Here are the updates relevant for managers: 

• Book meetings on behalf of other users (beta).
• New HubSpot embed for Salesforce (beta).
• Payments:
  • Edit subscriptions (beta).
  • Edit the next payment date for subscriptions.
  • Create and send payment links from contact, company and deal records.
  • Improved payouts experience.
  • Include multiple payment links in forms.
  • Payments Revenue Reporting Dashboard available in Starter.
• Add conditional logic to the ‘Create record’ form (beta).
• Manage your marketing emails from mobile.
• Automatically associate calls with deals through HubSpot AI (beta).
• Forms reporting moved to the Forms Analyze tab.
• Saved views for website pages and blog posts.

Book meetings on behalf of other users (beta)

Save time and enable call-scheduling team members by using the new release to book meetings on behalf of other users directly on the deal, ticket, company, or contact record. 

The release enables you to report on who scheduled a meeting and who was assigned the meeting. For example, you can now report on which business or sales development representatives (BDRs or SDRs) booked meetings for which account executives (AEs).

HubSpot embed for Salesforce (beta)

Save yourself and your team’s time from switching between HubSpot and Salesforce to see the complete view of the data using the new Salesforce HubSpot embed as part of HubSpot’s Salesforce integration. 

Previously, only the five most recent HubSpot timeline activities and a limited number of properties were viewable in Salesforce.

HubSpot Payments receive many long-awaited improvements

If you have been unable to derive the benefits of using Payments, such as seeing and using payment data in the same system as your other reporting, the latest releases from HubSpot may eliminate that barrier to adoption.

• To make it easier to upsell and retain customers who need to make changes to their subscriptions, you can change products, prices, quantities and discounts without canceling and restarting the subscription.
• To improve the customer- and financial-team experience, you can edit the next payment date for subscriptions instead of canceling and restarting the subscription. This feature is especially useful for businesses where the first payment is made immediately to reserve services for upcoming months. Regular billing occurs on one particular date for all customers.
• To help your team save time and make it easier to get paid, you can create and send payment links from contact, company and deal records. It now takes 10 seconds to create the link, compared to 3 minutes before this release. 
• To quickly and easily reconcile bank deposits with HubSpot Payments transactions, the payouts experience in Payment Settings now shows:
  • The estimated date the payment will arrive in your bank account.
  • Failed payments to take action on.
  • The customer’s email address.
  • A link to the Payment record to more easily identify the payment source.
• To allow customers to select which product they want to purchase within one form, you can include multiple payment links on forms.
• To save time creating reporting, the out-of-the-box Payment revenue reporting dashboard is now available in the Dashboard Library for HubSpot Starter customers, in addition to the current availability for Enterprise and Pro levels. 

Add conditional logic to the ‘Create record’ form (beta)

Ensure your team is gathering complete, relevant and accurate data for reporting and insights by utilizing the new release to add conditional logic to properties with defined options inside the form that creates records in HubSpot. Once a selection is made on the first field, the following fields are customized for the previous option chosen.

Manage your marketing emails from mobile devices

Check the status of marketing emails from the convenience of your mobile device. This release lets you manage your marketing emails in the HubSpot mobile app. 

You can also delete and test emails from the app and see when the email was last updated and by whom, the email details, performance and other key metrics. 

Automatically associate calls with deals through HubSpot AI (beta)

Save your team time and gather more complete data by enrolling in the public beta for HubSpot AI that automatically associates calls with deals. Previously, associating calls with deals was a manual process, which meant many calls were not attached, and the relevant information was difficult for your reps to find and hard for you to report on.

Forms reporting moved to the Forms Analyze tab

You can now find the forms reporting more easily by clicking on the new Analyze tab in the Forms tool. Previously, form analytics were challenging to find within the Reports menu in the Analytics tools. 

Saved views for website pages and blog posts

If you view a specific website page or blog post regularly, you can save time using the new Saved Views. Similar to the Saved Views in HubSpot’s other tools, the views can be shared to enable other HubSpot users to check these same pages or posts quickly.

The post HubSpot’s April 2023 releases: The manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

Understood today as campaign and messaging management tech, outbound marketing represents a holdout against the broader evolutionary trend. Yet, vendors are not immune to structural changes taking place in martech — and this part of your stack may well become the least recognizable by the end of this decade.

Outbound marketing technology today

Marketers have always loved outbound marketing: It offers proactive messaging that promises immediacy, actionability, measurement and flow that wasn’t available via traditional advertising. The old means of direct mail and telemarketing gave way in the digital era to email marketing. Thus, it’s no accident that email lies at the center of most major outbound marketing platforms today. 

Almost immediately, email marketing platforms built campaign-creation palettes so that you could send sequenced emails, including branching based on customers’ reactions. Over the past decade, these campaign subsystems enabled marketers to trigger messages in other channels, like SMS, in-app or outbound telephony and even on-demand print mailers. This allowed vendors to boast of their “omnichannel” capabilities, but really they coordinate just multichannel outbound messaging.

Typical platforms today divide into two camps: 

• Mass-market B2C email services providers (ESPs).
• B2B and high-end / high-touch B2C marketing automation platforms (MAPs).

Some MAPs further evolved additional capabilities, including potentially account-based marketing, inbound personalization, CRM integration and more robust reporting. In short, they have become a mini martech stack-in-a-box, especially for mid-sized B2B or considered-purchase B2C firms where a salesperson enters the mix.

This world is changing, though, especially at the enterprise tier.

The great decoupling

Beginning in the late 2010s, a new martech architectural pattern emerged that decoupled shared, foundational enterprise services from specific customer engagement channels. It began with customer data platforms (CDPs), which unify customer data in a single enterprise repository, sparing customer-facing systems from managing complex data going forward. 

We call this new pattern “legless,” and the overall approach is broadening beyond data to include enterprise content and personalization services. What’s driving the transition to legless architecture? 

As we emerge from the pandemic, there’s a new grammar to customer experience where the person on the other side of the screen becomes the subject of the interaction and no longer the object.

The most important change for this discussion is that heavyweight, service-rich outbound marketing platforms are increasingly anachronistic in a world where enterprises want key services to operate omnichannel. Let’s examine from the perspective of a decoupled, composable, “legless” stack. 

Decoupling data, content and decisioning

Decoupling data management from campaign management is a big win for enterprises. They no longer have to use their ESPs as quasi-CDPs (a role for which they are very poorly suited) and can instead focus on campaign optimization. This means operational change as more segments and individual message triggers get set at an enterprise level. On the other hand, this is the only way to scale. 

The advent of CDP adoption in large B2B enterprises puts great pressure on legacy MAPs, which traditionally relied (albeit reluctantly) on Salesforce or other CRM platforms for the single source of truth about customer data. It’s harder for them to integrate with CDPs. More generally, as stacks decompose, the need for an omnibus martech platform also erodes. I predict the demise of legacy, higher-end MAPs by the late-middle 2020s, if not sooner.

More and more enterprises are also decoupling content management from outbound marketing platforms. Here again, most ESPs and MAPs truly stink at content management. But more importantly, they tend to fare poorly at component block management — a critical precondition for more personalized messaging that all of you want to do. 

To be sure, not every DAM or CMS will integrate neatly with an outbound marketing platform. But we have seen proper omnichannel content platforms (OCPs) excel at this.

Finally, some enterprises are beginning to decouple decisioning (e.g., enterprise campaigns) from messaging platforms. This has the potential to totally disrupt the market because simple message-sending is now a commodity.

This trend started in the past decade as many enterprises decoupled transactional messaging from their outbound campaign platforms — simplifying their architectures and saving a ton of money along the way. 

Today, we see enterprise efforts towards more omnichannel orchestration logic (for example, things like “next best action” decisioning) as the hub that drives more customer interaction, including campaigns. Finally, the sometimes intense need to better integrate media ad spend with campaigns on owned channels is compelling a new look at what systems generate which messages.

A new model

This last trend is potentially the most profound. Some of our far-thinking clients already manage journeys and campaigns at a lower level in their stack. As for messaging, they deploy very cheap, highly-performant programmatic (API-based) senders for delivery and metrics gathering. The firms doing this now tend to be more born-digital enterprises, but it will become mainstream in a few years. 

There are many challenges to this legless approach. But automation and scalability require it. Enterprises will generate fewer ad-hoc campaigns, with more always-on listening and better response.

Most firms will want to govern and execute AI-fueled messages at an enterprise level rather than at the edge. You’re likely to see ever-more centralized marketing ops yielding improved customer experiences. With lower volumes of more targeted messaging, you’ll achieve better outbound and inbound engagement. 

It will take some time, but you can start heading there. And along the way, you may want to reconsider your choice of outbound marketing platform. 

The post The future of outbound marketing in an omnichannel stack appeared first on MarTech.

Our client portfolio is heavy in ecommerce, hospitality and food and beverage, which are particularly ripe verticals for email automation. 

This article breaks down six email automations that should (but often don’t) drive substantial incremental growth, including:

• Post-purchase or post-shipment 
• Welcome or account creation
• Birthday or anniversary 
• Abandon cart 
• Browse abandonment 
• Re-engagement / “We miss you”

You’ll learn the potential business impact and benefits of each automation type. We’ll also look at misconceptions that keep marketers from putting these into play — and tech options to enable them.

Must-have email automations in focus

1. Post-purchase and post-shipment emails

A purchase from an ecommerce site is an opportunity to engage with that user on their new product. This could be shipment details/status, upsells, customer service information or content on the brand and community the customer just joined. 

Especially for first-time purchasers, this journey can give the user a good experience and build a foundation for repeat purchases. The business impact of this automation is straightforward: increased revenue through customer LTV.

2. Welcome or account creation emails

Sending welcome emails is an opportunity to set the tone with new subscribers. We love to put this in place for CPG brands.

Tailor the experience and communication to fit the channel and content that draws new subscribers. Approach this series as an opportunity to set the tone on the frequency and type of communication users should expect.

We’ve mixed and matched promotion-heavy messaging with messaging that builds brand connection and equity. Both are content themes to test with your users. The business impact of this automation is more upper-funnel and nurture-focused. Metrics affected include:

• Time to purchase.
• Purchase frequency.
• Brand affinity.

3. Birthday or anniversary emails

Collecting birthday details at sign-up opens fun options to show appreciation for your users. Birthday emails offering small freebies, exclusive discounts or offers and ideas for using a brand’s products to help with a celebration are all effective ways for brands to build connections with their users. 

The same is true for celebrating anniversaries of when users joined brand communities. Using automations to increase personal connections may sound unintuitive, but it’s a win for brands. Business benefits here are brand equity, brand awareness and incremental direct-response revenue.

Dig deeper: What is marketing automation and how can it help B2B marketers?

4. Abandon cart emails

This journey is an absolute must-do for ecommerce brands. If users make it far enough in their web experience to put a product in their cart, they likely just need a small nudge or reminder to complete their purchase. 

Abandon cart emails are a huge revenue driver. One of our most successful abandoned cart journeys is with an ecommerce client who started with 1-2 emails in the series. Many iterations and testing tactics later, the difference is absurd: 88% increase in total conversions and 150% increase in average total revenue compared with the basic abandoned-cart series.

Here’s what a built-out abandon-cart series might look like:

That might look like a lot of set-up work, but with an effective approach, you’ll get a huge return for your effort.

5. Browse abandonment 

This is generally one step in the purchase journey before cart abandonment. Suppose a user is browsing your website and has been interested in a specific product or product category, but the product hasn’t made it to their cart yet. In that case, this is the time to sell them on that product and double down on that product’s use cases and benefits to get them over the finish line.

Though we don’t see the direct response levels of abandon-cart emails here, this step is a definite source of increased revenue.

6. Re-engagement / ‘We miss you’

Use cases for this audience segment sometimes come down to philosophical differences. Many enterprise-level businesses have a hard time letting go of unengaged subscribers because they believe that the more people they send to, regardless of engagement, the more traction they will get. 

In the long run, without further nuance in engagement strategies, this isn’t generally true. Moreover, continuing to treat these users as if they were fully engaged can be detrimental to your sender reputation, unsubscribe rate and overall engagement rate. 

Instead, I recommend understanding the level of engagement across your whole audience (high, medium and low). If someone falls into the low category, move them into a re-engagement workflow that sends less frequently and has content tailored to win them back. The goal is to nurture these users back into the funnel of a high- or medium-level subscriber.

If your leadership sets KPIs and goals based on new subscriber and total subscriber volume without regard for best email practices, push back and argue for putting unengaged users on their own path. 

The metric to watch here is the conversion of little-engaged users into medium or high segments of engagement.

What will enable marketers to use these automations?

I’m always surprised when the above series aren’t in place, which happens too often. So what’s holding brands back? In short, data and tech capabilities and the idea that the potential payoff isn’t worth the effort.

One of the common denominators for brands under-utilizing these automations is a poor data set-up in their ESP (email service provider). Sometimes: 

• They have several fields mapped to the same data type.
• They are not collecting the right data at al.
• Their data mapping is all over the place. 

We’ve taken on a lot of data hygiene projects as a preliminary step for effective email automation. If brands can’t do this in-house, there are plenty of partners out there to help.

Another common scenario is a lack of integration between a brand’s site and ESP. This requires IT resources, but the ROI from simply setting up a cart-abandonment series will prove positive quickly. 

Of the above automations, three require minimal API work. The all-important welcome series is straightforward to set up via API. The birthday and re-engagement series can be run directly from your ESP, with no API required beyond triggering new records from your website into the ESP.

Martech stack recommendations

All the opportunities described above come down to having a good ESP. As much as I love Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo is the option I’d recommend if you have limited internal IT resources. 

Beyond featuring a great integration with Shopify, it has many out-of-the-box options marketers can simply turn on and start testing. (That said, if you have a lot of resources and data and don’t use Shopify, Salesforce and Emarsys are each likely a better fit because of the sheer scope of functionality.)

Getting started

While fully developed sequences and growth to match are the goal for each of these automations, you’ll never get to step 10 if you don’t take step one. If this means taking a hard look at your data hygiene and making sure you’ve got the basic functionality of your ESP working to start, that’s time extremely well spent. 

Get those in line and automate an email or two at each of the six stages above, and your email game will be ahead of many big-name brands. 

The post 6 must-have, underused email marketing automations appeared first on MarTech.

Here are the latest HubSpot updates relevant for managers: 

• AI content assistant (Beta)
• ChatSpot: combining ChatGPT and HubSpot CRM (Alpha)
• Associate “Pop-up CTAs” with campaigns (Beta)
• Use event integration data in Customer Journeys reporting
• Filters for date properties on object index pages
• Create Multiple Knowledge Bases (Beta)
• Drag-and-drop blog post editing modules 
• Create random splits in lists (Beta)
• Make files expire in the file manager
• Use business days in task due date workflows (Beta)
• User records (Beta)
• Property validations for more properties

Accelerate content creation and complete simple tasks faster with baked-in generative AI

Doing more with less seems to be the mantra for 2023. Likely, you are now asked to create more content, run more campaigns and do more reporting with a smaller team than last year. 

HubSpot’s new AI content assistant (beta) can help your team quickly create ideas, outlines and drafts for blogs, landing pages, emails and other content without leaving HubSpot or learning a new tool. 

Other tasks — status updates, drafting follow-up emails, finding and creating reports — can be accomplished using prompts in HubSpot’s ChatSpot tool, which combines ChatGPT and your HubSpot portal’s data and tools. ChatSpot is in alpha and will become more useful over time as it learns from the early adopters and new features are released based on user feedback.

Join the waitlist for both products here.

Pop-ups now included and tracked in Campaign Tools

Using pop-ups to direct users to HubSpot website pages or external pages is an effective way to direct them to landing pages, meeting links and more using banners or popups containing pop-up CTAs (beta). 

You can now see these new CTAs inside the campaigns tool as “CTAs (Beta).” The original CTAs are labeled “Calls-to-action” in the Campaigns tool and “CTAs (Legacy)” during creation. 

Use Event data integrations to create more accurate Customer Journeys 

If events are part of your marketing strategy, you can create a broader and more accurate view of all the customer touchpoints by adding event integration data into the Customer Journey Analytics we reported in November. These reports are now out of beta.

Segment records ‘more/less than [x] days ago’ in object index record pages

View and save more accurate segments of your records on the main object index records page using the new filter for “is more/less than [x] days ago.”

For example, create a filter for contact records created in the last seven days and save that view to easily revisit it without inputting a different date range each time.  

Create different Knowledge Bases to better serve different audiences

Segment your knowledge base content more easily and securely using the new feature to create multiple Knowledge Bases for documentation. Previously, partitioning content in your knowledge base for internal users, customers and the public required using lists and assigning permissions at the article level. That process was difficult to maintain and often resulted in emails sent to contacts by mistake. 

Now you can create up to five separate knowledge bases for different kinds of users and other brands or products, making the search function more accurate and less overwhelming for each audience.

Enable faster blog customizations using drag-and-drop editing modules 

Avoid unsightly off-brand hacks and time-consuming developer requests by using the new release to drag and drop modules into your blog posts’ rich text areas while editing posts.

In the theme of doing more with less, this feature enables your creative team to publish more blog posts without custom development time.

Create random splits in Lists for A/B testing

Last month, the release of random samples in Lists helped eliminate manual spreadsheet exports and imports when segmenting lists for content testing.

This month’s beta release to create random splits in Lists further increases the quick in-HubSpot segmentation work for A/B testing and other uses without needing complicated math equations. 

Inspire action, increase security and keep your portal clean using expiration dates for files

If you want to inspire customers or leads to take action by viewing or downloading a file from the file manager in a certain timeframe while keeping your database clear of old or non-relevant files, use the new expiration dates in the file manager to automatically send files to the trash on a certain date and time.

Note that these are not the Sales tool Documents, where deleting documents would also delete the analytics of who viewed the files, for how long, etc.

Auto-generate more accurate tasks in workflows using task due dates counting business days 

Create more accurate and useful tasks automatically using workflows, with the new beta feature that only counts business days when setting task due dates and reminder dates.

Previously, tasks may have been due on a weekend, which required manual updates or incorrectly overdue tasks shown in your reporting. This update may also help with adoption and attention to tasks, ensuring your teams respond quickly to critical work such as lead follow-up.

View and change user records more easily in User Records

Admins can ensure your team has the correct first and last names, permissions and other settings in one centralized place in the new User Records (beta), which allow admins to edit settings on behalf of the users.

Ideally, in future releases, this user record will expand to be a full object and eliminate tedious workarounds such as making contact records for every employee to enroll them in workflows for internal communications, streamlining employee onboarding and offboarding.

Reduce manual data cleanup using expanded property validation

If you want your team to spend less time on manual data cleanup and more time on strategic projects that achieve your department goals, property validation now includes custom text, number and date picker properties to help ensure the necessary data is entered correctly the first time. This release promotes higher-quality data for more accurate reporting and decisions.

The post HubSpot’s March 2023 releases: The manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

Marketing automation platforms form the backbone of marketing operations, increasingly serving as sophisticated marketing orchestration platforms. A range of platforms is available to marketers depending on their firm’s size, budget and level of digital marketing sophistication.

The more basic functions of marketing automation have become somewhat commoditized, so platform vendors mostly look to differentiate their platforms based on the ability to scale, as well as usability, ease of implementation and customer experience.

MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation platforms and the considerations involved in implementing this software in your business.

This 44-page report includes profiles of 10 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. If you are valuating marketing automation software platforms, you need to read this report. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download your copy.

The post Compare 10 top marketing automation platforms appeared first on MarTech.

Below, we will introduce some of the basic concepts around marketing automation and ways you can get the most out of it. 

Table of contents

• What is marketing automation and why is it important?
• Key benefits of marketing automation 
• How marketing automation works
• Marketing automation best practices
• Popular marketing automation vendors
• Resources for learning more

What is marketing automation and why is it important?

Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) help automate activities across various marketing channels. The goal is to put repetitive tasks such as sending emails, posting on social media pages and managing data on autopilot. 

Marketing departments use marketing automation to ensure their campaigns generate desired outcomes rapidly and efficiently. Employees can focus on thinking through higher-level problems when automation is working correctly. It can take some time to set up initially, but the results can significantly impact your business once it is up and running.

Marketing automation is often associated with email marketing. After all, marketing automation began with IBM’s Unica email platform in the early 1990s. 

It’s useful to have an automated system for sending emails at scale to selected audiences or triggering emails in response to users’ certain actions (cart abandonment, for example). But using marketing automation only for emails can result in a disjointed customer experience. Thus, marketers must also consider its use across other channels too.

Key benefits of marketing automation

In addition to efficiency, marketing automation has several key benefits for marketing organizations:

Savings in time, energy and money

Marketing automation is responsible for increasing productivity among sales by 14.5% and reducing overhead in marketing initiatives by 12.2%. Intuitive marketing automation tools can give marketers their time back to invest in other initiatives and activities that boost a company’s bottom line in other ways.

Better targeting of audiences

A marketing automation platform that works for you will allow you to target your audience and monitor behaviors on your campaigns. Tracking real-time data and monitoring engagement allows you to capitalize on personalized communication across multiple channels. Consistent and relevant communication to your target audience results in major ROI and a boost in customer loyalty. 

Embed a seamless omnichannel experience

Remember, marketing automation takes over all the repetitive tasks when done correctly. When this happens, you can craft a seamless and personalized customer experience. Targeted emails, pre-filled forms based on user data and anticipating customer behaviors help to ensure your customers receive the same service each time.

How does marketing automation work? 

Marketing automation tools and platforms may have specific nuances to how they function, but at a high level, they automate workflows. They help us remove all the individualized sticky notes on our desks with reminders and put those reminders into a cadence that automatically gets done with minimal human involvement. 

At a basic level, marketing automation campaigns will send content to a list of contacts based on a specified behavior or predetermined criteria to get them to take a certain action. 

For example, let’s say you’re doing your last webinar before the end of the year, and you want to get some new leads into the pipeline to start January off strong. What would you typically do with marketing automation doing its part?

• You would send an invitation email to all the new leads to attend the stated webinar at a specific time. 
• You might include an end-of-year incentive to get them to participate and perhaps invite their peers.
• Those leads automatically fill out a form that will funnel them into two lists based on a “Yes” that they will attend or a “No” that they cannot attend.
• The people on the “Yes” list will start receiving an email or text nurture cadence that will keep your upcoming webinar top of mind in their inboxes and on their phones. 
• After attending the webinar, those attendees will be shipped over to the sales team to have a sales conversation about your product or service. 

As you can see, you did nothing except craft the content and inject it into the automation tool. The tool did the rest of the work until the sales call, for which people generally prefer speaking with people.   

Marketing automation best practices 

There are plenty of marketing automation tools available. The first rule of thumb is to do your research and see which one would be best for your business and which will help you reach the goals you’re trying to achieve the best. Here are a few other best practices to follow. 

Understand the journey of your buyers

For a marketing automation tool to benefit you, you must understand the journey of your target audience. 

• What do they really want? 
• What channels are they using? 
• What questions are they asking? 

If you know this information, you will find it easy to craft a workflow that works.

Ensure your content is relevant, engaging and consistent

Your audience is likely already bombarded by endless content, with most of it not being so good. How do you intend to cut through the noise? Test your content before feeding it to the automation tool. 

You want to produce what people actually want, not what you think they want. Once you have found what your audience finds relevant and engaging, deliver it to them consistently.

Avoid lengthy processes

Delight your customers but don’t bog them down with lengthy forms and overbearing popups. In each piece of content, focus on one asset, one opportunity and one call to action. The “keep it simple” rule of thumb applies here. 

Popular marketing automation vendors

Marketing automation software is very widely used by marketing automations. There are many solutions on the market.

Some specialize in B2B marketing, and as noted above, there are variations in the capabilities offered by each platform. Among the best-known and most popular are:

• Acoustic
• ActiveCampaign
• Adobe Experience Cloud
• Adobe Marketo
• HubSpot
• Mautik
• Oracle Marketing Cloud
• Salesforce Pardot

Dig deeper

A good marketing automation system keeps marketing to your target audience simple and consistent while being less time-consuming and cost-effective.  

For best results, follow the key points in this article and allow marketing automation to improve communication with your target audience. 

Here’s some further reading: 

• Find out if your organization needs a marketing automation platform to personalize the buyer experience. 
• Need help choosing a marketing automation platform? Here are 16 options that you can choose from. 
• When on a demo call with a marketing automation vendor, here are 15 questions you should ask before choosing one vendor over another. 
• The vendor marketplace is vast; here are several things you should expect from a B2B marketing automation platform. 

The post Why we care about marketing automation appeared first on MarTech.

There were quite a few enhancements to the landing page UX — with the biggest callout being the removal of the toggle switch (in other words, the Classic Experience will no longer be available). 

Leverage inferred attributes in operational programs

Many businesses rely on inferred attributes to identify when GDPR or CCPA compliance is required. Inferred attributes allow you to remove fields on forms and can reduce friction, yet there are downsides. 

Inferred attributes aren’t able to accurately capture VPN data. Some legal teams may prefer keeping these fields on forms to avoid any compliance issues.

Why we care: Even if the best practice for data governance policies is to request the country of new people acquired, plenty of companies still rely on inferred data to trigger processes (lead assignment, consent management, etc.). If your company uses that data for any operational program, inbound leads from Dynamic Chat would be included in the operational programs.

Roles and permissions enhance security and control

Roles and permissions were added to Dynamic Chat, enabling admins to limit functionality based on selected user types. 

It sounds trivial, but controlling your team’s roles and permissions is undervalued. Many organizations experience issues resulting from team members having too much or too little access. 

Why we care: Security starts with providing the right access to the right people. Permissions can often be neglected, so this is a great step toward security and control. Allowing admins to assign roles provides a layer of security while still enabling your team to view past chats and data records.

Unlock the ROI of Dynamic Chat through enhanced reporting

Like Email or Engagement Programs, users can select a “Dynamic Chat” program that allows them to track the success and performance of their Dynamic Chat dialogue.

Reporting on the success of Dynamic Chat, in addition to that of other marketing programs, gives users a more comprehensive view of their marketing activities. In addition, users will be able to better gauge the ROI of Dynamic Chat to their business.

Nine additional languages are now supported 

Dynamic Chat users can choose from nine additional languages to display static chat content: French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. 

Marketo sunsetting Classic Experience on landing pages 

Classic Experience on landing pages is being sunset. The new experience offers increased functionality without toggling between the two views, offering a more seamless and integrated experience. 

Why we care: The new UX provides enhanced details for individual assets, particularly the versioning of the asset. This provides a clear ability to view the current live and approved assets while working on an update in a draft version. Users will also have the ability to see in one view key information and settings about each version of the asset (approved vs. draft). 

In addition, the “Used By” tab was enhanced this month. It now lists all assets using a particular landing page template or form template. 

Asset lists in Marketo instances that use landing page templates and global forms for all assets can be long and tedious. The ability to sort assets quickly can speed up an audit or troubleshooting process.

View the complete set of March 2023 Marketo Release Notes here.

This article is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto + MERGE, a marketing operations consultancy.

The post Marketo’s March releases: A manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

There are ways to use additional solutions, notably artificial intelligence and journey orchestration, to take your existing marketing automation approaches to the next level. 

Challenges with legacy marketing automation

Marketers have achieved amazing results with marketing automation in the past. But customers’ shifting expectations and behaviors are pushing traditional approaches to their limits. Brands that rely on marketing automation alone find engaging with active customers on multiple channels difficult. 

Personalization in most marketing automation platforms (MAPs) is limited to simple rules-based instructions (“if this, then that”). For example, if a customer abandons their shopping cart, send them a reminder email. Or, if a customer signed up for an email list, send them a welcome message. 

This approach doesn’t allow for complex variations based on the segment a customer might be in, their propensity to buy, their past individual behavior, or other factors. While some MAPs can technically achieve this, building all rule sets can make ongoing management nearly impossible and fraught with errors based on cascading dependencies. 

As customers demand more dynamic experiences, your marketing automation approach must be augmented. This is where customer journey orchestration and artificial intelligence (AI) come in. 

How journey orchestration augments marketing automation

Traditional marketing automation can still work well in providing timely and relevant communications when dealing with a single response channel such as email. But your customers don’t rely on a single channel to interact. Instead, they are channel-switching and expect brands to keep up. 

Additionally, most marketing automation workflows are generally simple and rarely incorporate complex branching, particularly across multiple channels. 

This is where customer journey orchestration (CJO) can save the day. CJO was built for multi-channel communication. Thus, emails, SMS messages, mobile app push notifications, website landing pages and social advertising can be hyper-targeted.

Through branching, a series of actions can result in vast differences for one customer versus another, even if they are enrolled in the same journey. 

This way, CJO boosts your marketing automation, aligning with your customers’ growing expectations about receiving content, offers and experiences when, where and how they want them. 

Dig deeper: What is customer journey orchestration and how does it work?

The impact of AI on marketing automation

Since most marketing automation relies on a simpler, rules-based approach, AI plays a key role in augmenting these decisions in coordination with or separate from customer journey orchestration. 

Below are some ways AI can take your marketing efforts beyond your current marketing automation methods. 

Dynamic segmentation

Finding patterns in vast amounts of structured and unstructured data is cumbersome for humans. AI, on the other hand, can do this well. AI-based machine learning algorithms help you glean audience insights, turning formerly static audience segments into more dynamic ones.

These dynamic segments can group customers based on buying patterns or behavior that enable personalized content, offers and experiences to reach the right person at the right time on the right channel. That’s marketing gold. 

Propensity calculation and predictive analytics 

Adding AI capabilities can significantly enhance your performance if your MAP uses fairly simple if/then logic to send messages and take action. You can use propensity scoring and predictive analytics to route the next best action or offer to an individual. 

Personalized content generation 

The promise of generative AI tools is that content, including text and imagery, can be tailored on a one-to-one basis for the individual rather than everyone in a large audience segment receiving the same thing.

While there are hurdles to be overcome in this area, truly personalized content and images can lead to greater relevance, loyalty and lifetime value.

Dig deeper: How AI can help your marketing right now

What needs to change to be successful 

To successfully augment marketing automation with customer journey orchestration and AI, marketers must remember these three impactful points. 

Personalized journeys

Ensure your approach is customer-centric. Consider the experience an individual may want versus a one-size-fits-all approach that lumps many customers into the same buckets.

While a segmented approach is better than sending the same message on the same channel to everyone, it still doesn’t individualize the timing, channel, content and offers nearly enough to meet rising consumer expectations. 

Integrations

Better integrations can have a positive impact when using journey orchestration and AI to augment your marketing automation. 

Platform integrations

To take advantage of a true multi-channel customer journey orchestration approach, you will need to integrate several platforms in ways they most likely have not been integrated. Fortunately, because this is a core functionality of CJO tools, this can be straightforward in most instances. But, as with any integration, there can always be unexpected hitches. 

A common way to start is to use an iterative approach that builds toward an omnichannel setup, one system and platform integration at a time. This makes it easier and quicker to implement the first integration, letting your teams learn more quickly to become more efficient and produce effective results as time progresses. 

Data integrations

Platform integrations will also require your data sources to be more unified. You must ensure you are:

• Reaching the right customer on their platform of choice.
• Informed by the relevant purchase and behavioral data across multiple internal systems and platforms.
• Augmented by other demographic or psychographic information that may be beneficial. 

As you may well know, integrating all these data sources can be daunting for even the most sophisticated organizations. 

Team integrations 

Just as platforms and data can be siloed, your marketing teams can often be just as disconnected. Your email marketing team needs to coordinate with your mobile app team and SMS team and so forth throughout the organization. 

Doing CJO well and using AI to the fullest means that teams work together from the initial campaign and content creation to the measurement and optimization of your collective efforts. 

Omnichannel approach 

Finally, it is time to evolve your customer experience approach toward omnichannel and customer-centric instead of reactive and marketing-driven. Customer journey orchestration was built to be multichannel, and AI applications thrive in processing structured and unstructured data sources.

Improving upon your marketing automation means keeping these approaches in mind as you find more effective ways to provide tailored customer experiences. 

Conclusion

Using customer journey orchestration and artificial intelligence-based approaches to augment your current marketing automation efforts can dramatically impact your ability to deliver valuable experiences for your customers and your brand. 

The post AI powered marketing automation: How to make it work for you appeared first on MarTech.

It’s time to prioritize a strategic and holistic view of your company’s martech stack and create a lean, efficient, results-driven marketing technology infrastructure.

Learn how a marketing technology optimization framework benefits marketing organizations, enhances the customer experience and drives real ROI. 

Marketing technology optimization: A paradigm shift

Marketing technology optimization (MTO) emphasizes:

• Evaluating current marketing technology tools and platforms.
• Identifying gaps or redundancies.
• Making data-driven decisions on eliminating existing or implementing new martech solutions. 

This approach helps align the martech stack with the company’s overall business, marketing and customer experience goals, creating a streamlined and efficient set of tools that drive real ROI.

Further, MTO integrates ongoing optimization with the maintenance of the martech stack, preventing unnecessary spending and fostering maximum utilization of the tools. By adopting MTO, marketers can avoid the pitfalls of an unwieldy and bloated martech stack and focus on driving results with lean and efficient tools and platforms.

Dig deeper: The secret to building a useful martech stack

MTO benefits for the C-suite: More than just marketing

Marketing technology optimization offers unique advantages for CMOs, COOs and CFOs in driving ROI and improving customer experience.

For CFOs, MTO enables more effective budget allocation towards marketing technology, ensuring higher ROI and optimizing company performance. For COOs, MTO can lead to cost savings, enhanced team collaboration and reduced resources required for maintenance and support.

In addition, MTO supports compliance with industry regulations and data privacy laws. It empowers CMOs to adopt a proactive approach to compliance rather than reacting to data breaches or regulatory violations after they occur.

Change management and organizational buy-in for MTO

Creating a culture of marketing technology optimization within an organization requires effective change management and buy-in from key stakeholders. Strategies to foster a culture of MTO and obtain organizational buy-in include:

Establish clear goals and objectives

Set well-defined objectives aligned with business, marketing and customer experience goals to foster a shared understanding of MTO’s purpose and value.

Communicate benefits consistently

Share MTO’s advantages with stakeholders to build momentum, engagement and commitment. Emphasize improved efficiency, ROI, customer experience and compliance.

Involve stakeholders in decision-making

Actively engage stakeholders in assessment, strategy development and implementation for a sense of ownership and support, leading to better decision-making.

Provide ongoing training and support

Equip team members with skills and knowledge to manage the martech stack effectively. Demonstrate commitment to MTO and continuous improvement through training investments.

Celebrate successes

Acknowledge and celebrate MTO achievements to reinforce their value, motivate team members and encourage ongoing innovation and improvement in marketing technology optimization.

Budgeting and resource allocation for MTO success

Allocating financial resources and personnel to support MTO initiatives is crucial to ensuring ongoing optimization and maintenance of the martech stack. Best practices for budgeting and resource allocation in MTO include:

• Align budget with overarching goals: Focus on the business, marketing and customer experience goals to direct financial resources towards impactful initiatives.
• Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO): Account for acquisition, implementation, training and maintenance costs for comprehensive budgeting and informed technology investment decisions.
• Allocate resources for continuous optimization: Dedicate resources to regular assessments, updates and refinements, ensuring up-to-date marketing technology and sustained ROI.
• Invest in training and development: Equip personnel with the necessary skills to maximize marketing technology investments and contribute to MTO initiatives’ success.
• Assign “owners” for each tool or platform: Enhance accountability and encourage ongoing optimization within the martech stack by designating responsible leaders.
• Establish cross-functional teams: Collaborate with members from marketing, IT, data analytics and other departments to optimize the martech stack, improve decision-making and boost organizational performance.
• Monitor and adjust budget/resource allocation: Use data-driven KPIs and metrics to make informed decisions, adapt investments and maintain a cutting-edge martech stack that delivers sustained success.

Measuring and reporting on MTO success

To measure the success of MTO initiatives and demonstrate ROI to stakeholders, C-level executives should track key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics aligned with the organization’s overall business, marketing and customer experience goals. 

Some key KPIs and metrics to track include martech stack efficiency, marketing campaign performance, integration and data quality, compliance and data security and customer experience.

Embracing marketing technology optimization

Adopting a framework like marketing technology optimization becomes increasingly important as businesses evolve and adapt to the ever-changing digital environment. By embracing MTO, organizations can foster a culture of continuous improvement, stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge in digital marketing. 

Focusing on efficiency, agility and alignment with organizational objectives can help marketers unlock the full potential of their martech stacks, maximizing return on investment and enhancing the customer experience.

Dig deeper: 3 steps to building an effective martech stack

The post Marketing technology optimization: The path to peak martech stack performance appeared first on MarTech.

The rapid adoption of generative AI has increased the excitement volume to 11 for martech professionals. AI-enabled enhancements to the core uses of marketing automation platforms — data management, campaign/lead management and workflows/integrations — are being introduced by Salesforce, HubSpot and other market leaders. They will alter the mix of tasks marketers tackle daily and impact planned improvements to customer experiences and satisfaction.

This quote sums up the scale of AI’s impact:  

“Next-gen marketers know that in order to deliver the personalization and experiences modern consumers expect, marketing must become smarter. It must become marketer + machine.”

– Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput, Marketing Artificial Intelligence

This statement could have applied to the mainstream adoption of marketing automation platforms (MAP) as the original natural language processing for martech. They experienced an inflection point — similar to the one we’re seeing with AI today — of their own 10 years ago. Widespread adoption of marketing automation set the stage for the exponential growth of martech applications, which increased to over 10,000 in 2022 — a 6,000% increase compared to 2011. 

Why it matters. New capabilities will emerge by infusing MAPs with AI, further expanding the influence of the foundation of most organizations’ martech stack: core MAP integrated with CRM. Therefore, martech leaders should invest in discovering use cases that can be modified to incorporate new AI capabilities. AI-powered, tried-and-true best practices will drive value in 2023 and beyond.

Here’s how AI will be applied to the three core marketing automation uses. Each of these three will be the focus of a deeper dive follow-up piece over the coming year. 

Data quality will be even more important when our data are used to train company-specific AI models. 

Underlying data about customers and prospects is table stakes for personalizing marketing. As the amount and variety of data captured increases, it will require re-focused efforts to adjust to more natural language standard values in drop-downs, form fields, etc., to describe customer engagements. AI will enable marketers to understand, process and analyze data more effectively.

Campaigns and lead management. AI will enable new campaign approaches within existing workflows. Generative AI will power these approaches by choosing between content AI integration prompts or asking an AI assistant to help “codify” business processes. 

Workflows and integrations. Previously assumed scope limitations for broader operations and orchestration will be tested. If generative AI can help coders correct code, it’s just a matter of time before it can help extend an open API beyond a native Integration.

Native platform integrations were the original natural language for field mappings and workflows between the CRMs and marketing automation platforms. Instead of asking an IT team to build a custom API, we could use natural language software interfaces to set them up. 

Although the overall AI trends are moving at an unprecedented pace, re-investing in these core MAP processes will prepare your organization to adapt to these new AI-infused capabilities quickly. 

Check back for part two of this series on the AI infusion into data quality.  

Can’t wait for more? Check out my presentation at the MarTech Conference next week, “New School, Old School: Navigating the Current Marketing Automation Landscape.”

The post AI marketing automation: How it works and why marketers should care appeared first on MarTech.