How to Use Marketing Orchestration to Increase your Conversion Rates.

Marketing Orchestration is something that can be quite hard to wrap your head around if you are trying to do it yourself for the first time. It’s basically a complex system that will help you automate marketing, based on data.

In this blog I’ll go through some examples where you can achieve this marketing orchestration.

In today’s world, marketers can choose from a near infinite variety of technologies to grow their business. Chiefmartec listed over 8000 marketing technologies in 2020. An increase of 13% from the previous year.

Virtually every digital aspect of your business can be leveraged and nurtured with technology. From user acquisition to customer experience, there seems to be no shortage of affiliate marketing tools available.

The plus side of having so many tools to choose from is achieving true marketing automation. Marketing automation has been popular for a while now so marketers can talk to their audience easily and at scale.

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re probably automating some of your marketing. But, you’ve probably run into obstacles a few times when you realize your conversion data isn’t fully synced across all your tools.

Until that happens, true marketing automation is but a dream. More on this later.

Marketing automation has helped marketers all over the world automate their workflows and grow their businesses.

This trend exploded in popularity and “automate everything” became the new mantra. And it still works. But just because something works now doesn’t mean it’s the best option, nor the best option for the long term.

Marketers got so caught up in automation that they forget they’re talking to real people on the other side of the computer screen. Marketers sacrificed personalization for scale and automation.

And the people on the other side of the screen can tell the difference. This isn’t the early 2000’s anymore where a dynamic parameter including the customers name and location would “wow” the customer.

You have to step up your game and learn how to start affiliate marketing, the right way.

You do that by marrying your marketing automation with real personalization.

This can be done with marketing orchestration.

What is Marketing Orchestration?

Photo source: Integrate

Marketing Orchestration is the process of leveraging multiple data sources in order to provide a better customer experience, through personalization, timely and omnichannel communication.

It’s quite literally like a philharmonic orchestra where each musician plays their part in perfect harmony with their peers, while each person listening to the music will perceive and be sensitive to the multiple sounds and tones.

It’s similar to the marketing mantra saying:

“Deliver the right message, through the right channel, at the right time and to the right person”.

With marketing orchestration, instead of making informed decisions based on results, you plan your “music” according to your business goals, and automate your decision making based on actions, triggers and data that is constantly feeding your marketing tools.

It’s the difference between:

• Automatically sending an email to a user who opted in to your email list

Vs

• Automatically sending a specific email to a user
  • who opted in to your email list, and
  • has read a minimum of 3 posts, and
  • has clicked on 3 specific offers on your website, and
  • has not yet made a purchase, and
  • adding the user to a Facebook audience (so you can promote the offer it didn’t convert for)

The latter scenario is only possible with marketing orchestration.

And marketing orchestration is only possible when you control the data flows across your marketing stack.

Now you might be thinking: “Damn! This sounds like the best thing to do, but isn’t it something that can only be achieved with super expensive platforms like Marketo, Pardot, or Adobe Marketing cloud?”

You’re right. Except that with the rise of platforms like Zapier, Integromat, and to some extent Google Tag Manager, data has become a lot more accessible to the “no coders” that we are. I mean, who doesn’t know what a webhook is?

Of course as performance marketers, since we are in the pursuit of our conversion data, these tools alone are not enough, and this is where AnyTrack comes very handy.

AnyTrack is a conversion tracking and data management platform that enables marketers to connect and orchestrate conversion data across any marketing stack.

Simply put, AnyTrack can automatically track and sync your conversion sources (affiliate networks, ecommerce, crm, API’s) with all your pixels, analytics, ad networks, and email marketing platform.

Marketing Orchestration vs Automation

A lot of marketers use orchestration and automation interchangeably, which is just wrong.

They are very different terms but are complementary to one another.

When you dig into what marketing automation actually is, you’ll see there’s nothing inherently “smart” about it. It’s nothing more than a computer executing one or more tasks based on rules you set for it, at scale.

But what informs these tasks? How do we get data points from multiple sources to communicate with one another so then we can use automation?

Now obviously marketing automation is still crucial for online businesses. Rule-based automation has worked for years now, but there is a better way.

A way to leverage data driven marketing with automation to get a serious competitive advantage.

👉 Enter: marketing orchestration.

Marketing orchestration looks at the bigger picture of your funnel and ensures your tools are talking to each other so you can provide the best customer experience possible.

Think of marketing orchestration as the glue that prevents your marketing automation from going off the deep end and sending ineffective and irrelevant messages to your audience.

Marketing orchestration informs your marketing decisions and keeps your communication in harmony so your customers get personalized messages based on actions they specifically took (or did not take).

Think about it like this:

• User added to cart but did not checkout.
• User looked at 3 products, but did not add to cart
• User checked out.

What do you want to do with these segments?

Now, add personalization to your email message: (not mentioning first name, last name which seems too obvious for the smart marketers that we are)

• Apply color and tone of voice based on gender and demographics.
• Apply timezone sending preferences – if you’re selling B2B, you’re not going to send your emails at 10pm during the week end.
• Add products, or upgrade plans based on current subsription.

Then with automation you can segments these customer and send them personalized and timely messages at scale.

The takeaway in this section is this:

Marketing automation is built to communicate at scale, marketing orchestration funnels the data that will enable marketing automation to run smoothly and You, to be more effective, relevant and at scale.

How does Marketing Orchestration help your business grow?

So we know that marketing orchestration connects our existing tools with our audience data. We also know that marketing automation saves us a ton of time communicating.

Can you think of a few ways marketing orchestration can help you grow your business?

Think about it for a moment and then keep reading.

Let’s run through one flow of marketing orchestration and see how when properly applied, it can grow your business.

1. You drive traffic from Facebook Ads to your Landing page. Users are clicking on offers, reading reviews, and spending time browsing your website.
2. You made 7 sales from this campaign. All from different offers. You also see a lot of user engagement in the form of outbound clicks to your offers, but those didn’t convert into a sale.
3. All of this data is tracked by AnyTrack and automatically fills up your Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics with this data.
4. You decide to create a custom audience of those who clicked on an offer but didn’t convert, and run a retargeting campaign offering them an exclusive discount to drive more sales.
5. You also create a custom audience of users who converted in the last week and offer them complementary products or services as an up sell. (Example: a user purchased a golf club yesterday, now you can run retargeting ads and show them offers for gloves and golf tees.

Scale:

With enough data filling up your pixels, you can now create two lookalike audiences on Google, Facebook, Bing, and Taboola.

1. Intent Audience: visitors that engaged with your site but did not convert.
2. Converters: visitors that actually converted.

Depending on what you sell, you can refine by products, product categories, and even conversion value – i.e. lookalike audience based on users that spent more than $100 in the past 30 days.

Start your campaigns from the top of the funnel, rinse and repeat!

As you can see with the flow above, we can use marketing orchestration to not only map the customer journey, but prioritize and exclude specific audience segments for maximum impact.

For affiliate marketers, this flow can easily be duplicated and executed by using AnyTrack.

Because AnyTrack tracks and orchestrates all your conversion data across your entire marketing stack, the data becomes immediately available to use everywhere.

Putting it all together

In the example above, we showed a flow using paid media. But the same idea can be done for email marketing, SEO, etc.

Side note: ActiveCampaign has a great case study on leveraging marketing orchestration with email marketing. Be sure to check it out for ideas.

Marketing orchestration is a powerful and underutilized methodology that can deliver significantly better customer experiences. And good customer experiences = more sales.

Use it to your advantage.

An example of non-existent marketing orchestration

This article wouldn’t be complete without showcasing an example of what happens when you don’t have proper marketing orchestration.

Forever 21, you’re up to bat here. A customer posted on Reddit how he got bombarded with over 20 emails in… 24 hours.

Poor guy.

This is a perfect example of non existent marketing orchestration. As you can see, their marketing automation tools had an absolute field day. The poor guy got tons of different emails non stop. And what’s worse is that post got over 35,000 up votes. So it pretty much went viral.

Now here’s probably why this guy got all these emails.

1. Abandoned a cart, so they sent him an email with a promo code
2. Hasn’t purchased in over 30 days, so they sent him an email with new product offerings
3. Checked out a new category of clothing, here’s another email for special offers for that new category
4. Clicked on a Facebook ad and didn’t redeem his coupon code, here’s another email to make sure you don’t miss out on the discount!

None of these marketing tactics on their own are bad. They’re “personalized”.

But what if all of the above occurred during the course of a day? Marketing automation on it’s own isn’t “smart” enough to handle these parameters.

That’s why having your affiliate marketing tools communicate with each other is absolutely essential.

This example may be extreme but this stuff happens on a smaller scale every single day.

Another common example is seeing retargeting ads for a software you’ve already signed up for.

Or seeing non stop YouTube ads to start your trial when you’ve already started it a week ago.

This stuff is not only common, but is also infuriating to be on the receiving end of.

If the retail giants and big software companies are making these mistakes, then you can guess how prevalent lack of marketing orchestration is.

Although marketing orchestration is one piece of the larger customer experience, it’s a very important piece.

You’ve seen examples of what’s possible good marketing orchestration and you’ve also seen how detrimental non existent marketing orchestration can be to your business.

The key to creating great customer experiences is personalizing your marketing communications.

And the only way to do that is by having all your data communicate with each other so you can get real actionable insights to deliver better customer experiences and make more money.

That’s why AnyTrack is so critical for performance and affiliate marketers. AnyTrack automates this entire process for you and gives you real usable data so you can deliver better customer experiences.