5 Marketing Automation Mistakes Are Hurting Your Campaigns (and it could be worse than you know)
Marketers often find it extremely difficult to be heard in the midst of the noise from millions of messages that their targeted audiences receive. In spite of that, many marketers make the mistake of basing their campaigns on guesswork rather than on solid data-backed strategies.
Sadly, that’s not the only mistake that marketers make, assuring that their marketing automation campaigns will stumble and fail instead of performing the way those were expected.
However, these and other marketing automation mistakes are avoidable – here is a list of common mistakes that marketers are most prone to and how they can avoid them.
1. Processing marketing automation campaigns without definite goals
Marketers who are triggering too many automated email messages and social media feeds instead of setting a specific goal are probably shooting in the dark with no goal to see. Instead first thing they need to do is to spend time to identify marketing and business objectives.
After defining goals, they need to assign those objectives to all the marketing efforts and campaigns, whether through email, social media, direct mail etc. That way, you can optimize your campaigns to business goals, and your campaigns will be more purpose-driven and valuable to your business.
Marketers need to define specific goals for different campaigns before they put together campaigns for automation.
2. Marketing automation campaigns do not meet business goals
Once you’ve defined your goals and objectives, you also need to identify the right metrics to measure campaign performance and success.
One of the major marketing automation difficulties occurs when marketers fail to track relevant and important performance indicators that measure the specific business goals.
Companies that limit themselves to traditional, all-too-generic performance metrics such as email opens, clicks etc, are missing out on the data needed to generate revenues. Generic metrics could yield some data about your users’ activities, but you need to zero in on more specific metrics that help measure if campaigns are meeting business objectives.
If your objective as a marketer involves contributing to the revenue generation of your company, then you should rather choose metrics to help measure the cost per program success, the cost per opportunity, the new names added per program, the pipeline to investment and the pipeline generated.
3. Campaigns are not based on behavioral data
Many more marketers will ignore the behavioral data of targeted audiences and customers. To avoid this mistake, marketers should base their email messages and campaigns on information gleaned from how their audience is engaging and acting with their previous, similar messages.
Marketers also need to check out other relevant behavioral data on which websites and pages prospects are visiting, how they are interacting with similar ads on social channels, search engines, emails and other channels they are using. Thus, marketers can increase odds of more email opens, click rates, responses and conversion rates.
Email open rates that are 50 percent higher, and conversion rates that are 350 percent higher, resulted from targeted emails that are based on users’ behavioral data on their interactions with web sites and pages, according to analysis by The Relevancy Group.
That’s why marketers need to use listening tools to monitor their behaviors, interactions with web pages, where they click and navigating, emails messages they are opening, and links embedded in emails they are clicking and not – and based on these data points, they need to create a scoring model to measure users’ areas of interests and create campaigns with relevant and valuable offers.
4. Email lists are not segmented
If you are only using a marketing automation platform to blast off emails without doing segmentation of your email lists, your emails will attract more unsubscriptions than engagement.
That’s why it is important to first categorize your email list database and then to customize your marketing campaigns before you automate them. If your emails and offers are not useful to your subscribers and prospects, they might shift to your competitors and you will end up losing leads eventually.
To avoid this mistake, you need to create lead nurturing strategies that are optimized to the specific people who are going to receive your mails.
According to Direct Marketing Association, only 42 percent marketers are doing the right kind of segmentation and sending relevant messages to the segmented contacts. If you do not want to be among the 58% and lose customers, start segmenting your email database today!
5. Running campaigns on wrong channels
Marketers also need to focus on the right channels to circulate their campaigns where their buyers are most active. Customers often make spontaneous momentary choices on which channels based on those that are fitting their requirements or to complete a specific task at hand.
That’s why marketers need to consider more than one channel, and they need to distribute promotions across the multiple channels that their targeted customers mostly use. They must identify how their prospects want to engage and interact with content on their preferred channels.
Multi-channel marketing automation campaigns will increase the opportunities for reach and engagement with target buyers. A majority of young buyers now prefer consuming content, engaging with content and completing purchases on their mobile devices whereas older buyers prefer direct mails or emails to engage with promotions – That’s just one reason why you need to choose the targeted channels according to your targeted customers’ preferences.
What’s the biggest challenge and pitfall you face in running your marketing automation campaigns and gaining success in your campaigns? If you need professional assistance and tips to run your marketing automation campaign, connect with us via (408) 502 6765 or our social channels Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.