Marketing Automation Misconceptions to Avoid

Lead acquisition, campaign execution, email workflows – marketing automation offers marketers a wide range of opportunities to make their everyday work easier. But where there are many opportunities, there is also some confusion. You should avoid these five common mistakes so that your automated marketing processes prove to be efficient. 

As promising as marketing automation tools are, there are various pitfalls that can stand in the way of the efficiency of these software platforms. These five mistakes should be avoided by marketers in automation.

What is Marketing Automation, and How Does it Work?

1. Solely Focusing on Email Automation

The automated sending of emails makes up a large part of marketing automation. As a result, marketers can end up focusing almost exclusively on email automation. Newsletters are essential for lead nurturing, but the other channels must not be forgotten. By using the information about your buyer persona, you can also use tools such as social media and content marketing in a personalized manner. For example, you can create blog articles to answer questions from your buyer persona. Automated publishing on social networks offers the opportunity to draw the right users’ attention to your content. So that both lead nurturing, customer retention and customer acquisition can work via marketing automation, all channels must be taken into account.

2. Lack of Personalization

Automation enables marketers to centrally control a large number of channels and customers. Nevertheless, marketers must not lose sight of individual users: prospects, leads and customers want to be addressed personally in a relevant timing. Marketing automation should, in any case, facilitate internal workflows – however, the leads must not notice that communication with them has been automated. Despite automated processes, you have to give your leads and customers the feeling that each of your messages is addressed to them personally. Only then do they feel individually referred and can build a bond with your company.

3. Don’t Consider Every User a Lead

Marketing automation offers the opportunity to reach many users, send countless emails and draw the broadest possible range of users to your company. But not every visitor who is on your side can also become a qualified lead. Well-designed marketing strategies are not about generating as many leads as possible, but rather to those who are actually interested in your company, your service or your product. Marketing Automation offers you the opportunity to separate qualified and unqualified leads. This can help prevent marketing or sales resources from being wasted on leads. Automation can help to collect important information about your users. On the other hand, it supports you in reaching the right information to the right users. The keyword here is: buyer persona!

To do this, you should have the following knowledge:

* What are the needs of your visitors?

* What challenges and problems are they dealing with?

* How old are they, what gender are they, what is their marital status and level of education?

You can use this and other information to create a profile for your ideal customer. In this way, you can assess for each user, whether it is a qualified lead and concentrate exclusively on this.

4. Overdoing Automation

Automation simplifies many processes for the marketing team. However, this also increases the risk that marketers overdo it and operate the automation too aggressively. So be careful not to overwhelm your leads with newsletters or push notifications. In the worst case, such processes can cause adverse reactions from potential customers – which can result in subscriptions being canceled or users no longer enabling your push notifications. Therefore, choose a suitable frequency for sending out notifications and emails, which will support you in lead nurturing. A regular analysis of the key figures also provides important clues for optimization.

5. Forgetting Measuring

Automated processes save time and effort. But merely setting up the workflows and setting up all the associated rules won’t be enough. After all, what benefits does the automation of your measures bring if you don’t know which of them are promising? Therefore, you should always take enough time to measure your marketing performance. Keep an eye on your ongoing processes by defining key indicators in advance. You examine these at regular intervals and can thus see which measures work and which processes need to change.