10 Scary Marketing Automation Fails and How to Avoid Them
- 1. By: Rebecca Matias Marketing Director Callbox Inc.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.