Through ActOn, strategic marketing automation becomes simple.

ActOnSoftware is a global leader in the field of growth marketing. It provides solutions that enable marketers to surpass the leading position and cooperate with target companies at every stage of the customer life cycle. In this interview, KateJohnson, CEO of ActOn, describes how to create an excellent customer experience and foresees the bright future of the online marketing industry.

Please describe the story behind the company: what inspired this idea and how it developed to this day. Acton, founded in 2008, is a company focusing on automating and optimizing the development process of potential customers. Our goal is to help marketers use data intelligently, provide information for strategy and adapt to each customer. This is still the essence of our work, although our technology is much more complicated now.

We focus on helping marketers of all skill levels implement growth marketing strategies to increase their profits and deepen customer relationships. Leadgen is still important, but it is only part of a successful modern customer engagement strategy.

The following are some screenshots of Act on the dashboard:

What are the basic elements of a good customer trip? A good customer trip shows customers that we value them and want to educate them, not just sell them. Customers want to cooperate with brands they trust and love. This will only happen if customers are cultivated at every contact point, not just when they are "met" for the first time.

First of all, you need to know your audience and their unique concerns and pain points. You can find out what they have heard from potential customers by talking to existing customers, mining online comments from platforms and even competitors, and working with sales teams. Once you have determined what is important to your target audience, it's time for you to make a strategy. How can we win business? What resources can we provide to show how our solutions can solve their problems?

Paying attention to customer behavior through this process is the key to decide how to transform customers at the highest point of customer participation. Look at your data and let it inform your strategy.

However, once you win customers' business, you can't ignore them. You need to cultivate them at every contact point. Our customer, RedLionHotels, has made good use of our platform to do this. Red Lion Hotel can not only send warm and useful welcome emails automatically, but also use our automation suite to stimulate people's interest in its customer loyalty programs, and celebrate personal milestones such as customers' birthdays through automatic rewards. These are all good examples of continuing to successfully attract customers to extend their life cycle.

What are the common marketing automation mistakes and how to avoid them? Usually, we will see a misunderstanding that automation helps to reduce the personal customer experience because we eliminate a layer of "humanized" contact. However, the opposite is true. Marketers who use automation strategically can create richer and more personalized experiences to respond to specific contacts and what they think is most useful. Take ActOn's adaptive sending function as an example. This enables us to send an email to someone when they are most likely to open their inbox. This will bring more satisfactory customer experience and add value to the enterprise.

In addition, if marketers use it to output a large amount of information to customers or potential customers, instead of using it to understand the way the audience wants to participate most, automation may be abused. Customers can't tolerate spam, and they will soon avoid companies that they think bombard them with irrelevant information. The strategic use of automated tools can help marketers accurately understand the resources that potential customers are most interested in, such as specific e-books or webinars, and put the resources where people are most interested. How does 20 19 coronavirus disease change customers' use of your service?

The epidemic of influenza forces marketers to take a long-term and serious look at their marketing mix and cut their budgets when they know how to deal with the unpredictable environment. Fortunately, marketing automation provides great value by helping companies maintain business growth with limited budget and human resources. In addition, we also see that without any face-to-face meeting, customers have to rely more on digital communication, so the usage rate of our platform is also increasing. In this environment, it is also difficult to predict customer behavior, because behavior changes so frequently. We have received positive feedback from Act, and customers use our platform to track their participation and quickly adjust their strategies to maintain leading growth. Finally, marketers are also avoiding huge contracts that require them to pay for large lists or data sets that cannot be fully utilized. We are ahead in this respect, providing active contact pricing, so that marketers can spend money on moving pointers instead of inactive databases.

What recent trends or technologies have you found particularly interesting? When coronavirus broke out in 20 19, the company had to change the network mode quickly, forcing many people with backward digital marketing strategies to become experts overnight. Although physical stores and on-site activities are slowly returning to normal as the epidemic continues, the increasing emphasis on digital strategy will certainly continue.

Customers and potential customers spend more and more time online, which also urges people to give priority to multi-channel platforms. The target contact is no longer in contact with the website or environment in the silo. They may visit 10 or more different platforms in a day or even an hour to try to make a purchase decision. As more and more customers participate in the network, companies that do not integrate behavioral data from all these sources to create overall audience profiles will fall behind.

This is one of the reasons why we cooperated with Zapier in June to strengthen integration in our own marketing automation suite. ActOn integrates hundreds of other platforms, including LinkedIn, Zoom and EventBrite, to help marketers better inform their strategies and contact contacts in important places. What's your future action plan?

We have been self-evaluating how to become a stronger partner for marketers who want to develop their business and go beyond the simple prospect development strategy. This takes many forms. In the next few months, we plan to continue to strengthen our integration ability so that marketers can better attract their audiences, no matter where they are active.

And, especially as marketers pay more attention to numbers, we are investing in data compliance. Dealing with customer data is our main responsibility, and data privacy is the primary consideration for many of our customers and potential customers. We are proud to lead the industry in compliance, and recently we expanded our cloud infrastructure to Canada, so that our customers and end users can more easily create a secure experience that complies with local regulations.

The marketing industry is developing rapidly, and we are committed to helping marketers stay ahead and develop their business at every stage of the customer life cycle.