platform, and it could be particularly valuable to marketers who want to engage in content testing. If
10,000 versions of a particular piece of content can be quickly and easily generated by a computer, this
will create an incredibly useful data pool that can be used to understand in more detail the content that
is and is not working at a very granular level.

AI has also proved useful for the specific use case of personalising the subject lines of emails, enabling
real-time optimisation of the copy. When the UK retailer Currys used AI to optimise the subject line of emails,
they saw a 57% increase in open rates and a 9% improvement in conversion when compared to the
subject lines written by humans.22

There is, however, a likely limit to the role ML can play in content creation. Yanina Vidal, Senior Industry
Manager at Google, points out: “Humans will still do the best creatives. Humans have ingenuity and
creativity. We are still the ones to have the new ideas but automation allows us to test these ideas fast
to learn what works and what doesn’t.”

In fact a study by Google and Boston Consulting Group provides some data into the value humans can
still add to performance. The research showed that the campaigns that leveraged ‘advanced technologies’
saw an average performance boost of 20% compared to a control campaign that did not employ these

21
[Link]
22
[Link]

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 technologies. However, when a campaign drew on both advanced technologies and human
intervention, the boost went up by 15 percentage points to 35%, proving that humans still have
an important role to play.23

7.2 A continued drive to mobile-first marketing automation

Consumer behaviour went ‘mobile first’ a long time ago, when back in 2017 Google announced that
the smartphone was users’ primary device in 62 of the 63 countries it surveyed, from Argentina to
Vietnam.24 However, there is sometimes a lag in changing marketers’ behaviour to keep up with the
fast-moving consumer. Though most organisations now do consider their mobile-specific strategy,
this is a likely area of further innovation for marketing automation in the future.

One of the key mobile-specific use cases of marketing automation is the ability to use geolocation
signals to enable personalisation. Location data can be used in a few different ways:

• Geo-fencing campaigns: Companies can set up a ‘geo fence’ around a particular location, such
a retailer or restaurant. Once a user enters that geo-fenced area, this can trigger a communication
such as a mobile notification or SMS.
• Proximity-based campaigns: Companies can employ ‘beacons’ that detect when a user is within
a certain geographical range near that beacon. Much like geo-fencing, once the user enters that
area an SMS or notification can be sent.
• Location-informed behavioural campaigns: Probably the area with the most potential, collating
location data over long periods provides insights into customer behaviour and preferences which
can be used in a marketing automation system to enable personalised communications. As with
any personal data, gaining the correct permissions to use location data is a hygiene factor.

Another benefit of moving towards mobile-first marketing automation is the data that is available via
apps, this can include:

• Demographic data – this may be collected in forms in the app.

• Responsiveness to in-app notifications – to see what messaging is performing the best.
• Location data – behavioural data inferred from location and more general geolocation data such
as region.
• Purchase behaviour – if the app sells products, or services within the app such as subscriptions
or gaming add-ons.
• Device information – such as device type, manufacturer and model.

Again, the use of this data must adhere to all local privacy regulations, but for companies that directly
own apps there is the potential to take marketing automation on mobile to a more advanced level.

7.3 Will marketing roles be replaced by ‘customer journey

engineers’?
As marketing automation becomes smarter and more useful, it becomes increasingly engrained across
both the customer journey and the many different parts of the organisation using it. This has the
potential to change how we see the role of the marketing team internally.

23
[Link]
24
[Link]
mobile-majority/

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The changing role of marketing thanks to automation

“Marketing has changed at a philosophical level. Historically, marketing has been ‘push, push, push’ activity-
based marketing. But this just annoys people, especially now when there is so much noise out there and
people are bombarded with over 3,000 messages a day. Furthermore, previously the customer journey was
owned by departments all around the organisation as customers would engage with different parts of the
company. That has changed as companies engage ‘a digital layer’, i.e. an app or website where customers
can engage with an organisation, and this tends to be owned by marketing. This is a huge change as it gives
a new and important role to marketing of owning the customer journey. Marketing has become the ‘customer
journey engineers’ that tie the whole organisation together around the customer.”

— Stephen Yeo, Marketing Director UK & Ireland, SAS

This begs the question, if the traditional internal structures that delineate marketing, sales, customer
service, business intelligence and strategy will continue to suit the needs of companies that are engaging
automation at the most advanced levels. Will ‘customer journey’ departments appear that merge some,
or all, of these disciplines to better fit the new era of customer understanding and personalisation? Only
time will tell.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 51

8. Conclusion
Marketing automation is an established way for B2B and B2C organisations to optimise their marketing
activity and improve the user experience across the entire customer journey.

The role of marketing automation has become increasingly central as more transactions and interactions
happen online through a company’s ‘digital layer’. The pandemic has further accelerated society’s move
to a more online existence, a trend that looks unlikely to reverse. As this happens, organisations are
realising that traditional, manual marketing does not live up to consumer expectations, which pushes
marketing automation further into the mainstream. It is little wonder that in Econsultancy’s 2022 Future
of Marketing survey, marketing automation platforms rank in the top three martech tools that respondents
are considering adopting (Figure 4).

In fact, Yanina Vidal, Senior Industry Manager at Google, sees marketing automation increasingly as a
hygiene factor: “Nothing about automation is for one company; your competitor can use it just as readily
as you, it is not something uniquely available to you. If you do it fast and first, you can be ahead of the
curve, but in time everyone will employ it. Everything about marketing automation becomes a hygiene
factor in three years.”

Concurrently, significant advances in the technology that enables marketing automation are taking
place. AI and ML are the drivers of the next phase of the technology, enabling automation and
personalisation to an even finer degree, such as hyper-personalisation and dynamic content creation,
something previously unimaginable. Much of this functionality is currently already available, although
perhaps not widely adopted, so it is reasonable to expect that even further innovation is being worked
on behind the closed doors of the major platforms.

What this guide seeks to convey is that the opportunity to leverage marketing automation is available
to most organisations, in fact the majority not using marketing automation would likely benefit from it.
The steps to implementation are not out of reach, and if followed methodically, will result in many
benefits for the company and the customer.

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 52

9. Further reading
9.1 Econsultancy reports
Econsultancy | AI, Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics Best Practice Guide
[Link]

Econsultancy I Quick Guide to Customer Retention

[Link]

Econsultancy I Quick Guide to Customer Data Platforms

[Link]

Econsultancy I Data-driven Marketing Best Practice Guide

[Link]

Econsultancy I Segmentations and Personas Best Practice Guide

[Link]

Econsultancy I Social CX and Customer Service Best Practice Guide

[Link]

Econsultancy I Quick Guide to Customer Journey Mapping

[Link]

Econsultancy I Email Marketing Best Practice Guide

[Link]

Econsultancy | Case Study Library

Econsultancy’s database of case studies showcases best practice and innovation from companies around the
globe.

Browse the Case Study Library: [Link]

Submit a success story: [Link]

9.2 Other resources

Demand Spring I Marketing Automation Platform Insights
[Link]

HubSpot I How to Implement & Succeed With Marketing Automation

[Link]

Act on I How Do I Prepare for Marketing Automation?

[Link]

Emarsys I Omnichannel Marketing Automation

[Link]

Ascend2 I The State of Marketing Automation

[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 53

SharpSpring I 2022 Marketing Automation Comparison Guide
[Link]

Adobe I The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation

[Link]

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 54

Marketing Automation Best Practice Guide 55