Rebecca is the Marketing Director at Callbox. She spearheads successful projects in leveraging brand visibility. A vivid marketing blogger and a goal oriented leader who enjoys sharing tips and stories. This is her take on Marketing Automation Fails that marketers should avoid.
4. 1. The “Hi FirstName” personalization fail
This is a classic example of
personalization gone wrong. Practically
all of us have at one point opened an
email and found a unmodified first name
tag where we’d expect to see our names.
This blunder seems to happen all the
time and also involves other
personalization fields such as company
names, industry, location, etc. Most
experts believe that every marketer has
made this mistake at least once in their
careers.
5.
6. 2. Out-of-control auto-replies
Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cardkarma/5990183098
Automation frees up time and
people, so that these resources are put to
work on more important things. But time
savings and productivity gains from
automation don’t always justify keeping
humans out of the loop in some marketing
touch points.
7.
8. 3. Leads disappearing into thin air
MAPs exist to help you
efficiently move leads down the
conversion funnel, so losing track
of prospects defeats the whole
point of automation in the first
place. That’s why lead
management ranks as one of the
top benefits that marketers expect
from MAPs.
9.
10.
11. 5. Campaigns haunted by bad data
Bad data impacts MAPs in
nasty (and often insidious) ways. Poor data
quality results in unreliable metrics,
imprecise targeting/segmentation, incorrect
personalization (recall point #1), and lower
overall lead quality. For email automation
alone, bad data wreaks havoc on sender
scores, deliverability, CTRs, bounces, and
opt-outs.
12.
13. 6. Contracting email-focused tunnel vision
A lot of MAP users tend to
underuse the powerful features and
functions at their disposal. In the hands
of most marketers, advanced MAP
technologies simply devolve into
glorified email automation systems.
Emails form the backbone of most lead
management and nurturing processes
because of their scale and precision. But MAPs are more than just email
management tools. They enable marketers to use and combine every
marketing channel required to connect and engage with prospects.
Potential buyers don’t stick to one channel. They’re on the
platforms and tools that work for them. That’s why a good understanding of
how your target prospects communicate should precede implementing a
MAP.
14. 7. Finding MAP skeletons in the close
Speaking of MAP prerequisites, it’s a bit
astonishing (and not in a good way) that most marketers
launch MAPs before having a well-defined marketing process in place.
Common sense dictates it should be the other way around, but here we
are.
MAP users often find areas in their marketing processes that
need improvement long after acquiring and setting up their platform.
This leads to chronic underperformance and constant second-guessing.
It’s much easier to first understand the buyer’s journey and finding a
MAP that’s a good fit, than realigning your sales process to an existing
MAP’s capabilities.
MAPs produce better results when applied to clear processes
and specific steps. They’re, after all, only a means to an end,
not the other way around.
15. 8. Being trapped in marketing automation limbo
More than half (53%) of
marketers place increasing
revenues as their #1 MAP goal.
Yet marketers still struggle to tie
results from different marketing
initiatives back to revenues.
That’s despite having marketing
attribution as a key area where
MAPs lend marketers a helping
hand.
16.
17. 9. Cobweb-covered analytics dashboard
In order to get the needed
metrics and KPIs for making
informed marketing decisions,
you have to be looking at the
right numbers.
Just what analytics constitute “the right numbers” depend, to a huge
degree, on your MAP strategy and goals.
A MAP tracks and reports metrics on every marketing activity you
run it with. But only a small portion of this analytics tell you most of what
you need to know.
18.
19.
20. MAPs don’t do your work for
you. They simply automate the
repetitive, redundant, and boring
parts of marketing, so that you and
your team get to focus on what’s
important. Yet marketers often
wrongly believe that having a MAP
running in the background means
The Takeaway
their campaigns are pretty much on autopilot. It’s this misconception that
marketers need to cast aside in order to stop the nightmarish scenarios
we’ve talked about here from keeping them up at night.
