Does Your Marketing Crash? Here’s What You Can Do About It
"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong", they say. And if you are still mapping your journeys manually and enforcing them automatically – they will break and crossfire. Luckily, there's a solution (yeah, it's Optimove)
If you are a marketer in today’s world, it is likely that you use a Customer Engagement Platform to automate and orchestrate your journeys. You probably also use a Canvas or Journey Builder to create these automations. And you most certainly have more than one of those automations running simultaneously with different objectives and goals.
This means that your marketing campaigns and journeys have a high likelihood of crashing.
Don’t know how that looks like? Watch this one-minute video.
This happens because of automations, not despite them.
You see, automations use “if/else” logics to decide what to send to your customers. If one customer triggers more than one of those logics, then they’ll receive multiple campaigns at one time. They’ll be at the center of a journey crash.
You might be thinking, “my Customer Engagement Platform has a frequency capping feature that avoids this.” Well, technically it does, but all it is doing is sending the first campaign that is triggered, not the best campaign that should be triggered for your customer.
Avoiding Campaign and Journey Crashes
The only way to avoid marketing crashes is by allowing AI to make decisions on what campaign to send to each individual customer based on all available campaigns. We call it Air Traffic Control for Marketing, and here is how it works.
Imagine a customer that recently returned a product (dropping them into a returns automation), just abandoned a cart as they were buying a different product (activating the abandoned cart automation), and is about to celebrate their birthday (triggering your birthday journey).
Without Air Traffic Control, the customer would receive all three journeys at once. Disconnected messages, different offers, and overall, just a bad experience.
When using AI decisioning for marketing orchestration you ensure that doesn’t happen. The AI decisioning engine uses its access to customer data to determine each customer’s context and by analyzing thousands of similar customers, can decide what is the best campaign from all the available for each one.
Not what is the first campaign triggered, but rather what the best one is.
How does Air Traffic Control work in Marketing?
There are three intrinsic capabilities needed for a Customer Engagement Platform to be able to stop campaigns and journeys from crashing:
Robust customer data – most engagement platforms need limited or small amounts of data to operate. That is why they rely on simple if/else automations to orchestrate campaigns and journeys. In order to function as an Air Traffic Controller, rich historical, real-time, and predictive data is needed on each customer. The more data available, the better the AI’s decisions will be.
Flexible orchestration – rule-based journey builders are great for simple automations that are specific to a single scenario. But when multiple journeys are created only using them, campaigns are destined to crash. Air Traffic Control solutions use AI to power a flexible orchestration framework that isn’t based on rigid if/else commands but rather on a sophisticated decisioning engine that adapts to changes customer in customer behavior and data.
Incrementality measurement – most engagement platforms simply report on engagement metrics (e.g., opens, clicks) and total revenue. This results in limited insights into what is truly driving customer behavior, something that is critical for AI decisions to be accurate. Solutions that can function as Air Traffic Control for marketing measure the incremental impact of each campaign with scientific credibility to then inform the AI and its prioritization algorithm on what is best for each customer.
If your journeys and/or campaigns are crashing and you are looking to provide your customers with incredible experiences, contact us.
Rony Vexelman is Optimove’s VP of Marketing. Rony leads Optimove’s marketing strategy across regions and industries. Previously, Rony was Optimove's Director of Product Marketing leading product releases, customer marketing efforts and analyst relations. Rony holds a BA in Business Administration and Sociology from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.
