Avoid These Costly Marketing Operation Mistakes on Marketo During Economic Crisis
Whether you are a seasoned marketing operation specialist or a newbie, there are operational mistakes we all are likely to commit, or we have already made those in any Marketo programs and campaigns.
However, all marketing operation mistakes cost us havoc. Especially during an economic crisis, making these marketing pitfalls will be even costlier while running marketing operations in reducing budget.
The following are the most common and costly marketing operation mistakes you have to avoid in Marketo, and how to resolve them.
Starting Campaigns Without Knowing Your Customers
Most marketers focus on the technicality of digital marketing, such as using Facebook ads, Google Ads, and others, instead of understanding their target audience. Your product marketing team members may have already defined ideal customer personas and collected insights on how and which online channels people are engaging and how their behavior differs from one channel to another. Make the most use of these insights and information on the customer persona to optimize the language and the tone, which will resonate the best with every segment and customer persona.
Create customer-centric descriptors for different campaigns to strengthen targeting and also based on the stage of the buying cycle customers are positioned. Make sure the language, voice, and tone of campaigns are customized to the demography, job details, industry size, behavioral data, and other customer insights of specific persona and segment of the audience.
The more they find your messages and content relevant, personalized, and useful, the more they start trusting in your brand and driving your brand to stay ahead of the curve.
Lack of Social Media Strategy
Whether you practice an organic or a paid social media marketing strategy, or a combination of both strategies – having a social media strategy in place is critical.
According to a Marketo survey conducted on CMOs across the world, social media is one of the most significant and unavoidable marketing channels. Social media channels are effective for demand generation, lead generation, branding, community engagement, and double as an advertising channel.
Many companies consider Facebook not as effective as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media channels for ad campaigns. Still, the channel produces a sizable volume of ad revenues for diverse verticals of businesses.
Applying the Same Strategies on Every Marketing Channel
Each marketing channel has distinctive characters and attracts different types of audiences and people with a varied range of expectations. So a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy will invariably fail to work the way ad campaigns are intended to perform on different channels.
Each type of campaign resonates with the audience differently on different channels. Hence, marketers should not forget customizing the tone of content and messages, use of links, selection of images, offers and discounts, frequency, day and times of day to launch the campaign.
Using the same campaigns on all search campaigns, email marketing, mobile marketing, and social media channels will lessen your capability to build connections and trust from prospects and customers, especially when they are engaging with you and buying products and services related to your brand. So adjust your marketing operation strategies as per different marketing channels and goals.
Bad Email List Database
It’s already a challenge to get your emails seen, but today, getting your emails delivered is more challenging than ever. Simply avoiding “spammy” words isn’t enough to ensure you’ll make it into the inbox.
Big email service providers have followed Gmail’s lead when it involves embracing an “engagement model.” Gmail buckets emails into three separate tabs: primary, social, and promotions. It may be a challenge to hit the first inbox because Gmail evaluates these factors to work out which emails pass as “primary”:
The key to creating it through Internet Service Provider (ISP) spam filters is to keep your sender reputation as pristine as possible. The most common factors affecting your reputation include subscriber engagements such as opens and clicks, hard bounces, placement on a blacklist, and spam complaints.
Lack of Lead Segmentation
In addition to all these critical marketing operation practices, you also need to keep in mind that ISPs prioritize high levels of email engagement. This means ISPs are designed to ensure their customers are accessing, opening, clicking, reading, and engaging with emails from familiar and trustworthy brands regularly. When you maintain timely email delivery, regularity, frequency, and high subscriber engagement, ISPs will start routing your email communications to subscribers’ inbox.
There are several ways brands can improve inbox delivery, and at the same time, you need to remember 9 Do’s and Don’ts for Email Template Designs Optimized for Inbox Delivery. To drive better email delivery, start with targeting your highly engaged email subscribers and next, target unengaged email subscribers after around 30 minutes of sending the first batch of emails. Thus, you can improve email deliverability rates and inboxing. This is because when ISPs notice higher levels of subscriber engagement from the engaged subscribers first, they increase your sender reputation score.
Remember these 6 Common Email Marketing Mistakes that Affect Email Sender Reputation. Then, when you launch your subsequent set of emails to unengaged email subscribers, their ISPs also route your email communications to their inbox since you have already established a high engagement and credible sender reputation score.
Focusing on the Wrong Metrics
Marketers and business owners can select from a wide array of metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. But, most marketers do not focus beyond Impressions, cost per conversion, click-through rate, cost per click, ROI, among others.
Focusing on the most common and earliest metrics cannot give you full insight into customer instructions and campaign efficacy. Lead tracking on Marketo only is not enough, use social media analytics, paid campaign analytics, and others when necessary to identify which source is generating maximum leads.
Then, you can take a thoroughly data-driven budget allocation strategy for your upcoming marketing campaigns. Being efficient marketers, you should always take a complete look at all analytics and reports you can get for all the campaigns you launch.
Lack of Reactivation Strategy
Marketers invest huge amounts of their time, resources, and money in acquiring new leads and customers, and getting website visitors to subscribe to their email list. But, it is also not rare that some subscribers stop engaging or even opening emails. Those inactive or sleepy subscribers gradually decrease your email open rates, email deliverability, click-to-open rates, and even the sender reputation score.
The span of “inactivity” of subscribers largely depends on your email cadence. If you send an email to your subscribers around two to three times a week, then the inactive subscribers are not those who have not engaged or opened your emails for the last three to six months. However, If you schedule your emails on a monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly basis, subscribers who have not opened or engaged with your emails for a year or two will be marked as inactive subscribers.
Irrespective of the email cadence, when your inactive subscribers were actively engaged with your emails, have shown intent to buy, attended your webinar, downloaded your free content, or made a purchase, you should not forget them.
Increase the return on your resources, budget, and time spent in targeting and acquiring your prospects and customers. Create reactivation or re-engagement email campaigns exclusively targeting those sleepy or inactive subscribers to show them the best offers and start getting engagement from them.
Also, some subscribers may lose interest in your emails and start unsubscribing from your list – but fret not, you can create email campaigns to Win Back Email Unsubscribers and Keep Them Subscribed.
Conclusion
For an email to be opened, links to be clicked, images to be downloaded, you need to be painstakingly strategic in every asset and aspect.
However, you need experts’ help in setting up your Marketo process so that you can maximize the outcome from your investment, especially during a challenging economy when every dollar is important. Reaching us is the easiest move you make today for your business! Let us help you get started with Marketo so that you can avoid all dreaded and costly mistakes in your Marketo implementation. Use our contact us page or say “Hi” to info@marrinadecisions.com. You can also connect with us via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.