At Dunn Solutions we are often developing new e-commerce sites and also integrating marketing automation and data analytics into a complete customer focused solution for our clients. Working on these projects gives us an up-close view of the reality of how marketing teams and e-commerce teams use and leverage the technology they recently implemented. We often see a disconnect between the promises presented in the sales process by technology platform account managers and actual benefits from the platforms post-implementation.

The Skills Required for Marketing Automation Excellence

The issue typically revolves around the type of skills necessary to fully implement a complete e-commerce marketing automation solution. The drag and drop demos during the sales process gloss over the complexity of implementing and running multiple campaigns which are really segmented appropriately by end user needs and drive dramatic increases in sales. After working with over 8 different well known marketing automation platforms in the last 3 years we have found that a number of skills are required to really drive marketing automation excellence.

We can divide those skills sets into groups that are typically handled by marketing professionals and those which are more Information Tech/Data Science as shown below:

Marketing Professional Skills

• Brand strategy
• Persona development
• Customer journey mapping based on personas
• Copy Writing based on persona, brand, customer journey and product category
• Graphic arts

Information Tech/Data Science

• HTML, CSS, JavaScript to create email templates that work across mobile, desktop, and tablet
• Implementing complex, trigger-based customer journeys in the marketing automation platform, which encompasses understanding: E-Commerce platform integration and an understanding of programming including variables, loops, cookies, web services
• CRM, E-Commerce Site, Marketing Automation, Off-Line Data integration into a Customer Data Repository (CDP)
• Building Segmentation models based on CDP data to put customers into the correct journey
• Building pricing and promotion models based on CDP to properly target customers inside of marketing emails
• Managing and monitoring the execution of all the active campaigns

The Challenge for Small Marketing Teams

While large marketing organizations may have the internal resources to handle all of this themselves many smaller marketing teams are swamped just taking care of the items under the “Marketing Professional” list. This leaves them precious little time to also become IT and data science experts. The result: most marketing teams barely scratch the surface of the capabilities available in higher end marketing automation platforms, relying simply on creating date driven batch email sends to their customer community.

The truth is that the IT/Data Science part is typically not a full-time effort for the 3-6 roles required to execute these tasks, so it is hard to make the case to hire these types of resources full time in the marketing department.

Partnering with Dunn Solutions for Marketing Automation Success

We believe a better solution would be to partner with Dunn Solutions to handle the “back office” part of marketing automation while the marketing team continues to focus on the creative and brand strategy.

We have a full-time internal information technology, operations, and data science team ready to support you in fully implementing the power of your marketing automation and e-commerce tools. Our teams know how to pull data from your various systems including CRM, E-Commerce, and Marketing, combine that data and analyze it, and then turn the results into actionable marketing automation flows.

We can run the marketing automation operations while reporting back on the success of each campaign and the metrics and ROI that results. Our data science team can help you better target your audiences and offer them the right promotion and incentive to drive sales without sacrificing margin.

Together we can make a great marketing team! To discuss how we can partner together in more detail drop us a line at info@dunnsolutions.com and we can talk in person.