Why your Marketing Automation is Failing to Generate the Desired Results
With unlimited choices and easy access to resources, today’s buyers are more educated than ever before. They have the ability to understand and differentiate between an authentic brand and a lousy company with a simple Google search. Most of them are tipped by the way organizations market their services. Though the modern digital marketing system is equipped with amazing solutions to care for every need of successful marketing, the biggest mistake made by most organizations is to completely rely on the services of marketing technology available in the market.
Common reasons why marketing automation fails
Marketing automation tools are being widely used across every industry to conduct marketing operations faster and more accurately. Only a select few realize that to make the best use of marketing automation, you need to modify and operate it in a way so as to address your unique marketing objective. As a result, organizations often come across issues in their marketing system, for which the entire marketing automation fails to accomplish its sole purpose.
To avoid such a situation, building a sound marketing strategy based on a few proven fundamentals of marketing automation is essential. Let’s’ take a look at the common mistakes made by marketers and the reasons why marketing automation fails and how to avoid them:
Not personalizing messages
Sending bulk promotional messages to every address in your email list, without any human touch; just because marketing automation allows it, is not the right way to address potential clients. If you want to convert leads into buyers successfully, there is more to consider than just adding their name to the subject field as well. “According to a study by eMarketer, more than 85% of internet users specifically expect and accept personalization as a part of their online retail experience,” states Marketo. Using personalized content while interacting digitally with potential clients yields higher response and engagement rates. Use the customer behavior data stored in your database to craft personalized messages and make the readers feel special and a part of your brand. This will result in a higher conversion of leads.
Messages sent at the wrong time
The beginning of your marketing strategy’s success is when the open rate of your messages increases. Additionally, it is very important to monitor all metrics related to it. If you analyze that there is not much growth in this area, you may not be sending marketing messages at the right time. The right time to send marketing messages vary based on the target market and the product. Still, it is your responsibility to experiment with message sending times and figure out the best time that sees more open rates. With digital marketing ruling every platform, your target audience’s inbox might be getting flooded with promotional messages. If you are not sending messages when they are more likely to open it, there is a high possibility of your message getting lost in their pool of unread messages. A better understanding of your specific customer’s life cycle will help you deliver messages at the right time.
Not upgrading your email list
Every year, a huge percentage of the email addresses in your email list decay. Consequently, you need to be continually in search of collecting new emails. Some of the subscribers lose interest, while some change their email addresses. Therefore, building an email list is a process that should never stop. At the same time, it is important to track and delete inactive email addresses to save time, energy, and money.
The marketing objective is not compatible with your business objective
Maybe your marketing metrics show a very successful rate in terms of opening and clicks, but that does not always mean that it is supporting your business growth. Oftentimes, marketers make the mistake of not tracking key performance indicators back to corporate business objectives. As a result, no evaluation is made on how your marketing strategy is impacting your business objective. Sometimes organizations end up investing a lot in marketing automation, not realizing that it will have a negative effect on their overall business revenue. So, to avoid this, develop your marketing plans based on the overall ROI of your business and design your strategy to meet key business objectives.
Neglecting the importance of content marketing
There are times when organizations don’t understand the value of high-quality content. High-quality content is one of the most important components in generating higher conversions. Subsequently, it is a common reason why marketing automation tends to fail for businesses that ignore it. Your content should be transparent and interesting to engage with. Additionally, it needs to add value in the form of offering important information about the product(s) or highlight customer benefits. By simply investing in complicated newsletter designs and templates, or by not creating smart content, your messages lose their core value proposition. Rather, short, simple, and to-the-point messages can generate better and higher leads.
Not using the right communication platform
Be it automated or not, marketing is all about communicating with your potential clients in the absolute best way possible. With the effect of digitization spreading rapidly, your target audience might be using several platforms for communication. Are you aware of which channel(s) to target your market to generate the best results? If not, then maybe this is where your marketing automation is facing a bottleneck. While marketing automation has the ability to send automatic, scheduled messages to potential customers, it is up to marketers to determine if they are using the right platform. The right platform can attract and engage a wider section of the target audience. Take for example a B2B manufacturing company, it may be more advantageous for that company to maintain a presence on a platform like LinkedIn than it would be to invest time creating content for TikTok. Because they are targeting a more professional audience, it is important to understand the demographics of a perspective communication platform. Additionally, it is ideal to maintain a cross-channel approach, where the marketer aims to channel marketing via various communication platforms. Be sure that your efforts are utilized wisely. Ask yourself which platform(s) your target audience is using. How do they engage with that platform? Track your results and adjust as needed.
Forgetting to optimize content for mobile devices
No matter how many platforms you are using to send messages to customers, if you are not optimizing the display to address mobile devices, there won’t be much increase in the open rate. Since most of the customers these days are caught up in their busy schedule, they prefer to check such marketing messages on the go. Messages that fail to fit small screens are often neglected. Investing time and money on messages that are not even readable is a clear waste of resources. So, never forget to optimize your content for mobile devices. This is achieved by keeping your messages simple, short, and in bite-sized chunks.
Marketing automation software can increase your marketing scope, sales, and customer service efficiency, but only if you know how to integrate it in the best possible ways. Successful marketing campaigns depend on the way you utilize this state-of-art technology that has blessed the marketing industry. Marketing automation, though it makes access to digital marketing easier, is one of the most complicated processes of managing marketing campaigns. It requires the collective brainstorming power of the entire marketing team to yield successful results.
To help your brands reach audiences at key decision-making moments, you need to know how and when to use the marketing automation tools. Finally, to better understand the consequences of your marketing strategy, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your target market to analyze whether the way you use marketing automation on your system actually works.