Many marketing professionals today have become paralyzed by the effort needed to manage programs that are growing both in complexity and scale. To manage these programs successfully, marketers will need to employ automated machine learning to take care of some of the more mundane tasks associated with a program.
Marketing today reminds me of the way we used to manually create rules to manage inboxes in the early days of email. Back in those days, you had to create specific rules to filter out spam or junk mail that you didn’t want in your inbox. Along came more modern email interfaces that did most of the filtering work for you, freeing you up to focus more time on actually interacting with people.
Automation is the key to efficiency; in fact, it is the key to survival in today’s digital-marketing age. By delivering automated targeted content, businesses can scale the level of personalization they are able to provide across all of their channels. Let’s look at some reasons why the current way of testing and targeting doesn’t really work.
Static Rules Don’t Scale
People are very complex, and the manual development of targeting rules treats people in a simplistic manner that doesn’t really capture the complexities of their behaviors. Even people who are lumped into a single category have differences of opinions so that no two prospects are ever entirely the same.
People also change — not in a long-term, become-a-better-person type of way, but on a daily basis. Food preferences, tastes in certain types of music, entertainment choices — all of these (and more) can change daily, and manual testing just isn’t enough to keep up with everyday fluctuations.
It’s not only people that are complex and always changing, but also everything around us. The economy, technical and fashion trends, current events — all of these things impact consumers and affect whether they’ll engage in specific behaviors.
Finally, the statistics needed to analyze all of these data points and pull meaningful information from them are complex as well. It requires rigor and time to have confidence in the granular insights afforded by advanced testing and targeting, especially at scale. In this current state, the program is unscalable, meaning the manual tasks required to maintain the program have grown beyond the capacity of the team to support.
You Can Scale Through Automation
Automation allows the marketer to perform basic testing without needing manual rule definitions and analyses. It uses auto-allocation, which is a way to make AB tests more efficient by sending more traffic to top-performing experiences as the tests progress. It adapts to changing user behavior to identify top content performers, and it eliminates the need to babysit tests, frees time to focus on more important tasks, and ensures that no money is left on the table due to inaccurate testing.
Automated personalization involves using machine-learning algorithms to better understand an individual and make a best guess about what type of experience that customer is looking for. It starts with any available visitor-profile data and then looks at other factors that might influence the user such as environmental variables, offline behavior, temporal influences, referrer, site behavior, and shared audiences. Personalization allows the business to truly quantify things — like third-party data and homepage offers — and can account for things like seasonality or offer fatigue, which can skew results.
Automated recommendations are used to harness the power of metadata for pulling specific pieces of content together. Recommendations are everywhere and can influence consumers beyond things like seasonality or other factors. Recommendations can be created from customer-driven algorithms, look at content similarity across offers, or can even be popularity-based to help capture emerging market trends. What’s nice about recommendations is that they give all content an even chance since they require no past data — even new content can get an equal play against older content.
Automation Is Your (and Our) Future
Businesses that want to leverage the advances that have been made in digital marketing will need to employ some level of automation within their programs to efficiently scale. Auto-allocation, automated personalization, and content and product recommendations are three ways that today’s businesses can begin integrating automation into their strategies.
Automation doesn’t have to be scary. It’s based on the idea that you can empower algorithms with your domain knowledge and business rules to create better insights into your customers. It allows you to move from manual setup and intervention to semi-auto setup and automated intervention — which will help you scale your program to meet the needs of the future.
The post Automation: Because You Have Bigger Fish to Fry Than Testing Button Color appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.
from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/automation-bigger-fish-fry-testing-button-color/
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