These are the Most Important Requirements for a Marketing Automation Tool

If you're looking for a marketing automation tool, it's important to know how to distinguish a good and comprehensive solution from a less suitable one. But what requirements must such a tool meet in order to be useful to you not only today, but also in the future?

In this article, guest author Sergej Plovs presents the most important requirements for a marketing automation tool. So you are as well prepared as possible when looking for the right solution for your company.

What are marketing automation tools for?

Marketing Automation is often associated with automated email marketing. This technique uses rule-based, personalized, multi-stage campaigns to analyze and clearly display responses such as delivery, opening or click rates.

But marketing automation is much more than that. Marketing automation tools support marketing and sales departments in structuring the sales funnel, filling it with new leads, developing prospects into real sales opportunities and communicating with existing customers.

By integrating marketing automation, common goals and KPIs are created that can be achieved by both departments. Thus, marketing automation tools have become indispensable solutions in the course of digitalization in both the B2C and B2B sectors.

How can requirements for a marketing automation tool be determined?

Features of a good marketing automation solution include personalization, the integration of different communication channels and the ability to enable more dense communication. A solution is considered complete and mature when it covers all the functional components shown in the following figure.

However, caution is advised when comparing the different tools. Because these functions are listed in the sales and marketing documents of the providers - but there can be significant differences in the specific implementation. In order to make a reliable decision, it is therefore important to analyze and compare the different functions precisely.

Source: Vision11 GmbH

The 22 most important requirements for a marketing automation tool

1. Multilevel campaigns

Automated multi-stage campaigns require thorough planning. It is important to ensure that each stage has a clear purpose - and that it offers a seamless transition to the next stage. Each contact should be assigned an individual and personalized journey. In addition, it should be taken into account that each communication measure takes place at the right time via the preferred channel.

An important characteristic of marketing automation tools is the graphical modeling of the individual campaign steps. Tools with drag&drop functionality offer a big advantage here, as they can be used easily and without deep technical knowledge. In order to design and adapt campaigns flexibly, the tool should also have options to split and merge mailings as well as to use multiple communication channels within one customer journey.

2. Segmentation

For effective customer targeting, it is of great importance that a marketing automation solution supports graphic segmentation and the structure of target groups. The solution of your choice should allow segmentation by criteria such as geographical, sociodemographic, psychographic and behavior-oriented.

Personas can be built by generating the target groups from the respective customer profiles. It is also important that the segmentation rules can be combined using Boolean operators such as "AND", "OR" and "NOT". This allows contacts to be manually added to an existing target group and target groups to be automatically minimized or split. Target groups can also be merged and used in one campaign. A marketing automation tool that has these functions therefore makes it possible to effectively build up target groups and address them more personally.

3. Real-time personalization

A key component of marketing automation is real-time personalization. Based on the behavior and interests of customers, personalized communications and offers can be provided immediately. However, the decisive factor for successful real-time personalization is that current customer data are available and can be integrated from different sources.

Another important aspect here is a flexible rule engine. That is, your marketing automation solution should enable personalized content to be delivered on the basis of real-time transaction data - such as the contents of a shopping cart or the click behavior of customers. Such personalizations should also be played out in real time when the email is opened. Only in this way can the greatest possible relevance and effectiveness be achieved. Overall, this can lead to a significant increase in open and click rates as well as generally improving customer retention.

4. Email Marketing

The aim of interest-based newsletter programs is to offer recipients a personalized and relevant experience. Certain functionalities are required in order to achieve this. To ensure that the addressees only receive content they are actually interested in, a process for subscribing to and unsubscribing from the newsletter must be provided, for example. There should also be a pre-defined welcome email to make a positive first impression right from the first contact.

The creation of the newsletter should be simple, user-friendly and possible without technical knowledge using a drag&drop editor. What is also important to motivate the subscription is the possibility to assign and manage one-off discounts or vouchers.

5. Landingpages

A design tool is indispensable for creating landing pages. It allows you to ensure your company's corporate identity in the context of marketing automation. The use of video content should also be possible here. An out-of-the-box responsive design automatically ensures that a landing page is optimally displayed on each device.

6. Forms

Your marketing automation tool should enable the intuitive compilation of forms. This is done using a drag&drop editor, which allows predefined form elements to be easily combined. The design should be responsive here too - and guarantee optimum display on all devices.

Plausibility checks and mandatory field definitions ensure that all necessary information is entered completely. In addition, forms should be available in several language-country combinations and automated data supplementation should enable a better user experience. It is also important that existing forms that can be integrated into marketing automation - and ad hoc changes can be made directly during runtime, without having to "deploy" a form anew.

7. Template Copy

Template Copy is a process for creating personalized mailing templates. This process begins by copying and customizing existing templates from a template. To get a flexible and adaptable template, it is important that design and content elements are separated from each other. Templates should also be able to be copied easily from the source client to the target client. In order to create personalized mailings, a wide range of templates can be used.

8. Shipping Time Optimization

An important factor for the success of mailing campaigns is the optimization of shipping times. In order to achieve the best possible performance here, your marketing automation solution should be able to automatically and individually determine the optimal shipping time. This is based on an analysis of the opening rates and reading behavior from the past. In order to achieve optimal results even in international campaigns, the tool should also take into account time shifts and adapted time zones.

In order to meet the needs of the users, it is also important to be able to set the shipping frequencies and frequencies individually. All in all, the optimization of shipping times can contribute considerably to increasing the performance of mailings.

9. A/B Testing

"A/B testing" or "A/B/n testing" is a method for evaluating two or more versions of an email to determine the more successful version. Test criteria can be, for example, the opening rate, the click rate or other metrics. With an out-of-the-box solution for A/B testing, multiple variations of an email can be created and tested quickly and easily. These variations can differ, for example, in terms of design, certain content or target group distribution. An important function of A/B testing should be the ability to randomly split the target group. This ensures that the test groups actually represent representative samples of the total population. This aspect is of not to be underestimated importance for a valid measurement of the results.

10. Workflows & Trigger

Particularly interesting functions of a marketing automation tool are workflows and triggers. Because they allow you to set up automated marketing processes. Marketing teams can define and set up workflows without profound technical knowledge - and thus ensure smooth communication with customers. These processes can be executed on the basis of transactional data, contact activities on websites or various triggers. They allow you to make customer communication even more personalized, save time and resources and utilize cross-selling opportunities.

11. Social Media Posts

Marketing automation tools can also support social media posts efficiently and effectively. Social media channels can be played automatically with a single user interface, saving time and resources. Personalization can optimize interactions with customers and enhance the relevance of posts.

With the help of social media sentiment analysis customer feedback can be collected to gain a better understanding of their needs and desires. In addition, the marketing automation tool should also support social listening and social media monitoring. Because if you keep an eye on your customers' online behavior, you can react quickly to problems to protect the brand and its reputation before they become bigger challenges.

12. Event Management

Your marketing automation tool should also include a module for creating and managing online and offline events. With an open or closed registration model and an automated waiting list management system, for example, the number of participants can be effectively managed. The registration form generator simplifies the registration process. And surveys before, during and after the event serve to collect feedback efficiently.

13. Lead Scoring & Lead Nurturing

Among the indispensable functions of a marketing automation tool are lead scoring and lead nurturing. Based on a point system, they enable different lead scoring models to be depicted. To evaluate a customer's interest and the qualification of a lead, you can use both implicit and explicit scoring. Detailed representation of the sales funnel is then possible through automatic and rule-based allocation of leads to individual sales staff and reintegration into marketing. Particularly interesting: AI-based predictive lead scoring helps to better foresee potential developments.

14. Surveys

A marketing automation tool should also enable surveys to be created, sent and evaluated. The users should be able to create survey templates in the corporate design and calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS). To collect valuable customer feedback, transaction-based and product-based surveys should also be created and sent. It is important here to be able to evaluate the results of the surveys in detail in order to gain a better understanding of customers' needs from this.

15. Call-To-Action

Another requirement for your marketing automation tool is the ability to create personalized Call-to-Actions (CTAs). With the help of an integrated design tool, appealing and target-oriented CTAs can be created. The display of Smart Calls-to-Actions, which are generated at runtime, ensures a high level of relevance and effectiveness. The success of the CTAs can then be measured using the Click-Through Rate (CTR).

16. Next Best Offers & Next Best Actions

If you want to use your marketing automation tool in e-commerce, functions for defining and designing Next Best Offers (NBO) and Next Best Actions (NBA) are essential. Based on customer insights, such as a customer's purchase probabilities, personalized purchase recommendations can be made. To use cross and upselling potentials even more effectively, individual predictions can be generated here with the help of data-based algorithms.

17. Artificial Intelligence

Future-esque marketing automation tools should definitely use modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. With the help of AI, a content recommendation engine can be realized. This automatically delivers recommendations that are tailored to the individual interests and behavior patterns of individual customers or prospects. In addition, the tool should allow predictive analytics to be generated using AI-based predictive analytics to take more targeted marketing measures.

18. Chat Bots

Chatbots are also an important tool in marketing automation. The text or speech-based dialogue systems capture human language using rules and algorithms - and make it possible to play appropriate answers to the users' questions. Thus, chatbots can help create an individual customer experience and generate valuable customer insights. In a marketing automation tool, chatbot dialogue trees should be input or created manually to enable individual dialogue with customers.

19. Campaign analysis

A key building block of your marketing automation tool is the ability to analyze campaigns. This enables comprehensive monitoring and evaluation of marketing campaigns. For this, predefined templates for analysis are available, which are easy to adapt. The tool should also have a link tracking function to track campaign performance on a real-time basis. To reliably assess the effectiveness of marketing measures, it is also important to be able to easily measure and evaluate the most important KPIs of each campaign -such as delivery rate, bounce rate, open rate, click rate, conversion rate, reach, dwell time or bounce rate.

20. EU-GDPR

Last but not least, your marketing automation tool should always meet the requirements of the EU-GDPR. This includes, for example, secure data maintenance and the capture of differentiated marketing approvals for each communication channel. The tool should also enable you to create data disclosure requests at the push of a button and implement the "right to forget". Subscription and unsubscription processes should also be included as standard.

21. Multi clients

A marketing automation tool with multi-client capability is capable of setting up independent sub-clients under one master client. This allows global management of customer accounts and accesses per client. The complete configuration should be able to be copied from existing clients to new clients. The possibility of cross-client analyses and reports is also important. In addition, the multi-lingual capability should be adjustable for individual clients.

22. CRM Interface

The CRM interface of a marketing automation tool ensures the seamless integration of marketing and customer data. With standardized connectors or interfaces to the CRM solution "XYZ", the data can be transferred easily and quickly. Further individual interfaces should also be able to be programmed via an open API (Application Programming Interface). Predefined interface technologies like SOAP, REST or ODBC can simplify integration even further. Contact lists should also be able to be fed directly into the marketing automation solution and managed.

Conclusion

In the age of digitalization, it is imperative for companies to rely on a marketing automation solution in order to set themselves apart from traditional and largely manual marketing methods and gain competitive advantages. A marketing automation tool enables relevant and personalized content to be sent to the appropriate target group at the right time via the preferred communication channels - and thus create a consistent and lasting customer experience.

There are a variety of such solutions on the market. And each provider claims that their tool is the best in its market segment. However, each solution has its specific advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, thorough examination of all available functions is of far-reaching importance. After all, the decision for a specific marketing automation tool usually means a long-term commitment. Because a heavily networked solution is rarely replaced due to the high investment costs.

Therefore, you should allow sufficient time for the choice of a suitable solution - and prepare your decision thoroughly. Crucial in this: Without defined requirements for a solution, it is difficult to make an objective decision.

If you now feel that it is not possible to continue without marketing automation software , you will find the best marketing automation tools in the OMR Reviews Software Guide. According to the reviews of our users, you should especially keep the following marketing automation tools in mind:

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Klaviyo

ActiveCampaign

Emarsys

socialPALS

ELAINE