We often talk about the benefits of marketing automation, but we sometimes forget to mention what people should know before committing to the project. There are indeed 5 major mistakes that can easily be avoided when one is well‑informed before starting.
But first of all, what is marketing automation?
Basically, marketing automation is a solution that provides personalized and tailored content to consumers at the right time in their purchase journey. This content can be sent through various channels, such as emails, text messages, and others.
1. Not understanding your target customer’s journey
Building your relationship with your target customers involves a series of interactions between you and them. What are their habits? Where do they get their information? Where is the best place to reach them? What content do they need, and when do they need it? These are questions you need to answer.
Without this, you may make a massive detour before reaching the desired result. Suppose you don’t know enough about your target. In that case, you could get discouraged, lose time and energy and, most importantly, lose confidence in marketing automation when it could’ve been a great asset to your business.
To evaluate your target customers’ journey, use data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system. This data will help you understand what personalized content you need to push and when.
Also, you might want to take a look at our Customer Experience department to explore strategies for improving customer perception of your structure throughout all stages of purchasing and communication.
2. Starting too big
The best tactic with an automation marketing campaign is to start smaller and adjust along the way. It will be much cheaper to make a mistake with a small project than a big one.
Starting smaller will also allow you to test and find the most exciting avenues for you. You will then gain confidence in your marketing automation strategy and discover its benefits while risking less with your precious business.
3. Believing that marketing automation is only for emails
Most people believe that marketing automation can only be used with emails and is the most effective channel. However, marketing automation is much more than just sending emails. It can be used with text messages, social networks, web pages, phone calls and much more.
The important thing is to choose the channels that are best suited to your target customer: where will they be, and when are they most likely to interact with the content you send their way?
Hence why it’s so important to know your target audience (see mistake number 1!).
4. Creating content that is too general
One of the main advantages of marketing automation is the ability to create personalized content. So, after the target customer performs a specific action, you can react according to this action.
Therefore, the worst mistake would be to provide content that is not adapted to your customers’ actions. Communication must be human and direct, as if we were addressing the person directly. The customer must never feel like the content has been written and/or sent by a robot.
This personalized content is what fosters customers’ loyalty and commitment to your business because it makes them feel unique and important.
Don’t know how to organize your ideas? Ask an experienced copywriter to do it for you.
5. Letting the system run by itself
Once you have marketing automation in place, you can’t simply forget it. The term “automation” may suggest that it’s an easy and effortless way to create content, but it’s a little more complicated than that.
You need to maintain and take care of your marketing automation. In marketing, as in any field, there are always opportunities to improve or optimize performance. That’s why you need to stay alert to the results of your automated marketing strategy. If you don’t have the time to do so, our team can help you.
Since marketing automation works mainly according to the action/reaction principle, you will have to set up scenarios based on your target customers’ actions. But these scenarios will need adjustments when you have collected enough data during your e‑mailings, for example.
Your adjustments will give you a better conversion rate, i.e., more concrete and profitable actions for your company. Don’t be afraid to test things out: they will enable you to exclude certain avenues and reach given objectives more quickly.
Come see us and avoid those rookie mistakes
Despite all our advice to avoid the most frequent missteps, no one is safe from making mistakes. To make sure you set up a profitable and effective automation marketing campaign for your company, never hesitate to contact us.
It will be our pleasure to help you, advise you and accompany you in implementing your project!