In modern times, marketing automation has become a vital tool for both enterprises and small businesses. Marketing automation (MA) is a tool that can aid you in gaining and sustaining competitive advantage by speeding up sales in the marketplace.
Moreover, when MA is integrated into an easy to use CRM , it enables the user to personalize messages, engage more contacts and thereby builds a world-class relationship with prospects and customers.
However, all marketing automation systems are not the same. There are many silo MA software apps and CRM platforms that need integration with third-party applications, which can not only cost time and money but also bring along with it the fear of things going wrong down the road.
This is the exact reason businesses prefer to use all-in-one CRM software like ConvergeHub which includes Sales Force Automation (SFA) that is also popularly known as Marketing Automation in a CRM.
The four main benefits of using MA in an easy to use CRM are:
Nevertheless, there are also MA mistakes you can make along the way, which you must avoid as mentioned below:
MA Mistake #1
Send Emails to Contacts That Did Not Opt-In
One of the most important Marketing Automation best practices is that MA involves permission-based emails. This implies, you only send emails to people in your contact list that provides permissions to send them information about your brand.
You can get this permission when each of the contacts opt-in to your email, by providing their emails through authentic channels like web-to-lead forms, the free trial offers, buyer’s information forms and many more.
Therefore, going by the books, adding contacts manually or importing a list to your MA system is a violation of the Spam rules, since if you do it there are changes that doing so may compromise the delivery of emails and thereby reduce the success rate of your email campaigning strategies.
MA Mistake #2
Not Maintaining an Active Contact’s Database
Now, even after you get any contact to opt-in for your emails, you must also keep them active. This implies that you must continuously send emails with appropriate contents to keep your list engaged at least once every week. This is because, if you do not, your contacts may forget you and thereafter do not open your emails.
You can use re-engagement campaigns as an effective and time-tested method to get inactive contacts to get engaged with your emails.
Therefore, always maintain an active and clean contact list in your CRM database .
MA Mistake #3
Focusing on Wrong Metrics
Marketing Automation is an extremely robust marketing tool when integrated into easy to use CRM that allows the user to measure the results of their campaigns.
Some of the most important email campaigning metrics are:
However, attending to wrong metrics can make you misinterpret the real results.
Therefore it is most important that you must know the metrics you are seeking to find with each campaign individually to determine your email campaign’s success using MA software.
MA Mistake #4
Not Split Testing Campaigns
All email campaigns done with the help of Marketing Automation differs by the number of contacts, type, content and more.
Hence, spit test your campaigns to find what works right for your business.
The key to spit testing your campaigns is to just focus one variable at a time like, offer, headline, price, design, target audience and others.
Take the campaign that wins as your new control and then tests other subsequent campaigns against it.
MA Mistake #5
Not Having a Certified Consultant on Your Team
We are finally talking about this mistake as MA is both an art and science. Marketing Automation in practice requires a mix of technological knowhow along with expertise in direct response marketing.
This is the reason why it is best to rely on an independent marketing automation software consultant to build your custom Marketing Automation system, train your employees and develop MA strategies for your business growth.
