Smart automation

Marketing automation is something all big brands rightly see as a must have in today’s joined up marketing landscape. Although having it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have achieved a smart and relevant communication strategy.

Background

Seagate and LaCie are two of the biggest brands in the digital storage space. Both use Eloqua to help manage and implement their marketing automation, housing massive data sets, automation programs and web pages which comprise their largely digital comms strategy.

Requirement

The brands both knew who their audience was and felt that they had a clear picture of their data set. But on closer inspection, with multiple regional offices and people running campaigns inside their platform, this data set wasn’t as clean as first thought. Likewise, with multiple activities going on globally, across both brands, it was increasingly difficult to report on, and gain insight across all activity to help improve relevance, and so, engagement. We were tasked with analysing how we could improve engagement across all fronts, for both brands.

Activity

Having assisted both brands with their marketing activity for many years, we used this position to gain an insight into the overall data set within their automation platform, Eloqua. Thorough research of the activity was the first step. We used the quarterly business report to then give our thoughts to the global team on how to increase relevance and engagement.

We split our activity into Acquisition and Retention. Working with the data team, we ensured that all future ATL (above the line) and BTL (below the line) activity fed into Eloqua. We worked with the data team to ensure we were consistent across the board in how we gathered data, into what sets, etc, so helping clean the data set as we went.

Smart automation 3

We set up various onboarding and nurture tracks, and using multiple smart automation programs in Eloqua, we ensured all newly acquired targets were instantly fed into an engaging track, and as we learnt their preferences along the way, they were fed into more niche tracks of content that fed the targets topics with increased relevancy. This helped the new additions to the data keep a higher level of engagement.

For those already within the data set, we looked at all existing methods of communication and applied the same top level approach. We set up new communications to enrich the data, offering higher value content in return for individual insight to help future activity to increase relevance. We then use this new insight to help personalise the content on a further basis, helping increase the feeling of that one-to-one conversation with the targets.

Smart automation 2

Results

We have seen buy-in from the clients and their data teams are all working hard to look at how we segment and enrich data. We have been tasked with building out very segmented acquisition and retention tracks for both brands, from huge acquisition campaigns, to webinars – now we learn from all activity and so improve on the next.

This activity has resulted in a more joined up and automated ecosystem for the brands, and a more rewarding and engaging experience for the audience. Having learned what they want, and offering it, we are seeing engagement levels increase across the board, and this insight is allowing all acquisition activity to perform better. Thus increasing the brands’ return on investment.

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