Tokopedia

In an unprecedented time like today, it is estimated that marketing teams will have to reduce its budget and number of staff quite significantly. At the same time, marketers are challenged to deliver more results by improving its effectiveness in spending marketing budget while ensuring that users still engage with the products. Marketing automation with its purpose to drive growth by delivering personalized messages effectively to the right people at the right time without going through painful manual processes is a strategy that should be applied by companies to maintain engagement and grow sales during this difficult time.

Imagine this scenario. Scenario A, during the pandemic you want to explore the opportunity to start a business on Tokopedia, you fill in the open-shop form and wait for the company to contact you, but they don’t. Imagine another scenario, a few minutes after you fill in the open-shop form, you get a personalized email from the CEO that says he appreciates your first big step in opening your business with a task list that will guide you for your first few days. They will also send you several bite-sized tips which you can easily follow to help you get your first order. Of these two approaches, which one made a positive first impression, and which one left you cold? You’ll most likely choose the one that was responsive, that took you seriously enough to welcome you and help. That’s the power of marketing automation.

In summary, there are four things why we believe marketing automation is a great investment

1. Automating our campaigns improves efficiency

With a marketing automation system, we can improve productivity and surely can shift a marketing team’s capacity from delivering mundane tasks to problem solving and brainstorming innovative ideas. Even though the creation of triggered-based communication takes more resources, through automation we can cut down the number of repetitive tasks.

2. Help the company to create a consistent user experience

Automation marketing allows us to deliver a consistent brand experience that meets user expectations and builds trust. Automation helps marketers determine lost opportunities and create a communication journey to make sure that there is no single user falling through the cracks. Delivering a consistent user experience means: 1) consistent communication with every single user as we nurture each of them through their unique journey with our platform; 2) the communication is streamlined across all users that fall into specific criterias.

"Automation marketing allows us to deliver a consistent brand experience that meets user expectations and builds trust"

When a user registers in our platform, this person will receive an automated welcoming email that will also be received by other users who fall into similar criteria. The same welcome sequence for all users ensures a consistent brand experience for everyone.

3. Enable us to tailor experience and offerings to users’ needs

In fact, segmentation is rather outdated, and our users want everything to be personalized. As humans, we love a personal touch that makes us feel special. Demand for a tailored communication experience can only be delivered through marketing automation. It is almost impossible for us to manually pull a query every second and deliver the communication right away for 24/7 with zero tolerance of human error.

In Tokopedia, our marketers leverage marketing automation to refine target and customizing contents with the objective to deliver meaningful interactions by leveraging the data we already have. With the vast amount of data available, we use automation to understand and organize data to offer a highly personalized journey to every user based on their past activities or behavior and provided information. Tailored recommendations, content, channel, offers, and experience are able to transform a visitor to become a new buyer and finally a power buyer.

4. Improve return on investment

By the time we focus on users and satisfy them, we are seeing a significant increase in our engagement with them. Internally, in Tokopedia we always experiment to understand the impact of our marketing automations. From this, we learn that highly personalized content, channel, and timing allows us to influence purchase decisions, thereby boosting our sales and improving our marketing ROI.

Building marketing automation is a must to deliver a delightful user experience, but we all know that it is not easy as it should start from building data foundation in Customer Data Platform (CDP), integrating with the marketing tools to scale, designing the user experience, to delivering the marketing communications across channels. For marketplace platforms, due to large amounts of data, it is nearly impossible to create a consistent customer journey that, at the same time, is tailored to every user without automation.