What is B2C Marketing Automation?
For the uninitiated, Marketing Automation lets you automate repetitive tasks and create intelligent marketing campaigns. With rapidly occurring user actions, creating and scaling marketing operations manually becomes ineffective and error-prone. Once you add multichannel marketing to the marketing mix, manual operations at such a massive scale become overly complex and downright impossible.
A marketer can plan, create and execute highly complex marketing campaigns using B2C Marketing Automation platforms quite easily.
The advent of Automation isn’t just limited to the Manufacturing sector but has extended its reach to the realm of Marketing as well. Marketers are shifting their attention increasingly towards Marketing Automation. What is the whole brouhaha around B2C Marketing Automation all about?
Statistically speaking, Marketing Automation makes a strong point for itself:
- A 2014 report by the Aberdeen group stated that “67% of industry-leading companies would be more likely to use Marketing Automation”.
- According to B2C Marketing Automation Report India 2017 (Netcore), a whopping 70 % of Indian marketers have already adopted Marketing Automation to increase lead conversions.
- eMarketer says that marketers using B2C Marketing Automation have witnessed a 50% increase in conversions from different types of campaigns.
Why is it important for your B2C businesses?
If you are at the helm of a consumer business, then you NEED to be where your customers are.
- B2C Marketing Automation will give you the ability to engage with your customers contextually on a highly personalized level.
- You will have access to tons of user data that will help you create an intimate profile about your customers based on their demographic and behavioral data.
- You can facilitate one-on-one communication with your customers with personalized and highly relevant content
This brings us to the all-important question: How to leverage Marketing Automation technology to improve your brand’s marketing effectiveness?
To answer that, we have highlighted 15 examples to help you understand how different brands are using Marketing Automation:
1. Welcome Campaign
Communication Medium Used: Email
Industry fit: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel
Brand Examples: Resume.com, Airbnb, Tripoto
Having a Welcome campaign is perhaps the most obvious use of Marketing Automation. It is absolutely necessary for most brands to establish a connection right off the bat. You also can’t be bothered to shoot an email to every new signup, especially if you have a lot of users.
This is where automation shines and allows you to automate new sign-up emails right after registration.
Resume.com: Email example
Airbnb: Email Example
Tripoto: Email example
2. Onboarding Campaign
Communication Medium Used: Email
Industry fit: SaaS, Online Marketplace, BFSI
Brand Examples: Tailor Brands, Mailchimp
Most apps lose about 77% of their DAU (daily average users) in the initial 3 days after install. Users often drop out early because of having very little understanding of using a new product. This is why it is crucial for businesses to have a sound onboarding process.
An onboarding campaign can help ease the user into the product step by step, and facilitate the transition from casual onlooker to invested active user.
TailorBrands: Email example
MailChimp: Email example
3. Repeat Purchase Campaign (Customer Retention)
Communication Channel Used: Email, Push Notification
Industry fit: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel
Brand Examples: Pinkberry, Flaberry, H&M
How do you extract more out of an existing customer? According to Adobe’s recent study, existing customers are responsible for creating 40% of revenue for an ECommerce store. Acquiring a new customer will be 5 times more expensive than getting a conversion from an existing one. However, increasing customer retention rate in the e-commerce industry by 5% can increase your profitability from 25% to 95%!
Your existing customers are familiar with your brand and your product, which makes them theoretically easier to convert compared to acquiring a new customer.
Based on certain triggers derived from user behavior, you can create tailored campaigns with an incentive that will drive up the perceived value of the offer.
Pinkberry: Email example
Flaberry: Email example
- If you look at the Flaberry email closely, they have mentioned my cousins (Sona & Isha) being their customers. I had mentioned their names while personalizing their gifts during my last purchase.
- The second bit of personalization comes with the discount coupon code: PRIY10. It contains the first 4 letters of my name giving it the appearance of a one-off individual offer meant only for me.
H&M: Push Notification example
4. Re-engagement/Reactivation Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Push Notification, Email
Industry fit: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Pinkberry, Flaberry, H&M
It is a challenge for every entrepreneur to make a product that is super sticky, and keeps users coming back for more. Every major app that we have in our phones today had a point in their existence where they struggled with decreasing user count and average time spent.
If you are struggling to retain users and keep them engaged with your product, then you can use Marketing Automation to get them back on your app/website. Check out some of these examples for inspiration:
QuizUp: Email example
RunKeeper: Email example
BuzzFeed: Email example
5. Multi-channel Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Push Notification, Email, SMS, Web Push Notification
Industry: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Ola, Bookmyshow
Most online users elicit multi-screen behavior with phases of sequential usage. They might start off their online search on a laptop, proceed to check out some in-depth content on a tablet, and ultimately choose to make a transaction from their mobile phone.
Brands are increasingly tapping multiple channels of communication to maintain top of the mind awareness, and this can be easily achieved with marketing automation.
Ola: SMS & Email examples
Ride-hailing app Ola advertises their new service offering over SMS, Email, Push notifications & in-app messaging.
BookMyShow: Push Notification & Email examples
Ticketing-app BookMyShow notified me about the superhero movie Justice League over 3 channels: push notification, email and an in-app message a day apart from each other.
Lingerie retailer Zivame follows the users fervently across multiple channels. It covers the mobile domain effectively by sending a push notification and an SMS prompting the user to clear their abandoned cart. Even when the user lands on the website, a web push notification gets triggered for the same targeted campaign.
6. Behavioral Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Push Notification, Email, SMS
Industry: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle, Online Entertainment
Brand Examples: Nordstrom, Overstock, Netflix, Amazon
A Marketing Automation platform will generate massive amounts of data regarding users and their online activity across different channels. You can piece together your consumer’s buying behavior based on their demographic traits & online browsing activity. This is particularly useful in segmenting your users and targeting them with relevant, personalized messages.
Nordstrom: Email example
Overstock: Push Notification example
Netflix: Push Notification example
Amazon: Email example
7. Cross-selling Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Email
Industry: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Crate&Barrel, Amazon, EasyJet
Cross-selling refers to pitching related and complementary items for sale along with a product. E-Commerce behemoth Amazon has been wildly successful with this tactic with almost 35% of their revenue being generated from cross-selling.
You can send customized messages to your customers after every purchase to trigger a repeat purchase. This can be achieved easily with a Marketing Automation Platform and data pertaining to customer’s purchase history. Let us look at a few examples:
Crate&Barrel: Email example
Amazon: Email example
EasyJet: Email example
8. Information/Update Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Push Notification, Email, SMS
Industry: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle, BFSI
Brand Examples: BigBasket, Kotak Mahindra, United Airlines
Marketing Automation can be used effectively to send important information and critical updates to your customers over multiple channels. Brands automate the sending of basic transactional information, preferred updates via Marketing Automation. This way, you can send out crucial information which is contextually relevant at the right time.
Ola: Email + SMS example
Ride-hailing app Ola sends transactional information about refunds to users on Email & SMS automatically after successful credit.
United Airlines: Push Notification example
Google: Push Notification example
9. A/B Testing For Campaigns
Communication Channel Used: Email, Push Notification
Industry: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Microsoft, Yummly
A/B testing your campaigns can help you understand what works and what doesn’t. With a marketing automation platform, you can test out multiple iterations of your campaign communication on real customers and create effective campaigns.
Microsoft ran an email campaign for their Surface Pro computers in Europe. Using A/B testing, they ran a couple of ads and then compared their results together:
Microsoft discovered that the 1st version with the purple CTA and changed color scheme increased CTR by 325% compared to the other copy (red background).
Microsoft Email Version 1
Microsoft Email Version 2
Yummly A/B testing: Push Notification examples
10. Feedback Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Email, Push Notification
Industry: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Whale, Tailor Brands, Amazon
Feedback is the bedrock of every company’s development process. It directly affects the evolution of a product based on the reviews of real-world users. Trouble is, good quality feedback is hard to come by. Using Marketing Automation, your brand can reach out to your customers/users over multiple channels to extract sound feedback.
Whale: Push Notification example
Papa Johns: SMS example
Tailor Brands: Email example
Tinder: Email example
Amazon: Email example
11. Upsell Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Email
Industry: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Kotak Mahindra, Quikr
Upselling means pitching an upgraded product/service that is more premium to a customer against their preference. Gartner’s report states: “Over 80% of your future revenues will be generated from 20% of your customers”. Using Marketing Automation, Skullcandy managed to ramp up cross-selling revenues by 30%.
Another strong argument stems from the costs involved: acquiring a new customer worth 1$ will set you back around 1.18$, compared to 0.28$ from an existing customer.
Using Marketing Automation, you can extract more value from your customers effectively with upselling. Let’s see a few examples:
Kotak Mahindra: Email example
Quikr: Email example
12. Milestone Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Email
Industry Fit: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Payback, UEFA, Uber
Using personal and product milestones in marketing campaigns can increase online conversions and top-tier product adoption. Want to give your customers a special discount on their birthday? Want to reward your loyal customers? All of this can be automated by simply creating milestone triggers that will fire off a custom event of your choosing.
Payback: Email example
UEFA: Email example
Uber: Email example
13. Referral Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Email, In-App Notifications
Industry Fit: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Ola, Uber, Airbnb
According to Nielsen’s research, people are 4 times more likely to purchase something that has been recommended by a friend. Referral campaigns also attract higher-quality customers with a 16% higher lifetime value compared to a non-referral customer. You can use Marketing Automation to create a custom referral campaign for your consumers across multiple channels.
Let’s check out a few industry examples of Referral Campaigns:
Ola: Email example
Dropbox: Email example
Uber: In-app Message example
14. Location-based Campaign
Communication Channel Used: Push Notifications
Industry Fit: Offline Retail, QSR, Clothing & Fashion
Brand Examples: Starbucks, Moda in Pelle
Using technology called geofencing, brands are creating a virtual fence around a location of interest. Every time a customer breaches this ‘fence’, personalized messages are pushed out automatically to these customers on their mobile devices to increase conversions. Using geofencing can potentially double your conversions from mobile marketing.
Here are a couple of examples that show the effective uses of location-based campaigns:
Starbucks: Push notification example
Moda in Pelle: Push notification example
15. Limited time campaign
Communication Channel Used: Email, In-App Notifications
Industry Fit: SaaS, E-Commerce, Travel, Fitness & Lifestyle
Brand Examples: Ola, Uber, Airbnb
The psychological effects of perceived scarcity have long been used by marketers as a ploy to create demand for products and services. Using the scarcity heuristic increases the value of a product by making the product seem more difficult to obtain. Xiaomi employed a ‘drip marketing’ strategy to sell their Mi3 phone in India with great success.
You can automate these campaigns at set intervals instead of doing this manually with Marketing Automation.
Paytm & Flipkart: Push Notification example
Banana Republic: Email example
Summing It Up
There are many more ways in which you can set up Marketing Automation for your brand effectively. For a start, these 17 examples should hopefully be good enough for you to take inspiration and get going. If you can’t get enough of Marketing Automation examples, then we have listed 8 more examples of our customers who have mastered Targeted Email Marketing .