Vibhor Kapoor Of AdRoll: 5 Ways to Use Marketing Automation to Improve Team Efficiencies
An Interview With Rachel Kline
Marketing automation simplifies cross-channel marketing by providing ready-made campaign templates that help teams achieve their objectives by ensuring they deliver the appropriate message to the right audience, at the right time, through the right channels. These templates expedite campaign setup, allowing teams to launch a well-optimized campaign in under 30 minutes.
In the current era of rapid technological advancements, marketing automation has become a fundamental asset to any business. It has the potential to not only streamline operations, but also to significantly boost team efficiencies. As we explore its various applications, we would like to highlight how it can transform day-to-day tasks, foster innovation, and ultimately enhance performance. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Vibhor Kapoor.
Vibhor Kapoor serves as the President of AdRoll, responsible for driving revenue growth and overseeing various aspects of the company, including product development, strategy, sales, operations, and marketing. With nearly three decades of industry experience, he has demonstrated business leadership in SaaS and Cloud platforms, notably as a Senior Director at Adobe and Vice President of Marketing at Box. Vibhor’s educational background includes an MBA from Kellogg School of Management and a Bachelor’s in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?
Good stories are always about a journey and the intersection of several different turning points. My story is not a specific one, but one of many chapters which have unfolded themselves into this section of my life. The very early phases of my career were focused on building a strong technology foundation in undergraduate school and at Hewlett Packard. What followed was a journey into building business acumen and leadership skills at a global level with General Electric. The last decade and a half has been about product strategy, growth and marketing skills built on a foundation of data and analytics, most notably at Microsoft and Adobe. The cumulation of these experiences has been instrumental in my career path and in shaping how I got here.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
It would be less fair for me to name a specific individual, but I owe it to all my mentors — the ones that are reading this know who they are. This is for them. They have been selfless and generous in their time and their wisdom, in sharing their successes, being vulnerable to share why they failed, and they have been bold in giving feedback to me straight.
Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?
Three strengths that were crucial in advancing my career were problem-solving, adaptability, and resilience. I’m very appreciative of my ability to analyze complex situations and provide practical solutions. I strengthen this skill by embracing challenging problems and proactively searching for innovative solutions. I feel comfortable stepping outside of my comfort zone. I willingly take on a variety of projects, seek feedback, and am more than willing to try something new. I’ve acquired a growth mindset over time. In order to be resilient during adverse times, I believe it’s crucial to embrace challenges, learn and grow from my mistakes, as well as concentrate on long-term goals.
By continually challenging your limits, you can actively develop these strengths. Take part in a variety of projects, seek out feedback, and be open to new ideas.
Which skills are you still trying to grow now?
A skill that I am always seeking to expand is my emotional intelligence. Maintaining empathy helps leaders establish sincere and lasting connections with their teams. In the long run, establishing trust benefits the organization at large. I believe this is an important skill to have because trust is the foundation of collaboration, employee happiness, and a supportive workplace culture, all of which support long-term success and productivity.
Let’s talk about marketing automation. What impact has marketing automation had on streamlining and enhancing your team’s operations, KPIs, and overall efficiency?
Marketing automation has had a huge impact on streamlining and enhancing not only our team’s operations, KPIs, and overall efficiency, but has enhanced these for our customers as well.
Our team’s operations have been greatly streamlined by marketing automation, which automates repetitive tasks and offers data-driven insights. As a result, we have been able to organize our resources more effectively, concentrate on critical projects, and ultimately increase the effectiveness of our marketing.
Our team’s KPIs have been significantly streamlined by marketing automation because it has increased lead generation and customer engagement. We can now more effectively measure and analyze KPIs in real-time, which enables data-driven decision-making and ongoing marketing strategy improvement.
By automating jobs, enhancing data management, and streamlining procedures, marketing automation has considerably increased our team’s overall efficiency, resulting in more efficient and streamlined operations.
What’s your favorite marketing automation tool and the way in which to use it?
Forgive my bias, but my favorite automation tool is AdRoll’s automation builder. It’s a helpful tool that lets users create consistent, personalized, and automated campaigns across display ads, social ads, and email — all from one place. This capability empowers marketers to accomplish in one platform what previously required up to six different platforms, saving time and money while streamlining campaign performance.
AdRoll’s automation builder consolidates critical marketing channels into one platform, breaking down walls inside marketing stacks that cost time, hinder visibility, and impact performance. By streamlining multi-channel management, users can quickly and confidently create multi-channel campaigns, analyze cross-channel performance, and easily optimize over time. The result for users is seamless brand experiences for their target audiences, which leads to more revenue with less marketing spend.
Ensuring a personalized customer experience is crucial in today’s marketing landscape. How do you balance automation while maintaining a human touch?
Balancing automation while maintaining a human touch is crucial in our marketing efforts at AdRoll. Our team is careful not to let automation replace the genuine connections built over time with our customers. Our strategy involves human-centric communication, constant learning, and feedback loops.
Our team makes sure that routine tasks are automated, and human interaction is utilized for more complex and empathetic circumstances. Our customer service experts and account managers are always prepared to have individualized discussions, respond to questions, and develop lasting connections.
We remain flexible and adjust to changing customer needs. We achieve the mix between productivity and individualized interaction by routinely assessing and optimizing our automated processes.
Lastly, we consistently seek feedback from customers via surveys and one on one conversations. This helps in the improvement of our automated procedures and ensures that they conform to the standards and values of our customers.
Our intention is to utilize automation as a tool that enhances human interaction rather than replaces it. This approach helps us grow our tailored customer experiences while maintaining the sincerity and significance of our relationships.
Data is also a cornerstone of effective marketing automation. How do you utilize data-driven insights to continuously refine and optimize your automated campaigns?
We encourage our customers to continuously refine and optimize their automated campaigns by building the campaign’s foundation on A/B testing. To find out what truly resonates best with users’ audience, we conduct experiments on various campaign elements, such as ad creatives, messaging, and delivery times.
We acquire a significant amount of information from several sources, such as website analytics, customer interactions, and ad performance indicators. This presents a thorough picture of the success of our customers’ efforts.
Based on the audience’s behavior, preferences, and demographics, we use that data to categorize them in a way that’s easy for our customers to understand. As a result, we are able to develop highly targeted ads that appeal to particular audience categories.
Our engine for campaign optimization runs on data. We guarantee that our automated programs continue to be extremely effective and in line with our customers’ marketing objectives by making it easy to continuously observe, evaluate, and make adjustments based on data-driven insights.
As AI and machine learning become more prominent, how have you integrated these technologies to not only automate tasks but also to provide predictive insights?
AdRoll has been built on 10+ years of harnessing AI to drive incredible ad performance, and we’ve only just begun. We’re enhancing our AI usage to optimize every step of the campaign process — from content creation, to ad spend, to intelligent analysis that can enhance future marketing strategies. AdRoll’s AI capabilities enable marketers to truly do more with less, from start to finish. This technology serves two purposes: to automate repetitive operations and offer priceless prediction insights. By handling duties like audience segmentation and ad optimization, automation improves efficiency and frees up our customers to focus on strategic objectives. Using AI and machine learning, we can simultaneously offer highly tailored content, predict future trends, improve real-time ad performance, map customer journeys, and strengthen data security. These advancements are more than just tools; they are the engine that propels our data-driven decision-making process, enabling us to provide excellent customer experiences and maintain our competitive edge in the ever-changing world of digital marketing.
What strategies have you found most effective in integrating marketing automation with other departments, such as sales or customer service, to create a cohesive and efficient end-to-end customer experience?
Collaboration is a key component of successful methods for integrating marketing automation with other departments for building a seamless and efficient end-to-end customer experience. By emphasizing collaboration, access to unified data, and customized customer experiences, we can achieve success. It is important to promote open communication and cooperation between departments. Regular meetings and shared goals promote alignment. It’s helpful to make sure that all departments have access to a single platform for customer data. It enables a complete 360-degree perspective of the customer, supporting personalization efforts. Concentration must be placed on all customer-related strategies; it involves tailoring messaging, proposals, and support to their needs and preferences.
Implementing marketing automation can come with a certain degree of change management. What tips do you have for introducing a new tool or process to a pre-existing team?
A careful approach must be taken when introducing a new technology or procedure, such as marketing automation, to an existing team. First and foremost, effective communication is essential; outlining the advantages and how it fits with our objectives increases buy-in. Second, encouraging ownership and passion by including team members in the selection and decision-making process. Then, thorough training ensures everyone is comfortable using the new technology. Lastly, celebrating little victories along the way raises spirits and highlights the importance of the change.
What are 5 Ways to Use Marketing Automation to Improve Team Efficiencies?
1 . Marketing automation simplifies cross-channel marketing by providing ready-made campaign templates that help teams achieve their objectives by ensuring they deliver the appropriate message to the right audience, at the right time, through the right channels. These templates expedite campaign setup, allowing teams to launch a well-optimized campaign in under 30 minutes.
2 . Marketing automation can save teams several hours every week by developing automated social media posts and advertisements. Automation helps streamline significant portions of a marketing team’s tasks, including scheduling posts and advertisements in advance, monitoring brand mentions across platforms, triaging social media inquiries and mentions using sentiment analysis, and flagging fraud, spam, or phishing related to their social media accounts.
3 . Teams can significantly cut down customer support costs through the implementation of chatbots. Chatbots offer a mutually beneficial solution: customers experience quicker and more convenient assistance, avoiding lengthy hold times, while teams also enjoy substantial cost savings associated with hiring, training, and retaining customer service agents.
However, it’s still necessary to have a few members of a customer support team on deck at all times to solve tricky customer issues. A well-designed chatbot can bear the brunt of most customer requests.
4 . Email automation campaigns are one of the top tactics that marketing teams use to boost performance. For many brands, emails are rightfully the bread and butter of their marketing efforts — it’s an excellent tool for teams to deliver relevant and personalized content straight into the hands of shoppers. Email automation tools make it even easier for teams to gather customer data, use it to spot trends, and design emails that are sent out at the perfect time.
5 . Marketing automation helps craft highly tailored messages for customers. Automated marketing technology platforms seamlessly blend customer data with algorithms to produce personalized and optimized messages for customers.
For example, Spotify’s “Year In Review” content wraps up all the data it has collected on its users with a colorful bow (and fun animations) and presents it back to them, consistently garnering a positive response.
Personalized marketing does a much better job at catching the audiences’ eyes than regular promotional messages, but to do it successfully, automation is the way to go.
Can you share a story about a challenge you faced with marketing automation, and how you overcame it?
Ensuring the quality of our automated messaging was one of the difficulties we faced with marketing automation. We noticed that while automation could streamline processes, there was a risk of messages becoming too generic or impersonal. We put in place a stringent quality control mechanism to get around this. For message personalization, content relevance, and timeliness, we set clear guidelines. To maintain a high-quality and engaging customer experience, we continuously reviewed and adjusted our automation workflows. This dedication to quality not only solved the problem but also increased the efficiency of our marketing efforts as a whole.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
What an interesting question! Resilience is a topic I’m truly passionate about. My movement would promote people and communities to develop resilience throughout challenging circumstances, whether it be adversity related to the economy, health, or the environment. It would encourage the creation of tools, sources, and assistance networks that help enable people to recover from setbacks and adjust to unpredictable circumstances. By placing a strong emphasis on resilience, this movement would not only assist people in navigating the ups and downs of life, but also strengthen society as a whole.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
