The Pros and Cons of Marketing Automation: An Optimizely perspective

As your organization grows, it’s essential to have marketing automation in place to send relevant and personalized messages to all of your customers and prospects at the right time. It’s time-consuming, even impossible, to do all of that manually. But when 72% of consumers say they will only engage with personalized marketing messages, as a recent study showed, then businesses need to sit up and make the investment. This is where Optimizely Campaign comes into play. Previously known as Episerver Intelligent Campaigns (Episerver rebranded as Optimizely) it is a powerful omnichannel marketing automation tool that goes beyond generic emails to deliver meaningful, personalized engagement.

Ready to discover how marketing automation can transform your outreach and how Optimizely Campaign can elevate your strategy? Let's find out! 

What is marketing automation? 

Marketing automation is all about making your marketing efforts easier and more efficient! By automating tasks like sending emails, scheduling social media posts, creating workflows for new users, and more, you can spend less time on repetitive tasks and focus on what really matters—growing your business. 

Here are a few tools you might find helpful: 

• Automated email campaigns: With platforms like Mailchimp, you can customize emails based on what your customers do, like their recent purchases or website visits. This personal touch can really help engage your audience! 
• Social media scheduling: Tools such as Hootsuite let you plan and schedule your posts ahead of time. This way, you can maintain a consistent online presence without having to constantly log in. 
• All-in-one marketing platforms: Optimizely combines various marketing tasks—from personalization to content management—into one easy platform, making it a breeze to handle all your campaigns in one place. 

In short, marketing automation is a fantastic way to scale your efforts, build better customer relationships, and streamline your workflows. 

Optimizely Campaign Hub: A powerful marketing automation solution for campaign mailings 

What is Optimizely Campaign?

The Optimizely Campaign Hub, which evolved from the Episerver Intelligent Campaigns suite, is a key component of the all-in-one marketing operating system, Optimizely DXP. Optimizely Campaign Hub is a powerful solution designed for omnichannel marketing, enabling marketers to automate and manage campaigns across various channels. It offers scalability, allowing businesses to grow their marketing efforts without increasing manual workload. With benefits such as enhanced personalization, improved efficiency, and data-driven insights, Optimizely Campaign helps marketers achieve better engagement and higher conversion rates. 

Features of Optimizely Campaign: 

• Omnichannel marketing automation 
• Smart campaign management 
• AI-driven personalization 
• Template Kit 
• Performance Dashboard and Deep and Live Analytics 
• Various integrations 

Source: Optimizely 

The Pros & Cons of Optimizely Campaign 

Pros 

• Managing multi-channel campaigns: Provides an intuitive editor to create both one-shot mailing campaigns and complex marketing automations across multiple channels, including print, mobile push, web push, and SMS. 
• Strong security and privacy: It’s one of the few platforms that is ISO 27001 certified, meaning it boasts strong security and privacy (ISO/IEC 27001 is the best-known standard providing certificates to those that pass its audit and meet its information security management requirements). 
• Because Optimizely Campaign is fully compliant, it has high email deliverability 
• Integration ability: If you’re using Optimizely CMS, this marketing automation tool would obviously integrate well to create a consistent customer experience   Moreover, it can seamlessly integrate with major web analytics, Ecommerce, and CRM systems, including Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and Salesforce. APIs and webhooks facilitate real-time data integration and automation. 
• Diverse features for effective marketing automation: Offers a wide range of tools such as AI-driven personalization, A/B testing, campaign management, and comprehensive analytics to ensure efficient and effective marketing strategies. 

Cons 

• No pre-set lead scoring functionality – can be bought as an add-on. 
• It doesn’t come with a CRM system. 
• It’s not as popular as some of the alternative marketing automation tools such as Hubspot, Marketo, MailChimp, Eloqua, and Pardot. Therefore, you may not hear about it as often nor read lots of its reviews online. Optimizely Campaign is relatively new. Thus, there aren’t as many people trained to use it, even though the tool is quite intuitive and easy to use. 

Optimizely/Episerver marketing automation examples  

Here are some examples of automated campaigns supported by Optimizely Campaign:   

• Welcome series: A multi-stage campaign that introduces new subscribers to the brand and collects their personal information, interests, and preferences to send them the right offer and turn them into new customers.   
• Triggered emails: A triggered campaign can nurture leads and existing customers at the right time. Optimizely Campaign can send automatic emails triggered by a specific event you’ve set up. For example, if a lead fills out a form or downloads a case study, they will get a message immediately instead of having to wait for a member of your team to contact them. The nurturing campaign will move the lead through a defined journey to turn them into a hot lead.   
• Product recommendation campaigns: You can implement follow-up purchase encouragement easily and automatically via integration and analytics in Optimizely Campaign.   
• Abandoned cart campaign: Sending automatic abandoned cart emails has become easier than ever with Optimizely Campaign. Your customers will get emails with product recommendations and other buying incentives.  
• Reactivation: Optimizely Campaign also enables you to reduce customer inactivity and withdrawal with reactivation campaigns. Your organization can now investigate why customers have become inactive and offer them incentives to engage with your business again.    

Marketing automation: Driving More Growth for Less 

Marketing automation isn’t just hype. With technology, your marketing department can now automate many repetitive tasks easily and build better relationships with your customers and leads. You can now reach them just in time – when they need your help the most! In a world of constant distraction and overwhelming communications, sending a relevant message at the right time shows your customers how much you care about them as individuals. Therefore, you will be more likely to catch their attention. Optimizely Campaign is an excellent marketing automation tool choice to help you generate new leads, nurture existing customers and grow your business! 

As the world’s largest certified Optimizely partner, Niteco specializes in building an building an omnichannel commerce experience, helping your business grow faster than ever! Contact us now!