When you’re running a business using marketing automation solutions, it’s easy to think that you can just leave everything to run and that your business, to a certain extent, will run itself.
However, this is far from reality, and many businesses will be allowing certain automated marketing mistakes to operate without ever realising.
These mistakes could be costing your business. So you don’t fall into the same trap, here are seven of the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. A Lack of an End Result
Problem: You’re running an automated content marketing campaign, a social media campaign or emailing campaign but you haven’t defined the end goal of these campaigns.
Solution: Using automated marketing solutions saves you time when it comes to your day to day processes. Invest this saved time into defining your goals of what you want to achieve.
Maybe you want to generate more leads; maybe you want to grow your mailing lists, make more sales or increase your social media engagements rate. Whatever you want to do, define this as your end goal and then tailor your content to meet this goal.
It’s so important to set up your goals before you start automating your business’s processes. If not, you won’t be able to focus on what’s important or what you’re trying to achieve, which will result in your marketing campaign progressing through the motions, but not actually achieving anything.
2. Investing Too Soon
Mistake: You’ve invested in automation software for your business, but you currently don’t have a content strategy in place to keep it running smoothly. Either the content isn’t in place, or your mailing lists are too small.
Solution: Whatever you do, don’t buy a mailing contact list as these simply don’t work long-term. Instead, draw your focus into designed an inbound content marketing strategy that you can use. This means writing blog posts, creating customised emails and designing landing pages.
If you’re strapped for time, you can use content creation tools, such as Grammarix and Australianhelp, as recommended by HuffingtonPost article.
So, rather than jumping straight in every month and trying to spend all your budget so you can get the maximum amount of content for your business to use, take a step back and think about what you want.
After all, spending all your budget on five high-quality articles that have a purpose is far better, and much more effective for your business than 100 low-quality articles that could even result in damaging your reputation and credibility as a business.
3. Not Using Targeted Emails
Problem: You’ve grown your mailing lists, and you’ve got a steady number of contacts using automated solutions, but you’re sending out emails and getting little in return.
Solution: The problem here is that you’re not dividing your emailing lists into groups. The way that you’d market to a 50-year-old male is a lot different to how you would market to an 18-year-old female.
Using automated marketing software where you can segment your lists into groups like gender, age and location so you can create custom marketing content that will have much more of an impact.
Of course, by segmenting your lists, this means you’re going to be creating a lot more content, specialised for each segmented list that you’ve created. However, creating content in this way means that you’re not generalising your target market, but rather giving them the content that they want.
This is far more likely to increase your sales and overall revenue since you’ll be able to increase your website traffic and your customers will be far more likely to be looking at products that they are interested in, rather than just a generalised overview of what you have to offer.
4. Too Much of a Good Thing
Problem: You’re not getting enough responses from your email marketing campaign, so you decide to send more emails, hoping your customers will find something they like.
Solution: Don’t over send content to your subscribers because they’ll simply get sick of deleting your emails or you’ll end up in the spam folder” – explains Brittany Allen, a Digital Marketer at Oxessays and Huffingtonpost contributor.
One survey found a huge 78% of users unsubscribed because they were receiving too many emails. Only send emails you need that provide real value and have a takeaway for the reader. Also, use tools like EasyWordCount to make sure your emails aren’t too long.
In the event that you send far too many emails, you might even end up in the Spam folder which will consequently result in your becoming blacklisted by email providers, meaning none of your customers will be able to receive your emails.
What’s more, this can even damage the credibility of your business, since customers are not blind to spam and will think that you’re desperately trying to get custom.
Of course, the actual number of emails that you can send varies from business to business, industry to industry. While some businesses will thrive on sending an email, perhaps in the form of a newsletter, every single day, others may be successful only sending one email per month.
For you, this will most probably be a case of trial and error until you find a nice balance for you and your customers. However, you could also run a survey email, asking a question where you see exactly how many emails your customers wish to receive. Another approach would be to follow businesses in the same niche as you.
Sign up to their mailing lists, and then you can see how often they send emails to you. You can then use this information to see whether you feel like they should be emailing you more, or less, and then apply that concept to your own practice.
5. Only Using Automated Emails
Problem: Quite simply, you’re only using automated services for your email marketing campaign.
Solution: All aspects of your content marketing campaign can be automated in one way or another. Whether it’s your social media campaign, your blog content campaign, even your SMS marketing campaign, all aspects of your campaign can be automated, saving you so much time and effort in the long-term. Research what options are available to you.
For this, you can use automation tools like ViaWriting and Uktopwriters to get you started.
Nowadays, content marketing is a big place, and there’s such diversity in the industry. You could try creating a podcast, creating videos, designing infographics and working on your PPC campaigns.
While email marketing is a very popular and effective form of marketing, it’s not the only form, and you’ll need to conduct experiments through trial and error to find out what works best for you.
6. Restricting Data to Your Marketing Teams
Problem: All the information that you’re collecting from your automated campaigns is only being used by your marketing teams to generate more content.
Solution: This is one of the most common problems as the information you gather from your marketing campaigns, such as user demographics and topic interest can, of course, be used by your marketing teams to generate more readable content.
However, it can also be used by your sales teams and your support teams to give your customers an even better, more personalised experience that will help you to generate more sales and more happy customers. Use tools like Mywritingway or Academized to make sure that customer data is well organised for your departments.
In fact, using the analytical data from your email marketing campaign can be used by any department within your business.
Even when it comes to product design or sourcing new services to sell to your customers, using your email statistics can show you what kind of content, products and services your customers are most interested in so you can then proactively set about giving them what they want, maximising your revenue and customer base.
7. The Biggest Toolbox
Problem: You’re using so many automation systems and solutions that it’s hard to keep track of what software is monitoring what campaign.
Solution: When your automated marketing campaign is taking off, the best thing to do is to invest in an all-in-one automation solution. This keeps everything in one place, and it’s so much easier to manage.
You’ll also be able to match and compare data within an all-in-one solution effortlessly, so you can identify patterns and correlations with your data so you can see exactly what your customers, both old and new, want from your business; something you may have easily missed if you’re using separate automation platforms.
As you can see, there are many mistakes a business can make when it comes to using marketing automation software but, there are also many simple yet highly effective solutions to these problems. Be smart and think about the best way to address these problems for your individual business.
Author Bio
Freddie Tubbs is a marketing automation professional at Resumention. He is writing a Revieweal online review blog and is a guest writer at the Atlantic and Bigassignments blog.
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