Marketing Automation: Supporting the Customer Journey

In our previous article, we discussed "lead management." This time, we'll delve deeper into "marketing automation" (MA) tools, which we highlighted as the cloud services underpinning lead management.
Recently, the trend toward "automating marketing operations" has become increasingly prominent. This is because the rise of social media and DMPs means that manually analyzing and interpreting data, as was done before, is too slow to quickly feed the data generated in real time back into strategies.

Marketing Automation Functions

In Japan, well-known MA tools include "Eloqua" provided by Oracle Japan, "ExactTarget" provided by Salesforce, and "Marketo" provided by Marketo. Common functional concepts across these tools are "centralized customer data" and "automation of initiatives based on scenario design."

Centralization of Customer Data
To deliver the brand experience promised to customers across increasingly diverse digital touchpoints, it is essential to integrate customer information collected at these points and manage it uniquely (on a per-customer basis). However, customer information obtained along the enterprise value chain is often not integrated within the company.

For example, if a company fails to integrate online shopping cart history from its own e-commerce site with in-store visit and purchase history, a frequent online shopper visiting a physical store might receive the same service as a first-time customer. This creates a gap between the customer's experience and their expectations.

The necessity of data integration in the CRM field has long been advocated, yet actual progress has been limited. Historically, achieving high-precision data integration between existing databases required significant costs. However, data integration via MA enables the integration of only the necessary customer information at a "sufficient" level of precision in the cloud, allowing for swift and low-cost execution.

Automation of Initiatives Based on Scenario Design
By analyzing and interpreting customer information unified through data centralization, we automate the process of executing scenario-based initiatives. These initiatives primarily involve delivering messages and content across digital channels, such as company emails, website banners, landing pages, and apps. Some MA tools may also enable future integration with existing communication platforms like LINE.

Customers utilizing these multiple channels are identified as unique. After defining and setting up the customer nurturing process as scenarios within the MA system, the system automatically deploys measures through finely tuned branching scenarios based on customer responses across channels.

Marketing Automation Supporting the Customer Journey

Now that we've introduced the general functions of MA tools, the future scale of the MA market will significantly change depending on how the application areas of these MA tools expand. In the past, numerous tools emerged that optimized behavior solely within digital channels. Some may perceive MA tools as functionally similar to these. However, by not limiting MA tools to being merely "digital promotion optimization" tools, but instead expanding their application scope to include, for example, "marketing process optimization," the perspective on MA implementation within companies—regarding budget, timeline, and the departments involved—changes significantly.

The highest operational improvement effects within a company's marketing process are found in areas like the "sales department," where real customer touchpoints exist, leading to enhanced operational efficiency. Consequently, we've recently seen an increase in inquiries from the sales departments of B2B companies.

Furthermore, while creating customer journey maps is currently seen as crucial for service development and customer experience design, we frequently observe cases where these maps are not effectively utilized. Rather than the mass-marketing, uniform contact point scenarios traditionally drawn by advertising agencies, it is necessary to create journey scenarios for all customer patterns, responding to diversifying customer touchpoints, values, and desires. (Consequently, the complexity of action patterns often led to customer journey maps becoming theoretical constructs.)

One practical method to translate all these scenarios into actionable initiatives is the "scenario design function" of MA mentioned earlier.

Fundamentally, customer journey maps are designed not just for touchpoints between consumers and companies, but to depict consumer actions and feelings between touchpoints, aiming to provide the optimal experience when they reconnect. Therefore, customer information gathered solely from digital touchpoints makes it impossible to truly understand customers or deliver the best possible experience.

So, how can we incorporate the utilization of customer information and experience delivery from real-world touchpoints into MA scenario design?

For example, as previously introduced, consider enabling MA to connect in real time not only with digital channels but also with customer management tools like SFA (Sales Force Automation) systems used by sales teams or call centers. In other words, leverage customer information gathered through digital channels to deliver optimal experiences at physical touchpoints.

However, capturing customer behavior across touchpoints may be difficult using only the touchpoint information collected by the company. In such cases, incorporating external data obtained with consumer consent—such as vital data (so-called IoT data) collected from smartphones, apps, and sensor-equipped watches—or information on the same customer collected by alliance partners could enable scenario design based on a deeper understanding of the customer, bridging the gaps between touchpoints.

 

As someone who supports MA implementation and operation, I believe advertising agencies still struggle to fully harness MA—even within the limited digital sphere—when faced with the infinitely expanding range of scenario patterns. While mastering the MA tool itself is essential, what agencies are truly required to develop is the hypothesis-building ability to design customer nurturing scenarios.

Advertising agencies possess diverse frameworks, know-how, and talent for mapping customer journeys. We may soon be able to introduce initiatives that better unlock MA's potential in an article.