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Keeping it personal
As customers look for a more personal approach to their everyday interactions with brands, businesses have adopted a more customer-centric approach to the way they work. And with marketing automation, the days of generic communications are long gone as businesses look to keep things personal.
For Caci clinic franchisor FAB Group, deepening the customer relationship is one of its biggest goals, and as marketing and communications manager Emily Stevenson explains, marketing automation offered FAB Group the opportunity to utilise their data in a meaningful and relevant way.
“When we initially started using marketing automation, it was for simple tasks like automated birthday emails and ‘we’ve missed you’ messages to re-engage inactive clients,” she says.
“But now, we use the platform to do all sorts of activities, such as sending out appointment reminders, offering relevant material based on purchase behaviour and notifying customers of abandoned shopping carts.”
Stevenson believes personalised emails have had a tangible effect on FAB Group’s marketing communications, and that Engage—Ubiquity’s cloud-based marketing automation platform—enables them to develop specific communications according to their objectives.
“Open rates for our automated emails are up to 40% higher than other emails which shows that these pieces of communication are more relevant and valuable to our clients,” she says.
“Because we can segment based on demographics, customer preferences, buying behaviour and even their engagement with previous communication pieces, we can deliver a piece of communication with personalised dynamic content that changes dependent on who we’re targeting.”
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It’s all in the data
Data-driven marketing is more than just a buzzword—it’s a real and tangible approach that businesses are looking to utilise on an increasing scale. And with marketing automation’s ability to unleash the power of both new and existing data, it’s become integral to how modern businesses target their customers.
“For me, what marketing automation represents is releasing the power of the data you’re collecting,” says Simon Moutzouris, group head of brand and digital marketing at Methven, a New Zealand-based bathroomware company. “Most organisations are constantly collecting data about their consumers and their interactions, and marketing automation allows you to use that data to deliver a consistent brand experience.”
Although still in the early stages of their marketing automation journey, Methven recently rolled out an automated communications campaign to complement their 30-day trial for a new shower head. From making sure they installed the shower head properly to reminding them their trial was almost up, Moutzouris cites the importance of communicating regularly during the entire course of the 30-day trial.
“Marketing automation really allowed us to pinpoint what we wanted to say and when we wanted to say it. Therefore, the campaign exceeded our expectations and our open rates were 300-400 percent over industry standards,” he says.
Movies and TV-on-demand service Neon have also been looking to make the most of data-driven marketing. Neon marketing manager Sorrel Davies says the business has been testing the effect of personalised content recommendations within their emails to assess its effectiveness in increasing customer usage.
“With the Engage platform, it’s given us the ability to A/B test and work out what elements best improve our key metrics. As we try to move Neon’s marketing towards being more data-driven, the ability to be able to analyse behavioural data and marry that up to what then happens in the Neon site or app is the next step to really seeing the benefit of Engage,” she says.
Staying local
For Moutzouris—who’s had previous personal experience with other automation tools—he knew that although international vendors could appear more attractive, he wanted Methven to have the benefits of staying local. A local provider understands New Zealand culture and way of business, as well as being available in our time zone.
“Ubiquity really took the time to understand our business and what we were trying to achieve,” says Moutzouris. “We could lean on them to provide that full service support, which ended up being really important to us.”
For companies like FAB Group or Neon who were new to the world of marketing automation, having a locally supportive company proved even more crucial to help them through this new—and sometimes daunting—journey.
“Being new to marketing automation, we partnered with Ubiquity primarily because they are a New Zealand company and there was a team of people that could support us,” says Stevenson.
“In addition, their platform is intuitive, easy to use, offers a high degree of segmentation and the ability to create forms which feed data back into the system and Engage web tracking – which allows us to monitor customer buying behaviour through our website.”
For Neon, Davies refers to similar reasons for choosing Ubiquity. Parent company Sky’s previous experience working with Ubiquity and Engage had demonstrated that they were knowledgeable and supportive with an easy-to-use platform.
“We knew setting up our requirements for Neon from scratch wasn’t going to be a walk in the park,” she says. “But we knew that Ubiquity were experienced, flexible and being locally based, would be the best placed to work with multiple departments within Sky to get us up and running.”
- This story is part of a content partnership with Ubiquity.
