As Marketing Automation still is a young discipline, we all learn by trial and error, searching for the perfect combination of all the features and options available. Fortunately, small mistakes don’t ruin your marketing – they’re rather a natural part of it, enabling you to test and find optimal solutions. Disasters, on the other hand, happen not in consequence of small misstep or failed experiment, but because of the wrong mindset, which blurs your vision and makes you unable to see in which direction are you actually heading. Below we list 5 worst Marketing Automation catastrophes that can occur to your business, explaining what kind of attitude can lead to them. To make it more understandable (and fun!), we illustrated these with examples from Hollywood Blockbusters.
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1. Dirty data
Anatomy of the problem: You don’t remove contacts from you database, so they are many inactive, outdated or misspelled data there.
The mindset: You are afraid of letting them go and move on. You collected them for so many years that’s You feed yourself false hopes, like “Maybe one day they will start to convert”. Or you say: “It doesn’t hurt”. Well, it does.
It’s like: Dirty data are like an iceberg: you can see only a part of it, which seems pretty innocent, but actually the problem is much bigger than you think and real harm can be done. When you neglect such iceberg, you mind suddenly find your business sinking like Titanic. Why? Because inaccurate data might lower your emails’ deliverability and harm your analytics.
Solution: Scrub your database clean. Use a win-back campaign to awake inactive users and let all not-responding contacts go, including spam trap inboxes, forgotten inboxes, inboxes of people who changed jobs… Let them float down to the back of the ocean, Rose.
2. Not learning
Anatomy of the problem: You use a couple of rules you know, refusing to test new features and read more about Marketing Automation.
The mindset: Assuming that you are long enough in the business to know what works can backfire, especially with customer behaviour changing so rapidly and fierce competition on the market. Each week we learn about new possibilities marketing technology offers: new integration, new features, new options.
It’s like: Marketers doing that resemble protagonists of The day After Tomorrow: they don’t listen! Closed in their comfort zones, clinched to their ideas of well-being.Stop; otherwise you won’t be prepared for global cold.
Solution: Marketing Automation specialists constitute a vibrant community, also most providers deliver knowledge in many forms: blogs, ebooks, webinars or consulting. Growing your competencies is easy and can be free with so many free resources at your fingertips.
Learn! Read! If you don’t know where to start, check our list of best free resources to learn marketing for free. Without knowledge, your Marketing Automation platform will be under-utilised all the time.
3. Stalking
Anatomy of the problem: Your customers gets at least 3 messages from you each day, including: “You started following us on Twitter! Thank you!”; “It’s nice that you visited our store yesterday!”, and “Your purchases indicate that you have just broken up with somebody. Don’t worry, there is still plenty of fish in the sea!”.
The mindset: Bombarding customers with too much communication can stem from either beginner’s enthusiasm or will to control your customers.
It’s like: Overdoing Marketing Automation resembles stalking, or even worse – an attack of wicked bees. Like in The Swarm! That’s how the customer sees it!
Solution: We have three quick tips for you.
1)Check how many messages your customer will get per week.
2) Avoid risky subjects in your copywriting. Data can give you a huge amount of knowledge, but with great power comes great responsibility. Don’t freak users out with manifesting how much do you know.
3) Start small. When beginning to work with Marketing Automation platform, introduce new solutions gradually and test each one. Don’t try everything at once, because your communication will get messy.
4. Automating the Wrong Processes
Anatomy of the problem: You are angry. After implementing that fancy Marketing Automation, you don’t see any results! You expected more!
The mindset: You expect the tool itself to solve all your problems and you can’t see that the reason doesn’t lie in the software, but in your general ideas about marketing and knowledge about customers.
It’s like: In WALL-E, humans get fat, ugly and they destroy the earth because they automate anything to make it easier, not because they looked for real value. If automation is motivated only by laziness, you simply escalate wrong things you used to go – you just make them more efficiently. So before you start automating processes, think about what do you want to achieve with them and how users will react. Monitor users’ feedback.
Solution: Marketing Automation is not a magic wand: it doesn’t transform all your actions into gold. If you involve a lot of addresses from purchased lists into your database, sending them more personalised emails won’t do wonders. Of you have a poor content, Marketing Automation will only help distribute it for more people to see.
5. Nothing happens
Anatomy of the problem: Marketers tend to not squeeze the while potential of the MAP platforms. Many use them only as a robust email marketing tool, without even including visitor tracking code on the website.
The mindset: What’s the point of all that? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why am I so exhausted?, you ask yourself, staring bluntly at your screen.
It’s like: The real disaster is when nothing happens – as in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Simply, things are getting slower and slower, and suddenly your business is hit by the great asteroid.
Solution: Marketing Automation software can be intimidating, but don’t be afraid to learn new things. Ensure that you actually utilise the system, gaining new knowledge and experimenting.
Disasters occur when you get lazy and expect Marketing Automation platforms to do everything for you. Such unrealistic expectations can really impede your communication, so remember: you and your customers are most important here. The rest are just tools to make you know each other better.
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