How to set up a marketing automation tool ?

How to choose your marketing automation software?

Define your web marketing automation strategy

1. How much time are you willing to spend on creating the sending process for your email campaigns?
2. Do you want to configure each email scenario yourself?
3. What information do you have about your contacts?
4. Do you want to send newsletters or marketing emails with products?
5. How do you manage your e-commerce store? With which CMS?
6. How often do you send messages?
7. What email performance objectives do you expect from these campaigns?
8. What sales growth targets do you set for yourself?

Once these questions are answered, 2 types of software are available to you:

• platforms for creating newsletters, such as Sendinblue or Mailchimp
• email marketing platforms for e-retailers, such as Kiliba, Cart-Guru, Shopimind or Klavyo

As a reminder, a newsletter is a general information email about your brand and your company, which allows you to communicate with your leads and prospects about an event or about your brand image.

For e-merchants, the sending of newsletters must be distinguished from email marketing, whose objectives are to send to your contact base products from your store and generate a complementary sale with each message. The purpose of these messages is to take your contacts to the product pages of your site that are likely to interest them and thus improve the conversion into sales. No need to wait for your prospects to search for your product on the internet, you can increase your sales simply by soliciting your contacts.

The different types of email automation software

• configurable tools, such as Sendinblue or Mailchimp. You have to create each marketing automation scenario yourself: target, trigger, email content, template, sending time. -> You send an identical email to a customer segment.

• pre-configured tools, like Cart-guru or Shopimind. From a predefined base, you have to create yourself the content of the email, the products to integrate in your template, the customer target or the associated filters... -> You send an identical email to a customer segment.

• intelligent, 100% automated tools like Kiliba. You select one or more scenarios of your choice and the machine learning algorithms create and improve your emails according to the tastes, actions and behavior of your contacts. These algorithms allow you to effectively implement a predictive marketing strategy, where the software anticipates and predicts the behavior of your contacts. -> Each email is personalized and the content differs with each sending according to the recipient, the grail of marketing automation.

Kiliba's strengths

Kiliba's strength lies in the intelligence of its machine learning algorithms, which makes it a unique software on the marketing automation solutions market. These algorithms analyze the behavior of your customers on each page of your site, identify the products of your store likely to interest them and their action following the emails sent. These algorithms predict behavior and action upon receipt of emails, which makes Kiliba the only predictive marketing platform available today. Kiliba's product recommendation algorithm is comparable to that of Amazon or Netflix: your contacts receive emails that look like them, with products they like. Each email sent is unique and contains products likely to interest the recipient. The algorithms analyze the behavior of your customers: visit on each page, products on your site, purchases, opening of emails, clicks, conversion, recency of purchase, frequency of purchase, average basket...

All these analyses are used to create hyper-personalized content and recommend products that will appeal to your recipients. Kiliba identifies a lot of customer information that allows you to better know your customers and enrich your CRM:

• customer's gender: Kiliba guesses the gender according to the customer's behavior if the customer has not informed it on your store.
• Customer segment: is it a regular buyer or a customer you might lose?
• satisfaction rate: does your customer appreciate the emails you send him?

Email performance is optimized and improved continuously by learning and reaches record rates: average opening rate of more than 52% (80% in some scenarios), 7% average click rate, increase in conversion and sales rate...

Kiliba vs Carts Guru

Unlike Kiliba, Carts Guru is a pre-configured tool, providing you with a rules engine to build yourself by browsing through numerous pages. Cart-guru allows you to create emailing rules and filters to segment emailings to groups of customers sharing common characteristics. You have to create each html template and each workflow triggering logic yourself, which takes time despite the editor and templates provided.

We can talk about configured automation here: the email marketing activity is not 100% automated like on Kiliba. Carts Guru connects to your CMS and lists the products of your store. However, it is up to you to identify the products to be included in the emails, which will be sent to a group of customers (a segment), and not individually to each customer. The personalization of emails is therefore limited to a few text elements in the subject and the body of the email (the customer's first name for example), but the products inside the emails are not personalized according to the expectations of each customer. The performance therefore depends on your choices (design templates, triggers and email content) and your configuration.

Kiliba vs Shopimind

Shopimind is a direct competitor of Carts Guru and offers more or less the same features. You can create the design of your emails with an html template editor. You define the triggering rules and the process of the workflows according to the action on the site. You define the customer segment to which you want to send a common email. You define the content of the email with fixed products.

In short, Shopimind also requires a lot of time to configure each campaign, for a result that will depend on your configuration and that will not improve with each sending. Shopimind is also a configured automation tool.

Kiliba vs Klaviyo

Klaviyo is comparable to Carts Guru or Shopimind because it is also based on the principle of configuring rules and templates by the marketer. Like its competitors, Klaviyo allows you to create templates, set up triggers to send emails based on your customers' behaviors and define the content of the emails that will be sent to a customer segment. Like its competitors, Klaviyo sends an identical email to a customer segment that you have defined, which allows you to obtain standard email marketing performance.

Kiliba vs Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a different platform because it natively addresses newsletter type emails rather than marketing emails. Although Sendinblue allows thousands of businesses on the Internet to communicate with their contacts, Sendinblue was not created specifically for the needs of e-commerce. It is therefore a generalist emailing platform, while Kiliba, Carts Guru, Shopimind and Klaviyo are specialized for e-retailers. Although there are plug-ins to connect your Sendinblue account to your store (Prestashop for example), the features are less rich for e-merchants.

Kiliba vs Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a direct competitor of Sendinblue. It is also a marketing automation platform for creating newsletters, which can be used by e-merchants without being specific to this business. The functionalities are therefore less rich than the competitors that natively address the needs of e-merchants.

To read on the same theme

How to make a successful email campaign in 5 steps?

What are the best triggers for your marketing automation workflows?

The benefits of predictive marketing in e-commerce

How can you improve the performance of your emails?