How automation is helping enhance performance marketing efficiency

The third edition of DATAMATIXX ASIA 2024 Summit and Awards, held on August 6, 2024, brought together industry leaders to explore the frontiers of data, AI, and marketing evolution. A key highlight of the summit was a panel discussion titled ‘Using Automation to Enhance Performance Marketing Efficiency’, which was chaired by Udit Verma, Co-Founder and CMO, Trackier. The esteemed panelists included:

Argho Bhattacharya, Head of Marketing, PayU Payments

Fatima Sham Mahimwala, Marketing Director, SMOOR

Himanshu Khandelwal, AVP Digital Business, Axis Mutual Fund

Saugata Bagchi, Global Head - Digital, Experiential & Content Marketing, Tata Communications

Kanchan Shah, Head of Marketing, Brand Concepts Ltd

Suraj Shetty, Head of Customer Experience & Learning Development,

Ring | Kissht

Commencing the panel Udit Verma remarked, “In the rapidly growing landscape of digital marketing, staying ahead requires creativity. More than just creativity and strategy, it requires leveraging technology to enhance performance efficiency to maximize the ROI. He then asked the panellists how automation can impact they specific area of performance marketing.

Kanchan Shah said, “It helps you in many ways – it brings you good RoI, it controls your ACOS, which are the very core in acquisition or performance marketing. These are the two parameters which are constantly monitored, this helps you to control both. This is a very important part of why we use AI.”

Agreeing with Shah, Fatima Sham Mahimwala added, “It helps with your RoI and ACOS and it keeps your customers coming back for more. And the longevity of your customers is increased. So, that's where automation comes in.”

Argho Bhattacharya emphasized, “Automation makes my life easier, that’s why I use it. It makes execution of campaigns or measurement of campaigns easier for my team. In today’s world, there’s no other way than automation. If you have not already automated your marketing processes or your sales processes, the best time was yesterday and the next best time is today.”

Himanshu Khandelwal noted, “Performance marketing and automation are now at the heart of each other. They cannot stitch the way performance marketing has evolved in the last few years. Google, Facebook, everyone is now pushing towards making things more in control with the business user. With automation, there comes huge value added to the business. They can control personalization at scale. At least the industry where I come from – mutual funds, where we have a user from Rs 100 scheme to Rs 10 lakh rupees – is very diverse.  It is very easy, with a little more automation coming in the picture, doing personalization, omnichannel experience and then obviously optimizing the spends that we are going to target and ultimately the acquisition comes. And lastly, it boils down to the CLV (customer lifetime value).”

Citing a survey findings, Saugata Bagchi said, “On an average, a marketeer spends 16 hours a week basically doing tasks like email lists and marketing lists and so on and so forth. With the right kind of automation coming in, 16 hours a week means two working days. Imagine if you can free up two working days, the amount of work that you can get done additionally with the investment that you’re making in automation – that itself pays for the cost of the licenses, cost of the tools and so on and so forth.”

Suraj Shetty noted, “At present, learning and development are not linked to performance marketing. When it comes to learning and development, we have a vast field or team which is spread across pan-India, around some 8,000 people who are into sales and collections. They do direct sales to customers and also to businesses, mostly small business like a kirana store, etc. The automation that we have done here in learning and development is that whenever you have a big team in the field, a lot of queries come up. Every now and then there would be attrition. Many people are new joinees, they do not know what’s happening. They want someone to handhold them. And this handholding is not available 24/7, so what we have done is we have created a GenAI chatbot for this field team, which can answer their queries with respect to the product, with respect to the process, also with respect to HR related matters.”

Speaking about customer experience, Shetty said, “We have a marketing automation platform. It helps us streamline data and also work which is usually without the platform, you would need at least a team of 20-25 people to do all the data analysis and to take decisions within a day. And this entire work can be done by just one or two people sitting on the platform. So, it’s necessary to have platforms which can automate tasks with respect to creation of cohorts. it can immediately show you on the dashboard what is working, what is not working, and you can make changes on the fly within a day or within hours, you can make these changes. That helps.”

These are edited excerpts. For the complete panel discussion, please watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZZZxiahKk