Marketing automation can be an invaluable tool for B2B and B2C businesses. A recent study by Communigator and Smart Insights has revealed just 2% of B2B marketers use marketing automation to its full potential. Simon Moss, the Marketing Director of Communigator discusses these findings.

Marketing automation can be an invaluable tool for B2B and B2C businesses. A recent study by Communigator and Smart Insights has revealed just 2% of B2B marketers use marketing automation to its full potential. Simon Moss, the Marketing Director of Communigator discusses these findings.

CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM (CDP) BUYERS’ GUIDE 2019

Welcome to the 2019 edition of CDP Buyers’ Guide. As customer data platforms are becoming increasingly necessary for enterprise marketers, it is also becoming more complex to choose the best fit CDP platform amongst the pool of new and old vendors.

Communigator, providers of marketing automation software, have conducted a survey to discover how the uses and attitudes of these tools have changed since 2016. Previously, 18% of businesses surveyed were not using marketing automation. The results in 2019 presented that 1 in 8 businesses are not using marketing automation.

Less than 5% have optimised all the features available to them, this figure has remained consistent since 2016 but there has been a dramatic drop with those who declared they optimised the majority of features, with over 30% previously having done so, this has now fallen to less than 15%.

When questioned which automated email marketing techniques are used, the most common tactic has remained the same between the two surveys. Sending an initial welcome email remains the most popular tool. 

Nurturing emails, based on content and browser history, appear to be the only form of email that has seen an increase.

Surprisingly, businesses are focusing less on inactive customers and seem to be focusing on those who still retain an interest in the business area.

Marketing automation offers a valuable option of targeting emails to reflect user activity. 29% of companies do not tailor their emails in relation to this. As a result, all respondents receive the same email which can result in missed opportunities with conversion.

Lack of knowledge or the process or the effectiveness of this method could be to blame for this shortfall. 

However, there was a significant jump from the previous 4% in 2016 to 18% in 2019 of those using nurturing emails based on lead scores.

Lead scoring remains a popular technique within marketing automation, the process of ‘scoring’ users based on their activity and targeting individuals based on these scores. This can be an exceedingly powerful technique as it can help businesses filter through users and their sincerity in the product or service on offer.

The survey showed the most popular form of this remains the same, scoring on links clicked within emails and content views on sites. Both of these are powerful tools; however, these scores can be tailored to determine even more concise data of the user.

This year, businesses were asked how effective artificial intelligence is for ROI (graph below). As this technology is still in its infancy, there same was not asked in the previous study.

This technology uses existing data to provide actionable insights on the user. The most effective is reflected as the use of personalised landing pages. This can be in the form of adapting home pages to echo previous visits.

As artificial intelligence progresses, we may be able to assess these components in greater detail in future studies.

So, why are businesses not using marketing automation to their full potential and why has there been a decline within the last three years?

We are aware of the effectiveness of these techniques and that these can be tailored to a high level of specifics for each user.

Results show the biggest barrier is lack of staff knowledge and current data needing to be integrated from outdating systems to comply with modern technology.

Lack of resources such as time, budget or staff to manage these systems are also a leading contributing factor. 

Requesting users to sign in via social media proves to be the lowest scorer on the ‘highly effective’ scale, this can be contributed to media platforms encrypting information and therefore rendering the information useless. 

Overall, many of these techniques can be redundant if we are unable to obtain targeted email addresses from users.

How are businesses persuading users to hand over their contact details? 

Sign-up messages on key pages are significantly the most popular option with 56% choosing this method. This is followed by 44% offering free content in exchange for contact details. 

Largely, the study brings to light the reason as to why only 2% of B2B marketers are using marketing automation to its full capacity. 

Lack of staff knowledge is a high contributor, along with resources. Many outdated systems may not be able to accommodate such technology.

Smart Insights conducted tests that showed lightboxes can improve leads significantly and yet this is one of the most unpopular tools. Therefore, it is imperative that those seeking marketing automation ensure staff are fully educated on the processes to be able to unlock this technology’s ability and establish the correct method to gain the most conversions.