A couple of weeks ago, a customer told me she had passed on our details to a previous colleague and good friend. This friend is the head of marketing at an organisation and is looking to understand how Marketing Automation can help them achieve their business goals.
It’s always a good expereince when a customer feels confident enough to pass on your details to a trusted friend, it speaks volumes about the work you’re doing with them that they’d pass on your details to someone else.
This past week, while at an event, I met with the referral and then the following day caught up for an hour to talk more about Marketing Automation.
Amongst the many things today’s Modern Marketer is expected to understand, the digital landscape is just one of them, arguabley a big one though. She shared with me how after two years she’d managed to drag her colleageus kicking and screaming into the 21st century, as it related to digtial which is a major channel for them.
The cultural change required and the concept of members of the marketing team being “agents of change” was new, which caused some grief for the team along the way. A number of members of the team chose to move on, allowing my contact to bring in some “fresh blood” and build a fresh approach.
Cultural Change came first, now it’s time for modern platforms
This past week I met with another client, they’ve been using Oracle Marketing Cloud Eloqua for almost two years. They called the meeting which was titled “Persona Based Segmentation”. I was excited and curious to see where this conversation would go, I had a good idea, but wanted to hear it from them.
Awseome! They had reached a point now where they’d graduated from a “list” based mentality to one of understanding “Digital Body Language™” and how it could help them be far more targeted in their communications.
Based on some persona work they’d done about 12 months ago, a member of the team had gone through 80,000+ contacts line by line in excel and using job titles, then associated each contact to one of their personas. Brilliant. Heavy lifting and time consuming, but the impact this has made to their ability to segment, is huge.
Eloqua allows them to create a segment using what’s called a “quicklist”, which searches using a range of variables based on the “Job Title” free text field on the Eloqua contact. However, persona based segmentation is much more powerful and faster. Any free text field is the enemy of any Modern Marketer.
Bringing together the right assets to engage your audience
In the two examples above, we have one organisation commencing their journey on the road to Modern Marketing and one who is well on their way to Modern Marketing.
In my interactions with these prospects and customers, there’s one driving objective – to improve and create a unique Customer Experience #CX.
The prospect shared with me how she’d implemented a simple thank you email to those who’d renewed their insurance policy. Some of her colleagues had aksed why she did this, her response was “my mother always taught me to say thank you”. I laughed, such a simple objective and absolutley the right thing to do.
Simple changes and a simple campaign can often have the greatest impact.
I’m looking forward to meeting again with this prospect and furthering the discussion with my long standing client to see how their new persona based segmentation can help them engage with prospects and customers in a richer and more meaningful way.
