What is ‘Automation’ and how It helps your Marketing Campaigns?

What is Automation?

I believe every Marketing software claim about automation but only a few know about it.

Similarly, most of the people talk about it and only few know about it.

If you Google “What is Marketing Automation” you will find this fancy definition on Wikipedia

“Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.”

Ok, so the above definition does not make sense to you, so here I will simplify everything for you.

Let us first understand the term Automation, it’s like automatic, something which do not require human interaction to run every time, it means you do not have to worry about operation of a particular task.

Well, lets see how this helps in Marketing Campaigns.

Before getting into the details, check these 2 basics first.

Not everything needs to be automated
Only repetitive tasks are supposed to be automated
Now when you are clear with your thoughts, lets jump on your needs.

At first try to analyze the behavior of your marketing campaign

How frequently the task is getting repeated?
Is the behavior same?
Is it using the same amount of efforts every time?
What is the desired outcome?
Once you analyze your campaign, try to think about the ways where you can first optimize your campaign

Let me quickly explain that why we need optimization before automation.

Optimization means removing unnecessary resources/efforts within a campaign, sometimes we build a strategy/query which we realize at later stage that we don’t need it.

Remove unnecessary things from your campaign it will indeed boost the speed of your campaign and save the cost.

Now when you an optimized campaign, try to think about the automation logic.

Sometimes you don’t need an extra technology but just the logic.

Let me give you an example

Let’s say you have a campaign where you want to target users whose contract is expiring after 3 months and this task needs to be repeated everyday as the number of users may change every day.

Now this sounds simple, just follow these steps.

1. Create a Campaign where target users are according to contract end date equal to current date + 3 months.
2. Exclude whatever is unnecessary and people who do not prefer your communication.
3. Once the Campaign is done, test the campaign
4. If you see the desired results, observe the same on next day and if you get the desired result on the next day as well, now it’s time to automate the campaign
5. This is a very simple case of automation, what you need to Add a Scheduler in front of the campaign which runs everyday at the desired time.
6. Try to observer this simple automation for a couple of days and if everything is correct, you are all set.

The above case was a very simple case of automation where we just need to think about the basic logic of scheduler and most of the campaign software has the basic scheduler present, so you do not have to write any JavaScript or any other code.

Always try to think about the logic and the need of automation, it is not difficult, soon I will show you how to automate the complex campaigns with more Technical stuff.

Jitendra Khatwani
Head of Technical Consultant
Montivory Co.,Ltd.