But things were not that simple, because although they could be implemented, many people regarded automated marketing with a lot of scepticism. However, even though there were still many failing to fully understand all the benefits and advantages they could gain from it, there was a game changer, in our case Porsche Inter Auto, that created the first automated after-sales communication scenarios. This allowed us to reach customers very quickly, going through a number of extremely important steps for this moment in the customer journey, which would otherwise have required very high costs, through the call centre.
Another automation process also involved communicating with leads coming from the website to schedule an appointment with a sales agent. The results obtained in these cases improved the entire sales process.
2007 was the year when email address validation tools started to get more attention. Originally designed to be sold as a separate service, email validation eventually became an internal service which is used even today to sanitise the databases. In our view, it is one of the critical services that protect us.
Our entire business is continually diversifying, so the positive retribution could not have been late in coming. So this is how come that we won our first international award on the next year. I wrote about that in my 2008 story.
