Automation, Ho!

Dollars are tight, and consumers want to keep track of where every dollar goes

And for any money related business, that concern is multiplied many times over.

For Wells Fargo Financial, automation was a way to tie together the division's eight different lines of credit-related businesses. The company has worked with Aprimo for about three years, says Mike Clancy, senior vice president of marketing for Wells Fargo.

“[Before,] we didn't have a high level of automation,” says Clancy. “Any time we had an external audit it was a struggle to pull things together.”

A challenge was getting a handle on how the company was utilizing marketing resources, overall dollars spent and overall productivity. “Marketing tends to be a mystery to the rest of the organization,” he laughed.

Wells Fargo Financial, which has over 4.5 million customers, markets predominantly online, although it does have a strong direct mail presence. Automation helped the company get a clearer picture of the customer base and cross-sell to those customers better by tying together what is happening on the call center side, at ATMs and branches.

In today's environment, marketers are looking to marry the online and offline world, with the natural goal of lowering the cost of customer retention, says Lisa Arthur, CMO of Aprimo. “It's a great time for marketing to be driving this and merging them into a holistic, measurable view.”

While marketers are more intent about analytics, automation can still be a tough sell. Arthur advises starting small and getting a clear picture of how the organization is communicating with the prospect and customer base — as well as the partner ecosystem — online, and then build out from there.

“A good chunk of marketers tend to think as themselves as creative purveyors of the brand,” says Arthur. “The word ‘automation’ tends to fly in the face of that. But [automation] isn't a restriction on that creativity; rather, it can be an enabler of creativity, because less time is spent mired in trying to find files and more in crafting the right message.”