How To Avoid The Pitfalls Of Marketing Automation

How To Avoid The Pitfalls Of Marketing Automation

Setting up marketing automation for your business may seem like a daunting task but it is absolutely necessary and worth it. Once you have your marketing automation software set up it can be like an ATM machine that will produce a consistent income.

What are some marketing automation pitfalls and best practices that you must know when you are just starting with the implementation of your marketing automation software? In this post we go through some do’s and don’ts that our co-founder, Trent, discussed in an interview with marketing automation expert Dan Faggella.

Your Optin Follow-Up Email Should Be Triggered As Soon As Possible

Leads get cold. People that were interested in some kind of offer or content that you had a week ago might not be so interested now. You waited too long and the interest waned.
The best practice is to immediately send a follow-up email after someone has opted in to one of your content offers. The email should contain intelligent suggestions for more of your content instead of just being a thank you note.

Marketing Automation Segmentation

Subscribers to your email list need to be segmented into categories based on what they are interested in so you can send them more of that. The different consumers of your content are going to be interested in different things. That is why you need a whole range of content offers so you can make it as a custom designed experience as far as humanly possible that is still automated but feels personal.
There are two ways that you can segment your email list. The first one is to send them more offers based on the content that they are already interested in. For example, if they requested a white paper on LinkedIn marketing you can send them an offer suggesting more content that has to do with social media marketing.
The second way to segment them is a more accurate way because you ask them to segment themselves into a category. You do this by using a drop down categorization menu on the opt-in form. So instead of asking for just a name and email you are asking for an extra piece of information. An example of this could be for them to select one of the following:

• I am a person that is looking for a new business idea.
• I am looking for a way to scale my business idea.
• I am in a corporate job and I am looking for a way to start my own business.
• I am in a corporate job and looking for ways to improve my company’s online presence and marketing.

These different categories have different needs. When you know who is reading your content and what their needs are you can give them more of what they need and move them down your sales funnel faster to see if they are a good fit for whatever you are selling.

Identify Your Closing Channel Of Communication

You need to identify which channels of communication you usually use at the end of the deal when it is time to close. All your content assets need to gently nudge your prospects in the direction of where your majority of sales come from.
It doesn’t make sense to push your prospect to an e-commerce buy page if you are selling high ticket monthly retainer consulting services. Those deals are usually closed over the phone or in person. So when you’re nudging your prospects towards the bottom of the funnel you can start mentioning an upcoming phone call or an option to schedule a meeting in your content.
If you are selling a physical product and you go and copy the marketing automation process of someone selling online services you are not going to be optimized to sell. Identify your strongest selling channel and build your marketing automation around it.

Thank You Page

What you see a lot after downloading a piece of gated content or after buying something online is a thank you page that simply says “thank you for your order” or “thank you for downloading.” A better way would be to use it as an opportunity to move prospects further down your sales funnel. Offer them more content that they might be interested in.
If you want to be aggressive after a sale you can offer an up-sell. If that is not your style ask your new customer to tweet about the product they just bought. Capitalize on their excitement after just buying something and let them help you spread the word.

Don’t Send “We’re Still Alive” Newsletters

You see this pretty often, companies that have nothing to say sending out the same spammy emails month after month or even worse, week after week or day after day. This is a feeble attempt to keep top of mind with your email list. If you don’t have quality content to send, mail your listless frequently. If you spam your email list you will lower your open rate and your unsubscribe rate will go up. Some of the most successful email marketers don’t send an email every day and some don’t even send one every week but when they do it is super high quality and the people on their list look forward to their content.

Conclusion

Email marketing is far from dead and can still be a great source of business. Automating it can make your life so much easier but you need to have quality content for marketing automation software to be effective. If you are looking to implement marketing automation software in your company, that is a service we offer. We invite you to initiate a conversation with us.