Have you ever had a negative experience with a company? Such an experience remains in the mind and shapes future purchasing decisions. In marketing, the term customer experience (CX) refers to the experience(s) that customers have with a brand. It is closely linked to individual values and emotions and should be kept as positive as possible if a company wants to be successful in the long term.
Why marketing automation leads to higher customer satisfaction
To do this, it is necessary to understand them in the first place. But can CX actually be grasped, measured, let alone "used"? Not completely, of course, but already to a large extent: Marketing Automation Tools, or MATs for short, are software platforms that enable marketers to automate, manage and optimize sales-relevant processes. They collect data that maps important stages of the customer experience. Evaluating this data in turn helps to better understand the behavior of your own customers, allowing you to develop more personalized and precise campaigns.
Most popular MATs include HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot and Eloqua. You can find out exactly how MATs help to optimize your customers' CX here.
How to improve your customers' CX with marketing automation tools
Customer experience no longer only affects the B2C sector - digitalization and globalization are also leading to relentless competition and increased demands in B2B relationships. Here, too, the focus is therefore on existing and potential customers and their needs.
The number of customers is certainly usually lower than in B2C. However, this is precisely what makes positive experiences with a company even more crucial: a positive CX leads to long-term customer loyalty and ultimately to higher sales. All in all, it helps a company to assert itself against the competition - ideally, satisfied customers become advocates for the company.
MATs can have a positive impact on your customers' CX because they provide a basis for finer-tuned marketing measures. On the other hand, the feedback they provide also helps sales, customer service and product development.
5 advantages of marketing automation for the CX
1. Marketing automation saves time and resources
It is important for long-term customer loyalty not to be forgotten by the other party. Companies achieve this through certain campaigns or triggers that help existing customers quickly and keep them "happy". Very popular: the newsletter or download offers for content formats that contain useful information on products and orders. The sooner you meet the interests of your customers here, the more positive the effect on their CX.
Marketing automation saves a lot of time and resources here thanks to automated workflows and real-time interactions: where previously you had to react manually to events such as subscribing to a newsletter or purchasing a product, the tools handle content control automatically. This gives your team more time to deal with strategic issues.
2. marketing automation simplifies personalization
Let's say a contact is interested in purchasing B2B software. Your marketing automation software records their interactions across multiple communication channels (social media, ads, webinar tools, calendar, telephony, customer service, etc.) and thus maps their history. It shows which products they are interested in, which offers, content and channels they use. Which pages have they visited? Have they commented on or rated a social media post?
Since you now know their touch points and interactions, you can now provide them with better tailored content. It will be easier to "pick them up" personally for your own offer: on the one hand by addressing them by name, in a customized tone of voice and language style. On the other hand, via emails with individualized content, redirects to landing page areas and CTAs. For example, you can offer prospective customers an interesting e-book on the software so that they recognize its benefits for themselves.
"If customers are provided with content that appeals to them and helps them further, this promotes their CX."
3. Marketing automation improves lead generation and your own brand image
By creating automated workflows and personalized content, MATs generate high-quality leads sooner: They attract potential customers sooner and lead them into the "sales funnel" faster, resulting in a higher conversion rate and more sales.
At the same time, you can store information about your own brand presence (in the form of templates and processes). This helps you to provide your customers with high-quality content and to design offers uniformly on all channels. A coherent appearance creates trust, because recognition plays an important role in customer relationships - the keyword is "branding".
4. marketing automation enables better reporting
MATs provide detailed insights into your customers' behavior and the effectiveness of your campaigns. By monitoring this data, you can make decisions that improve your CX. The software creates scorings that help to draw attention to sales-relevant contacts, while AB testing tests variants of content: Who is most likely to respond to which version, when and how?
Finally, data analysis can also indicate problems at an early stage - so that you can react quickly to keep your customers satisfied. Their information history helps the sales team to address them more personally and accurately so that they feel more understood.
5. marketing automation supports customer service in communication
What many people don't know: Some MAT software includes features that support CX mapping in customer service and retention. These include dialogue-based tools, a shared mailbox, help desk automation, knowledge base capabilities, customer feedback and custom surveys, reporting, a customer portal and guides.
Let's assume our example contact has actually purchased the software and is now a customer. Thanks to the MAT functions for customer service and retention, he can now continue to be supported. Customer service and sales (for cross-selling and upselling if necessary) now have an overview of his entire history thanks to the information collected and can provide him with more targeted support so that he is satisfied in the long term.
Conclusion: Why it pays to invest in marketing automation
Positive customer experience values are also a key success factor in the B2B sector. A positive CX should therefore be the focus for every company - in the long term and across all departments. The numerous benefits of marketing automation make it clear how useful it is to embed it in a CX program. Of course, customer experience still remains a complex topic, but marketing automation tools reduce this complexity and make CX more tangible. Provided that you evaluate the results within your company across departments and develop joint strategies.
