Marketing automation in DXPs: The key to impactful marketing campaigns

Highlights

You’ll learn how marketing automation in modular DXPs drives efficiency.

• Streamlined workflows: Integrate the right tools to save time and deliver consistency
• Scalable solutions: Deploy flexible DXP features to adapt campaigns as business needs change
• Enhanced customer experiences: Leverage automation to deliver personalized interactions

Scale your marketing and reach your customers with the right message. Opt for a composable DXP to make it happen.

Recent statistics show that marketing teams identified customer experience improvements (43%), more efficient use of working hours (38%) and better decision-making (35%) as the main three benefits of automating marketing tasks.

Marketing automation helps you save time and streamline content operations, ensuring you deliver marketing content and campaigns on schedule. So, where does a digital experience platform (DXP) come in? A DXP allows you to harmonize the digital tools to automate marketing operations.

The role of marketing automation in DXPs

Here is a Jon Miller quote. Marketing automation is the technology that propels your business into a new era of relationship-based marketing with quantifiable results. 

Marketing automation, in this context, is about leveraging DXP features to manage repetitive and time-consuming marketing tasks. This could include handling follow-up emails, setting up marketing campaigns, tracking customer behavior, nurturing leads, etc.

You can run more efficient marketing campaigns, engage with customers better and deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience. By reducing manual processes and ensuring consistent messaging, it improves customer experiences, drives conversions and supports scalable, data-driven marketing strategies.

Marketing automation tools in DXP

A digital experience platform (DXP) offers tools that streamline marketing operations. These tools allow you to create, manage and deliver campaigns. Here are a few to consider:

• Automated email marketing: This allows you to schedule and personalize emails based on customer behavior. For example, you could send a welcome email for new signups or abandon cart reminders.
• Trigger-based workflows: These tools allow you to set up workflows that activate based on user actions. For instance, you can send reactivation emails to dormant customers or upsell offers based on a customer’s purchase history.
• Lead generation tools: Use customer data to find and target new leads with tailored messaging, turning prospects into loyal customers faster.

Here is an example: a retailer can use a DXP to send automatic discount emails to customers who leave items in their shopping cart, helping increase conversions.

Streamlining marketing automation with a composable DXP

Unlike monolithic DXPs that bundle digital tools into one rigid system, composable DXPs are flexible. You can alter or customize it to fit your marketing needs. 

So, how does a composable DXP support marketing automation? First, they are modular. So, you can select tools that fit marketing tasks, such as email campaigns or customer segmentation. This ensures you can always find the right tool to adapt to your marketing needs.

Its open, API-first architecture also allows you to integrate other tools supporting marketing automation, such as CRM and analytics. Composable DXPs support seamless data flow between systems within the platform. This capability ensures that other departments are in sync with marketing, which leads to consistent brand messaging across the board.

Why modular architecture works best

Composable DXPs are built with a modular architecture, making them highly customizable. Here are more benefits of its modular approach:

• Flexibility: As your business expands into new regions or starts to cater to new customer segments, you can replace or add new tools that enable you to scale.
• Seamless integration: There are extensible APIs to connect your DXP with other tools, like marketing automation software or CRM systems.
• Simplified workflows: Composable DXPs come with drag-and-drop interfaces that make it simple to manage customer data, design campaigns and create workflows without the need for technical expertise. This makes them easy for business users to use.

Think of a midsized business that suddenly moves to serve a new region. With a composable DXP, they can integrate localization features that allow them to deliver content in the right language and cultural context.

Case studies

Brad’s Deals

Brad’s Deals struggled with consistency as they did not have a dedicated platform to manage their different marketing operations. The systems also required extensive manual work for content updates, leading to wasted productive hours. 

Opting for Contentstack headless content management system (CMS) and Automate enabled them to unify marketing operations and automate content management. It reduced costs by 70% and improved production and publishing times by 95% and 99%, respectively.

Keith Mazanec, the Director of Software Engineering, said. "Thanks to Contentstack, we can now have a content strategy that leverages all of our assets. We’re no longer limited by the silos of our tech stack."

Keep reading to learn how Brad’s Deals revamped its content strategy via automation.

Mattel

Among its many other weaknesses, Mattel’s traditional system was too dependent on developers for minor tasks like pushing updates and editing content.

Mattel chose Contentstack’s composable DXP and headless CMS platform to support its website content. This enabled them to automate marketing tasks, leading to 4.9 times and 9.5 times more conversions on the web and mobile, respectively.

Hear from Mark Hall, Senior Director, Digital Technology. “With Contentstack, everything is microservice driven. As we get new molds or styles, we can manage that without any front-end changes whatsoever, which wasn’t possible before.”

Keep reading to see how Mattel reimagines its customer engagement via Contentstack. 

DXP tools for marketing operations automation

A composable DXP gives you the platform that allows you to combine the best-of-breed digital tools to manage marketing campaigns, content and customer data in one place. These include:

• Marketing automation tools: These tools enable you to automate personalized email campaigns and customer follow-ups, post social media content, manage targeted advertising, segment audiences and so much more.
• Headless CMS platform: A headless CMS enables you to create and distribute digital content across all platforms. It is cloud-based and separates content storage from its presentation, allowing you to serve content to any front-end channel.
• Analytics tools: Analytics are essential for marketing campaigns. These tools track customer behavior, user interaction patterns and marketing content performance. This enables you to work with a data-driven mindset to optimize campaigns. 
• Customer data platforms (CDPs): A CDP collects and centralizes customer data, enabling you to create the right profile to tailor your marketing campaigns.

For example, a marketing team can use a DXP to design, approve and publish a social media campaign across multiple platforms without leaving the dashboard.

Automating content workflows in DXP

Automation tools ensure you can streamline your content operations, leading to a more efficient workflow. Follow the below steps to set up and automate content workflows in DXP:

1. Plan the process: Analyze your current content performance to find gaps. Map out how content will move from creation to publication. Then, create a content plan and calendar.
2. Assign roles: Once you have set up the calendar, assign roles to team members and ensure they know who is responsible for what role, who to report to and relevant timelines for tasks.
3. Use automation: Set up automated notifications and approvals to speed up the process.
4. Integrate with platforms: Integrate the relevant tools with the composable DXP platform. These tools may include generative and brand-aware AI, email marketing tools, analytics software or social media schedulers.
5. Monitor and optimize: Review metrics regularly to identify and fix bottlenecks in your workflows.

Benefits of automating content workflows in a DXP

Considering the resources that will go into the workflow automation process, you need a convincing business case. Here are some pointers to consider.

• Unified content storage: Centralized storage means no more digging through folders for the most recent version of content. It makes it easy to find and update materials. It also helps you maintain consistency with brand messaging, increasing brand integrity.
• Faster publishing: By automating content workflows with a DXP, you can publish content up to 5 times faster than your current publishing time.
• Team collaboration: Automating content workflows keeps every team member in sync. That way, everyone understands their roles and can stay within allowed timelines.

Ease of use and ROI of composable DXPs

In building a business case for any technology, you have to factor in the needs of its business users. These non-technical team members rely on the system for tasks like content creation, task assignment, customer relationship management, etc. 

Ease of use

Many organizations find that minor changes take weeks to implement because they have to go through the IT team. When it is time to scale, they also need to write new code to reconfigure the system. A composable DXP addresses these issues. Here are some features that make DXPs user-friendly:

• Centralized dashboards: Manage campaigns, digital content and data from one single, user-friendly interface.
• Intuitive editors: Drag-and-drop tools make creating and managing campaigns easier. No coding is required. Just create content or workflows with simple tools.
• Headless CMS: It uses APIs to deliver content. You create once, and it delivers it to any front-end framework without the need for hard coding or endless IT hacking. 

How DXPs impact ROI

While investing in a composable DXP may have a high initial setup cost, it increases your publishing velocity, reduces your time-to-market and enables you to scale at a fraction of the cost. These impact your bottom line. Here is how:

• Save time and money: Automation reduces manual work, freeing up your team for more strategic tasks.
• Increase revenue: It supports personalized marketing, which drives better engagement, higher conversions and stronger customer loyalty. This leads to revenue growth. 
• Scalable growth: Add tools and capabilities as your business grows without spending a lot on a system overhaul.
• Faster publishing: Push content to audiences when you need to. This way, you can plug in and stay ahead of trends in your industry. 

For instance, businesses using DXPs often see a 20–30% boost in efficiency and a significant drop in costs within the first year.

FAQs

What is a digital experience platform (DXP)?

A digital experience platform (DXP) is a tool that helps businesses manage content, data and customer experiences in one place. 

What are the benefits of marketing automation in DXPs?

Marketing automation in DXPs saves time, reduces errors and helps you deliver the right message to the right audience. This leads to consistent brand messaging that fosters customer trust and brand integrity.

What is marketing automation in digital marketing?

Marketing automation involves using digital tools and technologies to handle repetitive marketing tasks like managing email, ads and social media campaigns, nurturing leads and managing content workflows.

What is marketing automation experience?

Marketing automation experience is the ability to use automation tools to streamline marketing operations and improve campaign performance.

Learn more

If you are struggling to streamline your marketing operations, a DXP is the ideal tool to fix that. Its automation features enable you to cut publishing time, reduce time-to-market and deliver timely marketing campaigns. It also enables you to scale your business to a broader audience. 

These benefits enable you to deliver effective marketing campaigns, leading to revenue growth. A DXP is also easy to use, so your business users no longer need to rely on IT to make changes or push updates. 

Contentstack offers the leading composable DXP built on MACH principles—microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless. Talk to us today to jumpstart your marketing automation and get ahead of your competitors.