Marketing automation is an incredibly powerful technology that has changed the way businesses do digital marketing. It increases the marketing efficiency while decreasing the related overheads by automating the repetitive sales and marketing processes. Companies of all sizes can take benefit of the marketing automation and supercharge their lead generation as well brand building efforts.
More than 50% of the companies are already using marketing automation, and almost 70% of the remaining are planning to use it in the next 6-12 months. It is worth noting that very few of the companies that use marketing automation have experienced the desired results. Many of them make some common mistakes that derail their marketing campaign. If you are planning to use Marketing Automation for your firm, avoid these mistakes to increase your chances of success with the latest marketing technology:
Purchasing the Wrong Marketing Automation Platform
Unlike other marketing technology platforms such as email marketing or social media tools, marketing automation requires close integration of the software with social media accounts, websites, existing CRM and other tracking technologies. Not all automation tools are made equal in terms of features and compatibility. Many firms purchase the software solely based on its potential features and benefits. If the new software is not compatible with your existing systems, it ends up creating a mess that is hard to resolve.
Do extensive research and demo testing before finalizing the automation software for your firm. The incompatible software will achieve little, no matter what benefits and features it offers.
Quality of Your Customer Data
The data is at the core of marketing automation. Poor quality of data produces a bad result irrespective of sound marketing strategy and its efficient implementation. Almost 25% of the email addresses expire every year. That means, a database of 10,000 email ids will have only 5625 correct ids within a short span of two years. The inactive email ids also result into bounces that hamper the reputation of the email server.
You must put a mechanism in place to clean up the database periodically. In the absence of such mechanism, you will be unable to justify the return on investments in marketing automation.
Poor Quality of Content
Marketing automation doesn’t work in isolation. You need to produce high-quality content that increases customer engagement. It is worth noting that for marketing automation to succeed, customer engagement is a must. If you implement marketing automation without investing significant efforts in generating quality content on a regular basis, it may lead to a complete disaster.
It is important to recognize the importance of content and have a sound strategy to curate quality content on a regular basis.
Sub-Optimal Usage of Platform Features
Among the companies that have adopted marketing automation, only 10% have utilized all the features of the software. The end objective of using automation is to eliminate the human intervention from repetitive tasks. However, if the software is not utilized fully, the manual work of marketing department will not reduce. Rather, the marketing process and reporting will become more hectic and prone to avoidable errors.
When you decide to integrate marketing automation, make sure that the team goes through an extensive training in using the features the software. If the vendor does not provide initial training, then your team members should spend significant time on resources portal of the software and understand the nuances of the product.
Excessive Dependence on Email
Marketing automation started with the automation of email marketing. However, in its current form, the software has included almost all digital channels. Despite adopting marketing automation, if you are still reliant mainly on emails to generate leads, it is time to rethink the entire marketing strategy. Utilize other media such as social, search engines and websites to provide a seamless experience to customers in achieving their goals. Excessive dependence on email can also annoy the customers to the extent that they start hating your firm.
To derive maximum return on investment on marketing automation, you need to integrate all the channels and utilize every channel’s strength to convert prospects into customers.
Conclusion
Marketing automation requires significant initial investment with respect to time and money. It is not a one click software magic that can solve your marketing challenges. So, before you make up your mind to purchase a marketing automation tool, make sure that you take the time out of the current schedule to integrate it fully into the system.
Moreover, motivate your team members to learn new things and customize the solutions based on your requirements. In certain cases, you may even request the vendor to customize a particular process as per your specific requirements. The end objective should be to eliminate human intervention from the repetitive marketing activities and automate the purchase life cycle.
