Five Benefits of Open APIs + Marketing Automation

By Mark Bantique, Vice President, Head of E-Commerce, Security Bank Corporation

Mark Bantique, Vice President, Head of E-Commerce, Security Bank Corporation

There are many cases in technology-driven business where the sum of two initiatives is greater than its parts. The pair presented here acts like a cyclical engine that keeps giving.

I’m talking about OpenAPIs and marketing automation. For the sake of clarity, OpenAPIs are externally-facing endpoints that allow third-party services to consume your enterprise’s services as needed with minimal IT onboarding while marketing automation is a software (or stack) that allow for pre-defined trigger-based touchpoints, audience maximization, and business goal-related optimization. On their own, they make up must-have tech stack pieces of the modern, connected business. Together, they unlock these five strategic benefits:

Fast Activation of New Revenue Streams
It’s important to note that tech stacks come in many flavors. Personally, because most businesses are still focused primarily on the P&L, customer-facing, top-line augmenting initiatives usually take priority as they help rationalize other long ROI projects. OpenAPIs deliver the potential of new on-demand revenue streams. Coupled with marketing automation, activating and maximizing this new potential becomes easier and faster.

Revenue is realized immediately and the ROI horizon draws closer.

New Customers via the Network Effect
Connected times call for shared customers; even competitors do it. Automating the interactions afforded by third party connections widen the casting of the acquisition net. The acquisition cost drops, and the effective market size increases. If the interactions are crafted in a way that feels natural, conversion becomes seamless as the use case value proposition of your channels becomes more attractive.

More Interaction Time
The goal is an acceptable level of addiction to your platform/channel/service. You have seen videos on your favorite streaming service where popular social networking sites are exposed on their attempts to create addicts out of its users. The truth is: more facetime corresponds to more revenue. With OpenAPIs extending the number of use cases via the network effect and marketing automation systematically inducing usage, more facetime and more revenue are inevitable. This is all the more relevant to old school businesses that are continuously being pushed to the background as processors while popular tech giants own the interaction. The combination of the two stack pieces hedges against this.

New Customer Lifetime Value Variables
One of the metrics that marketing automation affords enterprises is an increase in customer lifetime value. The other one is lowering the cost of acquisition. When coupled with OpenAPIs, the computation for CLTV gets augmented. When use cases and interaction time are boosted, the CLTV needs to be updated; usually in the upward direction. This can change your enterprise’s marketing game by creating new segments by interaction matrix as well as increasing your ceiling cost of acquisition for select segments boosting your edge over the competition.

DATA!
Both OpenAPIs and marketing automation open floodgates to new data points. But together, they create a virtuous cycle of product and service innovation, marketing efficiency, business model innovation, and business partnership rationalization.

Procure and enable OpenAPIs and marketing automation as a couplet that are managed in one view to level up.