This poses a serious challenge for us in the marketing space. And it’s being realized across the entire industry.

“A Q1 ‘17 survey by CMO Council and Redpoint Global revealed only 3% of respondents felt all of their automation, engagement and deployment tools were fully connected, with data, metrics and insights traveling freely between different technologies.” (Source)

It’s an alarming statistic, but not surprising. With so many solutions, there is an incredible opportunity to be more thoughtful in our approach to the design, organization, and management of our marketing stack. Let’s look at a few realities that will move us from not-so-managed to managed-magic.

Open Strategy: What does your marketing technology strategy look like? Is it focused on doing whatever is necessary to delight the customer? Or is it limited by what your technology allows it to do? If your strategy is not open to allow you to take unique and innovative approaches to connecting with your customer, then you should reconsider your approach.

Narrow Focus: With over 5,000 technology solutions it can feel like a daunting task to take an open strategy then narrow your focus. But this focus is not where you think it might be. The focus should be on your customers and associates. Clearly defining your marketing strategy with an open architecture, will allow your teams to take ownership of their place in the customer journey. This enables them to be hyper-focused on improving their processes and workflows and bringing value at each stage.

Manage Many: Regardless of the size of your business, effectively managing multiple technologies can warrant additional time and/or resources. With literally thousands of technologies to help organizations execute on their marketing strategy, it will require proper management to effectively deliver your brand message and promise.

Every business is at a different stage of marketing stack development. Some have had solutions for years and are currently reviewing how each improves their customer journey. Others are flexible enough to make changes to their stack to prepare it for the future of open marketing. Organizations that are successful will be able to address each of these realities in a way that meets the needs of the business and creates a meaningful brand experience.

Recently, Mautic announced the addition of Maestro. It offers powerful reporting capabilities, gives users more visibility into the success of initiatives across their entire business in a single dashboard. Companies can freely clone campaigns from other internal teams, and agencies can see a rolled-up view of campaign performance across all their clients. Regardless of your business, a holistic view of this data makes all teams and marketing initiatives more effective.

Working with both self-hosted and Mautic Cloud accounts, Maestro enables all Mautic users to clone campaigns across all their Mautic accounts. It also provides a single, unified view of all your campaign metrics, giving users the ability to understand marketing’s full impact on the business.

To get more information on Maestro and to learn how it can help you manage all your Mautic Marketing Automation accounts, click here!

Within the amount of time I’ve been in the Mautic community, I have often seen many questions about best practice for tags; there is no best practice set in stone, you find what works for you in your data structure and test through trial and error if the end-point is functional in the way you require.

For example, a project I currently work on deals with apprenticeships and distance learning courses. When I started this project they segmented their mailing list in 2 different ways:

The first being;

• Professional
• Funded/Apprenticeship
• Employers

And the second;

• Accounting
• Leadership & Management
• Funded/Apprenticeships
• Employers

I setup Mautic and altered the segment structure to look like this;

• Professional (Professional mailing list)
• Accounting (Professional mailing list)
• Leadership & Management (Professional mailing list)
• Funded/Apprenticeships (Funded mailing list)
• Employers (Employer mailing list)

Workflow Using Tags:

This is great when wanting to manually send/schedule broadcast emails, but essentially doesn’t help when you want to use one workflow to manage/send emails to the entire list based on conditions; I’m currently in the process of building a mailing list workflow for the first half of 2018 that will send out emails to the entire mailing list based on tag conditions.

1. Starting with “contact segments” as the source I select all mailing list segments.

2. This is where tags come into play, there is no need to create hundreds of segments to cater to each sector within a specific mailing list so instead I use tags. First, I add a condition to check the segment then I add another condition to specify the tag to check next.

3. The accounting list segments further into areas such as starting an accounting career, promotion/career advancement, bookkeeping, self-employment. I am using tags to prescript the subjects of the email for that segment within that period.

4. I then create two emails, one for bookkeeping and one for all others. Having the knowledge that users on the mailing list are very specific about what they’re interested in helps us select the focal subject and then generalize all other areas.

5. Then it’s just a case of repeating the tag condition for each sector and subject within that segment, then moving on to the next mailing list.

For me this is an optimum way to break down and schedule emails for our mailing list while deciding the subject each monthly email within a list sector (accounting, leadership & management); we also manage to cater to other users on the mailing list that are not interested in that appointed subject.

Working on a 6-month basis you can clone the campaign and at the end of the flow move users to the new campaign that handles the second half of the year.

Are there other best practices that you include in your workflow? Please comment below! Thank you again to Andre Etienne for allowing us to share this valuable content. To find out more information and discover other best practices visit Andre at yourdigital.club.

For all industries and business segments that want to use personal data to enhance their own customer experiences, it’s important to remember that customers are willing to share their information if they know you are using it to help them get what they want… (Source)

The responsibility is on us, as organizations to provide value with the exchange of data. We must assure our customers that we not only see them, but we know about them; and there is a significant difference. It’s critical that we seek to understand their specific needs at every step of the buying journey, from desktop to mobile and everywhere in between.

No matter what innovations businesses set in front of consumers, and no matter how they try to serve them, customer expectations will accelerate. (Source)

In the latest release, you will not only have access to more powerful information, but you can create a more connected, value-driven experience. From integrations to more effective communication tools, you will be able to know more about your audience, not simply know them.

Integrations:

• Workflow Integrations: There are 4 new plugins to integrate data from Citrix into Mautic. These include GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToAssist and GoToTraining. You can now automatically create contacts in Mautic when individuals register for your events in the Citrix tools from form data in Mautic. In addition, you can pull registrant and attendee data back from the Citrix tools into Mautic and trigger campaigns based on this information. The registration and attendance data is also stored as part of the contact’s timeline in Mautic, giving you more information at a glance.
• Data Enhancement: Data enhancement tools like FullContact and ClearBit can now be integrated with Mautic. Users of these services can enhance their contact and company data in Mautic by clicking buttons on the contact (or company) and bringing data in from those services.
• Accounts Integration: Data from Salesforce Accounts can now be synched with Companies in Mautic. In addition we have optimized the API to minimize the number of API calls Mautic makes. Data from a new field type – formula fields – is also now available for mapping data between Salesforce and Mautic. Lastly Salesforce users can now access the timeline for the contact in Mautic by clicking on a link on the page in Salesforce.

Campaign Management:

• Preference Center: You can now collect preferences for your contacts in Mautic including preferred channels, categories, timings and segments. This will help you manage delivery of more relevant messages, using channels the contact prefers.
• Account Based Marketing Update: We have added a number of new features to Account Based Marketing. Companies in Mautic can now be merged; you now easily change the primary company on a contact; and you can apply a lead score at the company level. These features are in addition to a new set of reports that are available to measure performance at the company level.
• Global Categories: You can specify global categories across emails, landing pages, stages etc to categorize groups of entities in Mautic. You no longer need to define categories individually for each entity in Mautic, helping you stay organized and save you time.
• Email/Landing Page Builder: We’ve created an all new view for those who want to go under the hood and adjust HTML when developing emails and landing pages. The Content tab has been replaced with the new Code Mode view. This view will provide users with 2 panes in the Builder, one to edit the HTML directly and another to preview. Simply select Code Mode to start building, or to convert your existing communications into this view.

Each of these enhancements is another step toward smarter marketing. But with these tools come a greater responsibility to not only know our audience, but know their preferences and their needs as well.

The Mautic 2.3 update has been made available to our Mautic Cloud and Self-hosted users. For more detailed information on this release, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions, please be sure to reach out to us via the Community Forums, Slack or our social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will do our best to help.

It begins with some self-awareness. Marketing holds the organizational mantle on creativity. They pride themselves on having all the right tools for assessing and understanding the customer need. They focus group test. They A/B test. Then after all the data has been gathered, they develop the most engaging campaigns ever. Sales is no different. They are one of the key pillars for organizational success. They stand in that magical circle called the “Moment of Truth”, and close deals. They brush up on their emotional intelligence skills. They develop deep client knowledge and wield it at the perfect time to bring the sale across the line.

This still happens today. Many organizations still rely on traditional marketing and sales teams to reach customers and deliver sales. But are they focused on the right metrics? The customer is more informed than ever before. The tables have been turned. The customer is now in the driver’s seat. Marketing and sales need to better understand the customer journey in a digital sense. Investing in new social and digital tools are not bad. But if sales and marketing don’t work together, they will never accomplish what they can together. And it begins by adding value.

At the Intersection of Value

Consider the graphic below. It has two lines. The gray line is representative of the customer journey. It has a beginning and a perceived end, which we’ll discover is not really an end at all. The black curved line is your business. As we move from left to right, the goal is to maximize the moments where these two lines intersect. Segments of the journey are indicated by brackets. They are Discovery, Research, Moments of Truth, and Customer Engagement. As these buyer touch-points occur, it’s our job to create and provide as much value as we can. It is in these moments where buyers form their thoughts about your brand. You must help them meet their need by providing value at every point along the way.

Marketing and sales have a unique opportunity to work together to deliver value at every stage of the customer journey. They first need to align on the major segments of that journey. After this is agreed upon, they must align on the value that is delivered at each one of those stages.

Creating Value at Every Stage

We’ve talked about the marketing/sales funnel and how it’s broken. We are in agreement that this is not where we have been before. So how do we know what value we should create at each buying stage? I’m so glad you asked. Let’s look at four typical stages along this customer journey.

• Discovery: The first area we need to tackle is when the buyer learns they have a need. Understanding this stage is a challenge. Start by asking your existing customers about what caused the need. What were they doing when they first discovered they needed your product/service? Where were they? This causal effect will assist you in determining the right content/value approach you should take. It will also help you understand what sites and channels are used when they discover it.
• Research: We all do it. The data doesn’t lie. Research shows that we are going online to find answers to all manner and kinds of questions. And your customers are doing it too. This has never been more true even in the car buying experience.
  

  Today, half of all car shoppers with mobile devices use their smartphones while at the dealership. The top action people perform with their phones while on the lot, not surprisingly, is confirming that they are getting a good price on a vehicle. Searches for Kelley Blue Book and competing dealers occur more often when at the dealership. – Think with Google

  These answers are the key to developing the value we seek to create. Learn as much as you can about where your customers are coming from. What sites do they visit when researching? Are they visiting your website? What content are they viewing? Is it valuable to the research they are doing?

• Moments of Truth: The buyer has become aware of the need. They’ve researched all the solutions. They will now enter the zone that we affectionately call the “Moment of Truth”. It is in this space where your potential customer will make a decision to buy. Our job is to engage the buyer with the reassurance of their buying decision. Sure we will have an amazing call-to-action. The button will be the perfect color and be in the perfect spot. But where is the value? When buyers make a decision, we must create the most value-filled buying experience possible. Is it easy to buy a product on your site? What does your follow up look like?
• Customer Engagement: Now that the buyer has become a customer, the value changes again. It now becomes a matter of user experience and engagement. When was the last time you used your own product? What questions popped up? Was it easy to find the answers? What if the answers were sent before you had the question? It is important that your customer sees the value in a long-term relationship.

Listen and Verify

But it does not stop at providing value. This does not automatically get you the sale. As any marketer worth their credentials will attest, you must always be listening. Each one of these touch-points should be tracked. It will provide you with the data you need to “listen” and verify that it is the right value being provided at the right stage.

For sales and marketing to be successful, it must retool. But more importantly, they must align their focus on providing value to the customer at every stage of the buying journey.

Marketing automation tools are valuable in helping you learn more about your customer. But the value doesn’t stop there. It can be assist you in creating a value-based customer journey that equips the buyer at every stage.

In this infographic you can quickly scroll down and learn more about the various parts of a drip campaign as well as how to build a successful drip marketing campaign.

Mautic is an open source marketing automation software available completely for free and as software you can install on your own website or server. Access the latest, cutting-edge in marketing platforms without a high monthly fee.

Download or Get a hosted account