In the AI era, why are 90% of brands’ overseas marketing automation still stuck in the ‘tool trap’?

At present, many brands simplify marketing automation into ‘EDM email mass sending tools‘ when doing overseas markets, and pay too much attention to superficial indicators such as open rates, but ignore their real contribution to business growth.

A cross-border e-commerce manager once told us: ‘The advertising budget has doubled, but customers are still like ‘seeing flowers in the fog’ – the email open rate is high, but the conversion rate is low; the online activities are lively, but the repurchase rate has dropped sharply.”

Behind this are three ‘invisible traps‘ that companies fall into in Marketing Automation (MA) practice:

1.The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) has been ignored

Single-channel strategies such as EDM and social media advertising can only cover a certain segment of the customer journey. For example, a fast-moving consumer goods brand invested a lot of EDM resources in the Southeast Asian market, with an open rate of up to 30%, but a conversion rate of less than 1%. After reviewing the situation, it was found that the email content lacked personalized recommendations and was not linked to user behavior (such as browsing and adding to cart), resulting in “quick coming and going” of traffic. What this reflects is not only a tool problem, but also the company’s short-sighted understanding of CLV – only focusing on single conversions, but not building long-term customer relationships.

2.Data silos hinder decision-making and lack of real-time customer portraits

When a certain clothing brand pushed promotional information online, some customers had already made purchases in the physical stores, resulting in a waste of resources. The problem lies in that customer behaviors are scattered across various channels such as the website, the APP, and the offline stores, and the data has not been integrated into Customer Data Platform (CDP), causing marketing actions to lag behind. Static labels (such as gender and region) cannot dynamically capture behavioral changes (such as adding items to the cart but not completing the purchase, or frequent browsing without conversion), leading to a disconnect in strategies.

3.The strategy is disconnected from business goals

Tools ≠ strategy. Many companies regard MA as an IT project, focusing only on the function list (such as email templates and automated processes), without deeply binding with business goals (acquiring, converting, and retaining customers). They fail to design strategies for key nodes in the customer journey (such as first-order conversion and awakening from dormancy), resulting in the automation process becoming “aimless”.

The way to break the deadlock

From “Channel Automation” to “Customer Full Life Cycle Operation”

The essence of Marketing Automation (MA) is customer-centered, achieving “delivering the right content to the right people at the right time through the right channels” through data-driven and strategic collaboration.

Combining the experience of SAP experts and our implementation of SAP public cloud solutions for multiple overseas enterprises, achieving this leap requires reconstructing capabilities from three dimensions:

1.Take the customer data platform as the “brain” to break down data silos

Omnichannel data integration: connect multiple touchpoints such as websites, apps, offline stores, and customer service systems to build a real-time updated 360-degree customer portrait.

Dynamic label system: stratify customers based on behaviors (such as add-to-cart, abandoned orders), attributes (such as preferences, CLV), and scenarios (such as holiday marketing). For example, high-value customers (consumption frequency ≥ 3 times in the past 30 days, and average customer spending higher than the average) and price-sensitive customers (frequently browsing discount areas) need differentiated operations.

AI-driven decision-making: Machine learning is used to predict the customer life cycle stage (such as potential, active, and dormant) and automatically trigger marketing actions. For example, a beauty brand uses AI models to predict customer churn risks and push exclusive gift packages in advance, significantly improving retention.

2.Full Life Cycle Strategy: From “Single Transaction” to “Lifetime Value”

“Deliver the right content to the right people at the right time through the right channels” This goal must be achieved by covering the three key stages of the customer journey:

Customer acquisition stage: Focus on “precise reach”. For instance, a certain DTC home furnishing brand, through social media and Lookalike targeting, displayed “living room scenario solution” advertisements, reducing customer acquisition costs by 30%.

Conversion stage: Strengthen “scenario intervention”. For users who abandon orders, we designed a combination strategy of “limited-time discount + similar recommendations”, and increased the first-order conversion rate by 40% through email + APP Push linkage.

Customer retention stage: Build ‘Member stratified benefits’. Based on the RFM model (recent purchase time, frequency, amount), provide high-value customers with exclusive benefits such as birthday gift boxes and new product trials, while low- and medium-value customers maintain their activity through doubling points and discount coupons. A fast-moving consumer goods brand has increased its annual repurchase rate by 25% through this strategy.

3.Omni-channel Collaboration: From ‘Channel Fragmentation” to “Dynamic Journey’

The core of omnichannel marketing is not to ‘cover all touch points’ but to achieve seamless customer experience through contextually coherent dynamic journey design.

For example, an outdoor brand designed a dynamic journey for ‘heavy rainy season equipment promotion’ like this:

EDM: Push waterproof jacket technical analysis pictures and text

APP Push: Send ‘limited time free shipping’ reminders to users who clicked on the email but did not purchase

SMS: Trigger the ‘last chance’ discount code 2 hours before the end of the event

Finally, the cross-channel conversion efficiency was increased by 40%, and excessive interruptions from a single channel were avoided

Acloudear Practice:

How does SAP cloud solution reshape global marketing growth?

In the practice of customer full life cycle operations and omni-channel collaboration, Acloudear relies on SAP public cloud solutions and SAP Emarsys solutions to provide integrated empowerment of “data + strategy + execution” for overseas companies.

SAP Emarsys is an omnichannel marketing platform that focuses on customer experience and drives revenue growth. It helps companies accurately predict customer needs and automatically push personalized content (such as dynamic offers and customized services) by integrating multi-channel data (such as transactions, behaviors, and preferences) in real time, thereby significantly improving customer conversion rates and order values.

More importantly, Acloudear’s global service network ensures that SAP solutions can be quickly adapted to local markets: from North American GDPR to Southeast Asian tax rules, we implement technology as a “localized growth engine” to help companies achieve global scale marketing at the lowest cost.

The essence of brand outsea is to reconstruct the growth flywheel with customers at the center. The value of technology lies in transforming complex cross-border challenges into quantifiable business results. Through the deep integration of AI-driven SAP public cloud solutions, customer-centric Emarsys solutions and global service networks, we help enterprises move from “traffic anxiety” to “global growth certainty.”

On June 5, Acloudear will attend the SAP NOW China Summit. If you have any questions about overseas marketing strategies, customer lifecycle management, or marketing automation implementation in brand expansion, please come to the site to discuss with us in depth.

We will combine global customer cases to analyze how to achieve a strategic leap from “channel thinking” to “customer operations” through SAP public cloud technology, and share key skills and pitfall avoidance guidelines in practice – about how to lay out multi-touchpoint collaboration for brands outsea and how to use AI to drive personalized scale-up, we will offer you tips one by one.

*The core viewpoints and analysis of this article refer to the research of SAP digital expert Ivan in “Marketing Automation for Brands Going Global: Strategic Transition from ‘Channel Thinking’ to ‘Customer Life Cycle’, and are integrated and extended with Acloudear’s global practice experience. Copyright belongs to the original author. If there are any omissions, please correct them.

This article "In the AI era, why are 90% of brands’ overseas marketing automation still stuck in the ‘tool trap’?" by AcloudEAR. We focus on business applications such as cloud ERP.

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