Are you anxious about your team’s mistakes while implementing the marketing automation solution?
Do you think, with its current throughput, your team can make the best out of your marketing automation software?
You must prepare for mistakes that your team members potentially make while implementing the marketing automation system.
Some common errors with marketing automation are spamming your email list or not using personalization enough while sending emails using the automation software.
If your marketing automation tool is not set up properly or is being used without proper guidance, it can set you up for some embarrassing mistakes.
Here are 5 of the several things you can do to improve the implementation of your marketing automation system.
1. Never begin without a concrete plan at hand
If your efforts are not guided by a plan, it will be challenging to achieve any significant results. Your efforts will most likely go to waste.
We all know that!
The only way to truly appreciate your marketing automation investment is by making sure you don’t waste it away.
Compact your expectations into your campaign goals. Then decide how best your marketing automation software can help in achieving those goals. If you go the opposite way (define goals based on what your marketing automation software can do), you are doing it wrong.
After the goals are defined, list down your integrations, segmentation, and other components.
2. Never spam your email list with too much or too irrelevant content
This is a common problem if your marketing team has not refined your audience sets. If you don’t segment your email list appropriately, what happens is you will end up spending way too many emails to way too many people.
This may result in people unsubscribing from your list or even marking you as spam. The second consequence is particularly bad because it affects your email deliverability to all other leads with the same email service provider.
As a solution, use your marketing automation software to automatically segment your email list based on where your leads are in the customer’s journey and use those segments to send emails.
This way you can ensure two things:
- Avoid sending all emails to everyone.
- Send only relevant emails based on what they might expect at their stage of the customer’s journey.
3. Always connect your existing technology with your marketing automation system
You could miss out on many benefits that are borne out of integration between your marketing automation and other data-generating tools – if the latter does not provide any data to the former.
For example, integrating data from your CRM with your marketing automation tool will help deliver more personalized experiences. Or if you are using another tool for landing pages, you could integrate it with your marketing automation tool. This will allow you to keep continuing to use both as you prefer while taking advantage of specific functionalities of your marketing automation software.
Modern Marketing Automation solutions can readily integrate with several external tools either directly or through an intermediary tool like Zapier.
4. Never skimp on split testing and optimization
Many marketers are so (over)confident about their email content and design that they think testing is an overhead. Or it is somewhat of a luxury.
The reality is the opposite.
Creating a second variant will not take more than an hour (and often even less than that!). All you have to do is copy everything and change the element you want to test. If your marketing automation system is smart, it will enable that within just a few clicks.
All that is correct. What will you get out of testing?
In simple terms, split testing (A/B Testing) will tell you what works and what doesn’t work.
So how will you know which email subject line gives you the most email open rate? or which email CTA gives you the most click-through rate?
The answer is testing.
5. Never put all your faith in vanity metrics
It’s important to get the right picture of your marketing efforts. If your focus is on “high numbers”, you may get distracted or even misguided by the wrong metrics.
For example, an email campaign’s success is more accurately measured by the click-through rate. So, a high email open rate on its own has little consequence. All it does is make you feel good. Hence, it’s called a “vanity metric”.
There’s always room for improvement
Sending emails is not your goal with marketing automation. Making sure your leads open those emails, read them, and click through the links – these are your goals.
When we make mistakes, we also have a chance to learn from them. So, examine your current marketing automation strategy and see if you are making any of the above mistakes.
