Marketing automation can help relieve marketing teams from time-consuming duties that keep them from their more important tasks. Marketing automation software is often used by companies to collect customer data, qualify leads, analyze data for in-depth forecasts, and much more. However, problems arise when companies don’t take advantage of the software and use it to its fullest potential. Here, we’re going to break down four mistakes to avoid when implementing marketing automation in order to improve productivity and offer your sales team the best possible chance at generating more conversions.
1. Not Segmenting Your Leads and Opportunities
A marketing CRM is built to collect and organize data, but that doesn’t mean you can set it and forget it. It requires constant attention from the entire team to ensure all the data it gathers is organized in a way that best fits your company’s segmentation model. Segmenting your leads and opportunities helps organize data based on demographics, purchasing behavior, psychological tendencies, and other critical metrics.This plays a significant role in creating more personalized experiences and buyer’s journeys for every individual. People know when they’re getting content that’s sent to everyone, and that’s not enough to convince a potential buyer to follow through with a purchase. They need to be targeted with personalized content in order to increase the sales team’s odds of converting the lead into a customer.
2. Not Using Lead Scoring Features
Lead scoring is a powerful feature of marketing automation software that shows marketing teams which leads are most likely to convert to customers based on certain metrics gathered from the software. These metrics can include job title, social media followers, specific demographics, and which product page a lead viewed. All these metrics provide marketers and sales agents with important context that can be used to offer a more personalized experience through omnichannel implementation.This also plays a role in filtering out leads that won’t make it through the pipeline, which helps to save the sales team a lot more time. Lead scoring works for any business model too. If you want to target lots of leads who typically make a one-time purchase, you can do that; if you want to target higher quality leads and sacrifice quantity, you can do that too, knowing you have the necessary context to make each strategy successful.
3. Automating Too Much Too Quickly
It’s best to automate certain tasks within your marketing strategy in stages. Workflow automations are a great way to limit the amount of time-consuming tasks throughout the day, but they still need to be looked after from time to time. If your marketing team isn’t capable of managing the automations, or the automations aren’t as optimized as they should be, you could end up with some serious issues down the road.If you’re going to implement marketing automations, do it in smaller, more manageable batches to ensure everything is working the way it should. The opposite can be overwhelming for agents who are used to older systems, as it can increase the pressure to learn the new system quickly and leave agents open to making mistakes.
4. Using Automations as a Bandaid
Marketing automation will be of no use if your marketing strategy is already ineffective. This could mean that the leads you’re targeting aren’t connecting with your product or service, or it could mean that there’s something wrong with your ads and email marketing campaigns. For example, typos, addressing people incorrectly, and sending irrelevant or poor-quality ads can all leave a significant negative impact on your company.Automations will do nothing to fix these issues. If you do nothing and then implement marketing automations, you’re only going to make the problem worse by allowing the automations to continue doing what you’re already doing, but with complete control and limited oversight. Like I said, automations still have to be monitored regularly, and they should come in stages to ensure your already-existing marketing strategy is working to its fullest potential.
The Final Word
Marketing automations are a great way for companies to prioritize more important tasks by leaving the more time-consuming ones up to software that can handle them for you. However, many people treat these automations as a bandaid to their marketing strategy, making the entire effort pointless. Automations will not fix existing problems, so it’s important for marketing teams and executives to identify what those problems are first.After, it’s up to the marketing team to implement new automations gradually to make sure they’re working properly and your marketing strategy is optimized to its fullest potential. From there, you can focus on some of the more important features of marketing automation software like lead segmentation and lead scoring, which help improve the odds of converting leads and offering personalized experiences. The four mistakes I mentioned here are great to keep in mind when optimizing your marketing strategy.
About the Author
Reuben Yonatan is the CEO at GetVoIP, a leading VoIP systems comparison guide that connects shoppers with relevant providers.
Workflow automation has been proven to be efficient in several different workplaces. Read below on why you should implement workflow automation now.
