Last week, our team had a chance to attend the Digital Summit DC and learn about the latest trends in digital marketing! The conference featured a variety of sessions highlighting best practices, emerging technologies, and innovative solutions to issues frequently faced by modern marketers across all domains, from design, content, and user experience to mobile, social media, and analytics. For those who weren’t able to attend, three major themes from the event were:

• Not enough time! Most marketers know and understand common best practices, such as A/B testing, lead scoring, and capturing implicit consumer behavior, but don’t have enough time or fail to consistently implement these practices in daily activities.
• Email is not dead. As a result of the growth in mobile, email is experiencing a renaissance with new best practices, such as “embracing the scroll” with clean, single column layouts and not wasting valuable pre-header text in the mobile inbox with “Having trouble viewing this email…”
• Data drives decisions. Marketing has experienced an increased level of power in the boardroom, with a growing influence on business strategy development, and as such, must use data to drive decisions that align with and meet business goals.

How can marketers improve on these themes? Marketing automation!  With the help of marketing automation tools, marketers can quickly implement best practices using dynamic content and personalization features, as well as act on a multi-dimensional view of a customer over time with triggers based on both activity and inactivity. Also, through automation, marketers can capitalize on all interactions with the customer to encourage further engagement, including the sometimes overlooked transactional emails, which often have the highest open rates. Finally, marketing automation enables marketers to track and analyze customer engagement at not only the campaign level, but also to regularly monitor and asses the overall database health.

Contact us to learn more about how marketing automation can enhance your digital strategy and overall marketing operations!