An overview of marketing automation

1.1. What is marketing automation

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies specifically designed for marketing departments or organizations to more effectively conduct multi-channel marketing online and automate repetitive tasks. Marketing departments and salespeople improve efficiency and reduce human error by developing operational standards for tasks and processes that are then interpreted, stored, and executed by IT systems.

The purpose of the marketing automation platform is to simplify sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.

The marketing automation platform is the dashboard marketers use to plan, coordinate, manage, and measure all online and offline marketing campaigns. It is often used in conjunction with user lifecycle marketing strategies to closely manage and nurture generated leads, aimed at turning leads into customers.

Marketing automation is a subset of customer relationship management (CRM) that focuses on the definition, segmentation, scheduling, and tracking of marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise need to be performed manually more efficient and enables new processes.

Marketing automation can be defined as a process that uses technology to automate multiple repetitive tasks that are performed regularly in a marketing campaign. Tools that allow individuals to design, execute, and automate time-bound marketing workflows can be called marketing automation platforms.

Marketing automation platforms allow marketers to automate and simplify customer communication by managing complex omnichannel marketing strategies with a single tool. Marketing automation provides a great help in potential customer generation, segmentation, lead cultivation and lead rating, relationship marketing, cross-selling and upselling, retention, ROI measurement and other areas. Effective marketing automation tools leverage data from individual or integrated CRM to understand customer influence and preferences.

1.2. Why develop marketing automation platform

1.2.1 Business problems and pain points

  • Marketing timing is difficult to grasp the pain, unable to effectively identify active, automatic operation reach time, difficult to achieve timely reach, lost communication opportunities.

  • For different delivery channels and users, if all users see exactly the same content, the operation effect is bound to be poor, seriously affecting user reputation.

  • The pain of manual operation, many operation scenarios need to be implemented in real time, manual can not monitor and operate every moment.

  • Single user access channel, unable to effectively integrate all access channels, resulting in waste of access.

  • It is difficult to measure the effect of activities, and the effect of attribution transformation cannot be effective. If we do not know whether an activity is good or bad, ROI cannot be measured.

1.2.2 Advantages of marketing automation platform

  • Improve management efficiency, standardize marketing process, automatically supervise and assess marketing process, solidify marketing SOP, guarantee marketing quality, improve service quality, replace a lot of repetitive work and save labor cost.

  • Improve marketing conversion efficiency, short-term marketing effect and long-term user LTV.

  • Improve user experience satisfaction, through professional creative solutions, with reasonable rights and interests resources, to carry out marketing activities that users like, avoid marketing activities to disturb users, improve NPS.

1.3. What are the challenges of marketing automation platform construction

1) Multi-department collaboration to break data silos.

Build massive big data marketing data warehouse, provide powerful big data OLAP technology, meet the needs of large-scale data processing.

2) Provide a rich library of marketing strategies to support the changing marketing scenarios, improve the conversion rate of reach delivery, and achieve the ultimate goal of fine operation and smart marketing.

Flexible rule engines need to be developed to realize intelligent clustering, intelligent scheme design, intelligent matching and automatic delivery.

3) High availability requirements above 99.99%.

As the connection center of data and business, the technical architecture must ensure the system to support the goal of high availability.

The following is an overall introduction to the overall business and technical architecture of Vivo marketing automation platform.

Ii. Product architecture of Vivo marketing automation platform

Vivo marketing automation platform is mainly divided into four business modules:

2.1. Crowd management module

The main function of the crowd management module is to provide the target audience for the marketing automation system and complete the fine classification. There are three types of clustering: manual clustering, regular clustering and intelligent clustering.

For b-end marketing automation system, the crowd management module also includes clue management function. The clue here is the potential audience. Cue management function also provides cue scoring and grading to complete marketing transformation more effectively.

Technical challenges of crowd management module include:

  • Massive big data OLAP technology to provide real-time crowd selection;

  • Provide ultra large scale data processing technology.

The main functions of the crowd management module are: clue management, identity management, potential customer management, crowd management, crowd selection, crowd sampling, crowd expansion, crowd orientation and passenger flow insight.

2.2. Marketing strategy module

The main function of marketing strategy module is to provide strategy plan library for marketing automation system. This strategy library is a pointer to the marketing strategy and delivery process established for users. For example, for one week of purchase, it belongs to the new purchase user push playing skills; When users enter the order page, push coupon information to users who have not paid for one day to help the final conversion; 50% discount coupon for 3 purchases within 7 days.

Marketing program is the experience of marketing automation system, is one of the core assets, can standardize and guide marketing behavior, establish marketing SOP. The core function of marketing strategy module is program library management and program matching. The scheme is mainly divided into static scheme and dynamic scheme. In the initial stage of marketing automation system construction, static schemes will be used to verify product form and value. When the system is gradually improved, it will gradually provide dynamic scheme capability, and finally static scheme and dynamic scheme will coexist in the system, compatible with each other. Matching scheme is to match the best marketing strategy for users. When users can match multiple schemes, the system needs to select the optimal scheme based on user experience and cost.

The marketing strategy module also contains material management functions, which can manage text, pictures, videos, small programs, H5 pages and APP content materials in a unified manner.

The technical challenges of marketing strategy module include: powerful rules engine, flexible workflow engine and system modeling.

The main functions of marketing strategy module are: program management, program design, activity management, content management and user journey design.

2.3. Touch the delivery module

The main function of touch delivery module is to integrate the touch channel of Vivo, open up the whole touch link, provide a one-stop touch platform, and provide effect data recovery function.

The channel management function provides contact access configuration and content template configuration. Through the channel integration function, the overall access to the optimal mechanism, the selection of appropriate channels and alternative strategies. Marketing automation system also needs to consider the marketing activities of the user to disturb, to avoid negative word of mouth, so it needs to provide anti-harassment function, mainly through frequency control Settings, black and white single to achieve.

Technical challenges to reach the delivery module include: real-time delivery execution engine, high performance and high availability of delivery requirements.

The main functions of reach module are: channel management, channel integration, effect data evaluation and user anti-harassment function.

2.4. Measurement center module

The main function of the measurement center module is to provide operational indicator reports for the effect of marketing activities and evaluate the effect of operations. To record data on the process data and transformation results, analyze statistical measurement targets set by science, evaluate whether the input and output than expected marketing activities, whether operating effect core index reach the goal, to help users understand the situation, we have achieved the goal of finding out problems of marketing activities throughout the link, and optimize the next marketing solutions. The core indicators of the measurement center module are user activation, retention, churn, touch, in-store and re-purchase.

Iii. System architecture of Vivo marketing automation platform

3.1 System Architecture

** *Nginx load balancing;

** [Service layer] ** Mainly deployed application service modules include crowd selection service, activity configuration service, scheme execution service, delivery service and measurement service.

  • Crowd selection: provides crowd creation, crowd management, crowd calculation, and crowd orientation functions;

  • Activity configuration: responsible for connecting the management and configuration services of the operation background and providing basic configuration capabilities and information interfaces;

  • Programme execution: Responsible for the actual implementation of activities, including activity triggering and data processing;

  • Service delivery: abstract reach ability, provide unified business access to external channels function;

  • Measurement services: provide operational measurement report visualization capabilities;

These five services can be separated independently. Considering the complexity of the system, they can be defined in a modular way in the early stage.

** [Computing layer] ** Mainly includes basic data services, automation scheme execution and channel access services

  • Data services: provides data insight, crowd computing, intelligent clustering and crowd orientation.

  • Marketing automation engine: obtain activity configuration information, according to the marketing plan, do index calculation, crowd matching and rule matching, the final output results, distribution and delivery.

  • Channel access service: the aggregation service layer of all-channel contact, which connects the sending and data recovery interfaces of external contact services such as SMS, push and wechat. Processing process: prepare to put materials, user address, anti-harassment frequency control, and finally reach the user.

[Storage Layer]

  • It mainly uses MySQL to store business data, while Redis is used as a cache service and ES is used as a data query tool.

  • Another key big data application is the Presto query engine, which acts as a massive data analysis query engine (due to space reasons, the application practice of Presto engine scenarios will be analyzed in depth in a subsequent article).

[Common Components]

  • Monitoring system: Monitors system level and service indicators.

  • Rule engine: The rule engine is a key component of complex activity event rule processing, supporting a wide variety of activity rules with its powerful configuration extension capabilities (the practice of the rule engine will also be analyzed in depth in a subsequent article).

3.2. System design

3.2.1 Design of marketing strategy engine

Each marketing business process node is customized by workflow engine component to support highly scalable activity business. The core process includes: creation of operation activities (configuration of trigger timing, activity users, content configuration), approval of operation activities, and execution of operation activities.

In addition, design patterns and design principles are used for componentization and abstract processing of specific activity configuration, activity approval and activity execution node logic realization inside business process to achieve the goal of higher expansibility.

3.2.2 Integrated management of marketing all-channel touch points

By configuring different push strategies to carry out multi-dimensional combination of delivery, complementary channels can be configured in the same activity to improve the coverage of users. For a certain number of active users, for example, to use more in-depth business channels (example: WeChat channels) activity, no connection WeChat account or for other reasons lead to the failure WeChat touch of users, using coverage higher channels (such as SMS, every user with a phone number as account) to supplement touch, to enhance general contact rate.

Multi-channel data need to be unified to analyze the overall effect of activities, as well as touch frequency control and harassment prevention. Another key point is to improve the reach performance of single channel (currently, the number of daily users in all channels can reach tens of millions), and to do a good job in resource control and isolation between different channels.

3.2.3 Real-time marketing scene access

Through real-time event flow processing, rules of different activities can be matched to achieve real-time reach effect.

Based on the integration of service data and log data, complete trigger data -> calculate data indicators -> match rules -> output results.

Take [sending SMS alerts within 10 minutes of users placing orders] as an example:

1. The business system sends the order data to the marketing automation platform via RabbitMQ.

2. The marketing automation platform makes use of the stored user information and order event configuration to complete user data (surname, mobile phone number).

3. Conduct rule matching for the event of “placing an order for 10 minutes” through the rule engine.

4. After the match is passed, the result data will be forwarded to the touch system in a unified format for SMS sending.

3.3. High availability construction

** 1) Monitoring & Alarm system **

System level monitoring and service indicator monitoring are included. Monitoring alarms at the system level, such as hosts, databases, containers, and domain names, with the help of infrastructure capabilities. At the same time, the operating status of the business, key indicators, the establishment of data kanban for real-time monitoring.

2) Smooth release

This ensures smooth application upgrade and does not affect task and contact data integrity. The rise of microservices, DevOps, and cloud native emphasizes that software can be delivered anytime, anywhere. In the process of publishing will need to attach importance to the impact on the system, as far as possible do nondestructive release, such as was released, just in the text at the same time, must make the pledge that we shall release process at this time does not affect the SMS delivery data integrity, can be applied to restart a hook function port to restart the business processing, can also be by saving the business data status to try again.

3) the current limit

Overload traffic is restricted to prevent services from being affected. During the operation of the marketing system, it is inevitable to encounter marketing hot season. However, when a large traffic activity is passively triggered or actively launched to a large number of users, it is necessary to evaluate the bearing capacity of the system and set an adjustable threshold under the bearing capacity for traffic limiting control.

4) Compensation retry and data idempotency

As a marketing platform, there are a lot of system businesses involved, and the core data delivery interface has a retry mechanism. Accordingly, the idempotency of data must be guaranteed. For example, an activity can push a task to a user only once. In this case, the activity ID + user ID can be used as the unique primary key of the service to implement idempotent anti-replay verification.

Four,

Marketing automation system has been in vivo and nationwide agent widely used, mainly used in the user operating life cycle, market marketing of new products, major nodes, member, fine marketing activities such as scene, business generally feedback to marketing work help larger, save a lot of labor costs, improve the efficiency of marketing, It provides obvious value.

This is the beginning of a series of articles titled “Marketing automation Technology Deciphering”, which gives an overall introduction to marketing automation business and technology. Of course, this is only a beginning, marketing automation technology in the use and scene landing process there are a lot of practical experience summary and everyone to share, we will continue to bring the following “marketing automation technology decryption” series of special articles:

1. “Marketing Automation Technology Decryption | Engine part – Design Pattern and Application Practice”

2. “Marketing Automation Technology Decryption | Engine Part – State Machine Application Practice”

3. “Marketing Automation Technology Decryption | Engine Part – Workflow Engine Application Practice”

4. “Marketing Automation Technology Decryption | Engine Part – Real-time Event Engine Application Practice”

5. “Marketing Automation Technology Decryption | Engine Part – Rule Engine Application Practice”

6. Marketing Automation Technology Decryption | Channel Chapter

7. Decryption of Marketing Automation Technology | Data

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Stay tuned for detailed analysis of technical practices in each article.

Author: Liao Yi, Vivo Internet Server Team