What exactly is meant when we say marketing automation?

Perhaps the first question to ask is, what aspect of marketing are we wishing to automate? Remember marketing is about selecting subset groups from the overall market and understanding how your products and services can be applied to those groups and sub sets. It is also about understanding which messages and what communications channels are best utilised for each individual group or sub set. The final aspect of this triangle is then understanding how those sub-set groups interact with your messages and communications. How they respond, via the interest shown in your products and services. As you can see there are three corners to this triangle the first two that we discussed are perhaps somewhat more difficult to automate than the final element or alternatively I should say the degree of complexity required to automate each of the three sections is reducing as the definition of the requirement becomes more clear. Customer Relationship Management systems are geared to deliver just that: "customer relationship management".

Many CRM vendors would argue that marketing automation is simply a subset or an analytical report from the CRM system. We would argue that it is really dependent upon what is meant by marketing automation. In our interpretation of marketing automation we look for the iSAM system to deliver the third aspect in the area of marketing. We know that our clients are interested in understanding how their customers and potential customers are interacting with the marketing communications that they are distributing. Indeed this will include direct marketing, advertising, and of course e-mail marketing, and website marketing. In the latter two cases this is where the iSAM system really shines.

The iSAM system holds your customer relationship management data and therefore understands and knows about all of your contact data. When sending communications via e-mail iSAM can make each communication uniquely traceable for every individual contact to which the message is sent. Further more the marketing automation tools such as trackable URL links and our unique footprint tracking technology give you deep levels of marketing automation. Enabling you to see for each contact to which the message was sent, when they read the message, which links in the e-mail they clicked upon, where they arrived at your website, and which links on your website that they clicked up on. Giving you unique insight into which products and services they spent the most time looking at. All of this intelligence is readily available from within the iSAM system. This becomes a very powerful marketing automation tool and can give you powerful commercial advantage putting you three steps ahead of your competitors. You are able to communicate rapidly and effectively with your contact groups and subgroups, sending selective messages to each with degrees of personalisation derived from the contacts data record. You are then able to see how each contact responded to your message, this enables you to selectively pick out the contacts who showed the most interest in your products and services and then follow those up appropriately. The iSAM system enables you to be so much more effective because using the marketing automation technology you now have the information you need to make the correct decisions about the communications that you send to your target groups. Overall, the net result is an increase in marketing efficiency, an overall performance increase in your return from your marketing budget and increased support for your sales activities.