Marketing automation is growing steadily, and many companies are using it more to promote marketing. According to the research of Emailmonday, 51% of companies are currently using marketing automation, and more than half (58%) plan to use more marketing automation technologies.
However, while market automation is becoming increasingly popular, the bad news is that people may make many automation mistakes. These errors can be sent from spam to databases that do not integrate automation into the company. Worse, these common mistakes may eventually ruin a marketing campaign, or even damage a company's reputation.
To help avoid such headaches, we have listed six mistakes to avoid when using marketing automation.
1、No plan
If you don't have the right strategy, marketing automation may fail.
According to the survey of Three Deep Marketing, 58% of the marketing personnel believe that it is difficult for them to succeed in automation tools due to the lack of effective strategies. Of course, if there is no plan to guide the automation work, it is also very challenging to achieve results.
Before starting automation, it is critical to determine marketing goals. For example, the purpose of a marketing campaign may be to lead sales or improve e-mail opening rate. No matter what the purpose, each goal needs a different strategy.
It is important to take time to develop a strategic plan for marketing automation, which includes an overview of objectives, segmentation, integration, content and other components.
2、Irrelevant content
With marketing automation tools, it is easy to quickly create and arrange promotional marketing activities, but it is also easy to create some problems, such as sending too many emails or push posts to unrelated audiences.
As far as email is concerned, spam sending to the inbox of the contact person will lead to higher unsubscription rate, which will not only lose users, but also be reported as spam, causing the email service provider to stop the account.
Be sure to divide your audience into several parts and only send relevant content to the right people at the right time. Even so, the content transmission frequency should not be too high, and should be staggered appropriately to avoid bombing your users.
For example, real estate agents may set personalized content according to the customer's position in the buyer's trip, so as to push different information to different people separately. For example, first-time buyers may be interested in some content about how to maintain the house and how to buy housing insurance, while customers who sell houses may be interested in such content as how to price their houses. Remember, content must always provide more value to the reader, so you only need to send valuable and relevant materials, not some irrelevant content.
On social media, publishing too much content that is not focused on specific topics or industries may confuse followers. People use social media for social activities, which again emphasizes the need to provide useful and attractive information.
3、Failure to consolidate technology
Marketing automation solutions must be integrated with the company's other tools and databases to succeed. Otherwise, automated tools will not be able to communicate with other systems, nor can they use valuable data to create personalized customer experiences.
According to the research of ResearchCorp, 89% of the users who have deployed the marketing automation system have integrated it with the CRM system. This integration into a unified data management method provides convenience and can greatly enhance the interaction between customers.
Although many marketing automation platforms can connect with other tools and systems, enterprises can also use data management software to help them combine automation solutions.
4、Complete reliance on automation
One of the main risks of using marketing automation is falling into the "set forget" mode, which is completely dependent on automation.
This approach will not yield the best results. Although marketing automation can save time by automating tasks, it still requires someone to control and monitor activities.
Users should often check automatic activities and monitor their performance in order to find any errors or undesirable results.
For example, triggers may not work properly, or lack of participation due to your automated processes. Monitoring each activity keeps the enterprise informed of what is happening, pauses the activity, and makes changes when needed. Otherwise, an invalid movement will continue.
5、No test, no optimization, once and for all
Testing content is a key part of marketing automation, which enables enterprises to learn more about their audience and predict whether a strategy or activity will succeed. Users can then make changes based on the results to optimize the activity.
For example, users can perform A/B testing to maximize the functionality of email marketing automation tools. Instead of just creating a generic active version, you should build two versions and compare various detail elements, such as title, content, or sender address. Be sure to test only one variable at a time to find out why something is working.
For example, real estate agents can test their e-mail subject by sending an e-mail to a smaller part of the list to see which part can persuade customers to open, and then automatically send the title that everyone is interested in to other customers. They may find a question, such as "Are you still looking for a house in area X?" It is better than the title "Look at these houses in the X area".
It is also important to test the way email is displayed on different devices and design it adaptively.
Social media can also be tested. In fact, testing your social media posts is crucial. Maybe "click to learn more" is useless, but there must be something else that people can click on posts. Be sure to test writing longer and shorter content (on the allowed network), and test the effect of different labels.
6、Focus on the wrong criteria
When checking the performance of automation, it is easy to be confused by high performance standards and ignore other important numbers. Don't be confused easily. Be sure to further explore and understand the results of your efforts.
For example, a high e-mail opening rate is a good standard, but it does not necessarily mean that an activity has a good effect. It's better to add some standards, such as click through rate after opening an email. Just because users open an email, it doesn't mean they will click in and take action.
When measuring the performance of automation activities, be sure to look at various indicators.
Enterprises that automate manual marketing tasks should be careful to avoid these mistakes. If done correctly, marketing automation can undoubtedly help companies grow and increase their return on investment. But as mentioned earlier, it can easily fall into simple traps and traps, which will derail your overall efforts.