The Pedowitz Group‘s Caitlin Culbert shares tips for a healthy relationship with MA tools.
Marketing automation is designed to make a marketer’s life easier, but software that automates actions such as emails, social and web landing pages can make us a bit too comfortable. To avoid becoming a lazy marketer, you need to create healthy MA habits. Let’s look at four ways to establish good habits and stay on course during the journey to revenue marketing.
1. Take the time to plan. More time upfront equals better quality in the end.
Don’t assume MA will fix bad or nonexistent marketing processes. You can’t automate something that does not exist. So before you use MA, make sure you have defined processes for campaign execution, lead flow, data management and other marketing practices you want to automate. If you don’t have these defined and documented you will automate a mess. Companies who successfully use MA take the time to map out these processes.
2. Don’t spray and pray.
I hate the term email blast. Its connotation is negative and impersonal. Be targeted. Segment. There is no one-size-fits-all customer, and typically there are going to be several ideal customers for your business. For example if you own a lawn care company, you might cater to homeowner associations as well as residential homeowners. These are two very different types of customers. If you were doing email marketing to these two customers, sending the same message won’t be as effective as tailoring the message to speak to each of them individually.
3. Be personal.
It seems to be the cardinal rule that everyone knows, but no one completely follows. When it comes to personalizing your email marketing, there are some easy ways that go beyond just using a name in the email itself. Use the automation to personalize their experience. Try using their time zone for email sends and set up triggered emails that respond to a unique function a person performs. Create a positive user experience by conveying that you understand them and their unique challenges.
4. Pay attention to your data first.
This one seems obvious, but dirty data in, dirty data out. We tend to hook up an MA system to a CRM and then try to start the engines with a ton of great email and nurturing ideas. But we fail to look at the data first. I see it too often. 100,000 records in the MA system, but only 30,000 are marketable, and even then, the majority won’t have a clean or updated profile. So start from the very beginning keeping the bad data out and keeping it as clean as possible. The best habit you can have is being aware of what you have. Be vigilant. Remove junky data. Use picklists to normalize data; use workflows to update bad data. Take the human error out of it. Then go back up to tip No. 1 and document it. Make sure you have a process for loading new data.
