​The 5 Marketing Automation Pitfalls Many Fail To Realise

As someone who is focused on planning and implementing higher-level and multi-channel marketing automation projects, I came to realise the extent of rosiness in peoples' eyewear when they pay the initial 50% of my consulting retainer. I write this article to say “Snap out of it ladies and gentlemen, marketing automation is not as infallible as many believe it to be”. MarkComm automation can be useful, but only if used well.
 
Here are the 5 major potential pitfalls of MarkComm automation many people fail to realise: 
 
1.People fail to focus on the results and the value for clients but buy at face value all the hype of saving money by marketing automation. If you don’t go deep don’t do it at all. If you have a limited budget and you just want to have 6 emails going to your abandoned carts' emails, 5 emails in a sequence & two SMSs to go out to your lost clients, and with each new lead to add ten new tasks in your CRM, better don’t do it. If you decide to do marketing automation, make sure you do it well in the right manner. There’s nothing more monstrous UX-wise than sending out messages that are not solving a problem or satisfying a need of the targeted audiences. Here are some general rules:

• All content should be dynamically customised (names, product categories, products, address, interests, preferred loyalty incentives, etc.).
• The content must arrive at a meaningful time. Everybody has had enough of 3 am email automations going right in their inboxes. 
• Understand the segments psychologically so that you could write the style and essence that is most suitable for what you want to achieve. The customer comes first.

2. Marketing automation will always leave more time for taking a breather? Not really. If you are like most people sometimes some easy manual tasks relax us and recharge us so that we could focus on that higher-level activities afterward. Getting the manual labor out of the equation may feel liberating at first, but imagine that for some position eliminating repetitive tasks would mean greater focus on more cognitively demanding tasks. This can be taxing. Not liberating. Here are some real case scenarios:

• Sales representatives who were calling leads used the manual tasks in the CRM to rest before making another call. They needed some time to reinvigorate and gather confidence. Now, they have more time for calling prospects and qualifying leads. Whether it would increase productivity? Yes. Would it increase quality? Depends. Probably not. It may even increase employees churn rates.
• Internal marketing automation can send reports with marketing results throughout the marketing and sales departments so that everyone keeps track of the KPIs. As these results are automatically generated from the CRM, the additional time executives have isn’t automatically liberating. Now they cannot manually choose which data to disclose and can oftentimes find themselves in situations when they are in the hot seat and take a lot of questions. Will this increase transparency and quality? Yes! Will it bring wellbeing, spare time, and safety for the marketing executives? No. No safe zones with markcomm automation.

3. Marketing automation is not a work in progress. Yes it is. Your automated sequences won’t last forever. With time your content will become dull and your conversion rates will plummet. After 3-6 months you would have to already plan how to change the content that supports your automated procedures. Like with ad campaigns, having an automated sequence requires all the attention it deserves to bring optimal results for your business.

4. You can use MarkComm automation to speak less with your clients and only acquire user feedback through surveys? Don’t be ridiculous. Surely, when you have fewer people interacting with clients, their emotions and opinions aren’t coming directly to you. This is why many marketing departments can totally lose touch with their clients’ realities. So here are some tips about marketing automation implementation so you could keep your executives on the ground (even if you use the cloud for your data):

• Always listen and leave an option for user feedback to your automated campaigns. Having noreply@ addresses surely can feel efficient, but gathering the responses into research email inboxes can provide you with insights worth gold. This is especially important in the early stages of your MarkComm automation unrolling. Also, for this type of unstructured user research marketing departments spend millions of dollars, so why waste any opportunity to gather feedback, even if it’s not planned? Surely, you can send an auto-responder to the email writer who responds to your automated emails and direct him or her to the appropriate channels for communication so they won’t hope for an answer. But still, you will get another worthy channel to listen to what your clients need and want.
• Enable manual follow-ups and customisations so that you can integrate the automatic with the mindful & hand-written. By not having this option, you risk losing important accounts. You can use some ‘red’ keywords that would sound the alarm if a client is close to quitting or if something else important can happen to your business if it doesn't get humans to support the machines.

5. MarkComm automation is a panacea/magic bullet for any business’s problems? Definitely not. It’s a tool to help executives do more with less and do better with smarter tools. The acumen, grit, and perseverance of the people will still determine the success or the failure of the company. Automation is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have as it’s has become a competitive disadvantage not to use it, while it has become a no competitive advantage to have it. But the good side is that many who have marketing automation don't know how to use it. So it would be easy to beat them in the game with a bit more thoughtfulness in your work. Here are some examples:

• If you have 900 accounts (clients) but 80% of your business comes from 50 key accounts, automating your communication with the 50 key accounts should get you in jail for gross negligence of your fiduciary duty towards your business. Some people play the power game and automate their key accounts, making sure they would lose some of them faster than expected. Don't risk what you cannot afford to lose!
• Automating the sequences without a sense for the market conditions or timing, or not adjusting to changes can be fatal for any business. Having markcomm automation that is easy to adjust is vital to stay agile. There are many examples such as sending automated emails offering tourism packages during the #coronavirus lockdown, or offering inappropriate foods during stringent pious times in highly religious markets. For this, computers won’t have the opportunity to match human idiocy in 30 years from now. So use your minds while you can, but properly.  

Finally, MarkComm automation is just a tool. Like blockchain, AI, and NGOs, marketing automation too, can be used for good or evil, depending on the cognitive talent of the people who use it!
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