Marketing automation is not an easy task to excel in but if you do, boy oh boy can it bring your business more reach, more leads and more revenue with a lot less manual effort. Especially if you are new to marketing automation, it can feel quite overwhelming. Read on to learn how you can maximise your marketing automation efforts with these 8 top tips.
1. No Persona
Identifying and building out your buyer persona profiles should be your first step before you even begin marketing automation. Remember marketing automation is a set of automated emails, SMSs, tasks and CRM updates created using a software.
So if you want to build a marketing automation strategy, you need to know what the end goal is, who you’re targeting, how to qualify them at every stage of the buyer’s journey, why you’re doing it and then what needs to be done.
2. No Goal
It may seem obvious to have a goal but I actually find a lot of marketers not understanding or seeing the bigger picture goal when doing marketing automation. The spray-and-pray approach becomes a really big problem as you use marketing automation to scale. You might (and very likely) end up doing tactics without a strategy.
If you aren’t clear about your goals, it becomes difficult to create a lead qualification process, create gated offers to ascend prospects to the next level and measure success. I highly recommend using this as your guide when building automations.
3. Using Wrong Triggers
Triggers or enrolment criteria is a set of individual or combined criteria that allows or disallows contacts from being added to an automated sequence or workflows. Depending on the marketing automation software you are using and how you’ve set it up, you often have contact-based, company-based, deal-based and ticket-based properties to use as triggers.
Choosing the right triggers comes back to knowing who your buyer personas are, how your funnel is mapped, your lead qualification criteria and most importantly, the purpose of the automation sequence.
I often find people using “opened or clicked emails” as a trigger which generally is not a good indicator - unless you have a very very specific use (I almost never use that as a trigger).
4. Not Segmenting Data
Mass email marketing is when the same email is sent to a large subscriber list.
If you are not leveraging on the power of marketing automation to slice and dice your data and just “e-blasting” your database, you’re missing out on sending personalised, targeted and relevant content that people actually want to read.
This usually results in very low conversion rates, possibly even higher unsubscribe rates.
Use NeverBounce to reduce the number of inactive, invalid & disposable email addresses in your database to improve conversion rates. By sending different messages to different audiences at different stages of the buyer’s journey, you can lower unsubscribe rates. You could segment based on the stage of the buyer’s journey, buyer personas, topics of interest and much more.
5. Bloated CRM With Dead Emails
What frustrates me is hearing marketers and founders say “I want a larger database, I need to grow my database”. Yes, I hear you and understand why you want it but always - quality over quantity.
Frankly, a database full of unengaged or dead email addresses is not useful. I would highly recommend removing dead email addresses (often due to people moving jobs) regularly. Even better yet, integrate your CRM with email verification and cleaning software to reduce manual work for yourself.
If you’re a HubSpot user, you’re in luck - there’s a native integration between NeverBounce and HubSpot.
6. Wrong Choice Of Software
There are many marketing automation software to choose from and it can be really overwhelming and confusing. But not all software is made equal.
Choose software that suits your business and marketing needs. If you are a small business, then no Salesforce is not for you. Consider whether you need to store private/sensitive information in your CRM, analytics available, ease of use, integrations you might need, open API, customer support, send cold emails and how much time you will save. Check out this blog by SmartSheet.
7. Forgetting To Consider The Other Emails Being Sent Out
It’s easy to get carried away building email sequences after email sequences and forgetting how they all work with each other. There’s no real formula or science to this but you really want to avoid bombarding your prospects and customers with emails.
This is more of a check in for yourself to ensure you don’t overwhelm your engaged prospects and customers and accidentally encourage them to unsubscribe.
8. Blindly Following Best Practices
There are general best practices that you should incorporate when you are doing marketing automation but it’s not about deploying all the best practices available. Not all best practices are suitable for your needs. Plus, it’s quite common that best practices are past practices.
If you are new to marketing automation, get in touch and we can explore how we can get you started properly from the start.
I highly encourage you to avoid having the mindset of wanting to know the ideal CTR, conversion rates or email open rates. Every business is different and there are so many internal and external factors at play that it wouldn’t be a fair comparison or worst, you could be going down the wrong rabbit hole leading to serious harm to your business! Context is everything.
Instead, you should test general best practices and build up your own bank of best practices.
So there you have it.
8 common marketing automation mistakes I hope you will avoid when implementing marketing automation into your marketing strategy. Marketing automation is really powerful when it’s used properly. Start with the ultimate business goal in mind, plan backwards and iterate! Learn more about marketing automation here.
