Marketing automation vs customer journey mapping/orchestration

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation can be a powerful tool for your brand, if you know how to leverage it. When used effectively, it can help you market to existing and prospective customers at scale with relevant, personalized and timely communications that nurture them towards conversion or retention, and ultimately increase your sales. In the long run, it can also help save you and your team time on manually sending out email blasts so you can focus more on tailoring your messaging and engaging with your audience with relatively low ongoing effort.

The automation part does only come after a lot of hard work, strategy, content generation and program implementation. It requires hands-on management and the platform itself can only automate what you tell it to.

Brands can automate marketing tasks like:

  • Lead generation

  • Lead scoring

  • Drip campaigns

  • Customer retention

  • Segmentation

  • Retargeting

“Marketing automation is typically thought of as the vehicle firmly centered on solving the ‘how’ of facilitating scalable processes, data signal responsiveness and operational coordination to get ideas into delivered campaigns,” says Joan Smith of Protiviti Digital managing director. “It is often a component element of customer journey orchestration.”

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Before you can start building your emails and getting to the nitty-gritty of developing content, you should map out your customer journey for the specific email nurture you’re looking to create.

A customer journey map is a simple visual tool to illustrate the steps your customer will take through your email nurture. It helps you to prioritize what content is sent when, and in what order, and what actions and inactions trigger another email. This then becomes a ‘map’ as steps begin to branch out into new arms that best respond to the behaviors of the subscriber at that given point in time.

To start your customer journey map – begin with the end in mind. What is your end goal for this email nurture? Is it to welcome and introduce them to your brand? Is it to convert leads into paying customers, or nurture existing customers to repurchase?

Once you have set a goal, you can then outline the steps of your customer journey and define the timing, triggers and rules that send your subscriber through each stage of the email nurture. 

By mapping all this information out, it will provide you with a clearer understanding of your desired process and give you a top-level view of the content that needs to be developed across the various emails. Customers in different stages of the marketing funnel have distinctly different needs and so your email content should reflect both the stage they are in as well as encourage them to move forward to the next stage. Your customer journey map can also be a blueprint against which you review potential pain points, gaps, or drop-off in your email nurture. 

"Customer journey orchestration is really about building authentic relationships with prospects and customers, whereas marketing automation can be perceived as impersonal and checking boxes in the sales funnel to convert a lead,” said Jessica Andrews, Copper senior product marketing manager.

“The true benefit of customer journey orchestration is that it allows you to shore up gaps in your customers’ sales journeys that simpler automation or ad retargeting just doesn’t solve,” CX consultant Greg Kihlstrom told Forbes.

What do you really need for your brand?

Sometimes, however, your needs may only require simpler marketing automation.

Though analysts agree that customer journey mapping/orchestration is more advanced, that doesn’t mean it’s right for every organization.

When selecting which approach to take organizations should ask the following questions and be very honest with themselves:

  • How advanced are my data collection and management techniques?

  • Do I have a holistic view of my customer across channels?

  • Are my marketing interactions batch-based and time-boxed in nature?

  • Do I have the tools, technologies and processes to execute real-time, highly personalized interactions across a customer journey?

  • Are my marketing interactions based on what my marketing department wants to talk about — or what prospects and customers have shown interest in?

  • Do my marketing interactions build on top of each other to create a customer journey that I can then orchestrate with analytics running behind my customer journeys?

“Marketing automation works better for batch-based single-channel campaigns, “So, organizations with less sophisticated needs, perhaps fewer channels, for example, might choose marketing automation over Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO).

What are your organizational needs when it comes to automation and communication orchestration?

Betach Solutions