Marketing automation is made easy thanks to the rise of no-code marketing tools. Nowadays, you simply need to drag and drop to create a custom journey of multiple steps and actions. No coding involved. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
If it was all this easy, we would expect this powerful tactic to be widely used, wouldn’t we? Yet, our observation after talking to hundreds of businesses is that there’s still a large portion that doesn’t really use marketing automation, even when their tools allow them to do so.
There must be some hidden challenges. Below, we summarize the three common ones of marketing automation, and provide you some tips to help alleviate them.
Three common marketing automation challenges
1) Having expertise and know-how
Lack of expertise and know-how ranks as the top marketing automation challenges in an international survey, with almost half of the answers (40.3%) cited it as a blocker that prevents them from starting to utilize marketing automation. While marketing automation is here to simplify marketing processes, it indeed requires a certain level of knowledge about the technology from platform functionalities to the logic of automation, lead scoring and segmentations. Many times when an automation platform is brought in, there’s not enough training on these tough prerequisites.
Our tips:
- Start simple. There are so many things you can accidentally break without properly checking the details, especially when you have multiple automation programs running in parallel and there’s an overlap of audience. The evolution certainly takes experience. Don’t be too ambitious to aim for the sky in a single bound.
- Implementation consultants are worth their weight in gold. When you first start, consider getting some help from industry experts like Ematic to ensure a smooth onboarding process and assist your team in acquiring the necessary knowledge to greatly accelerate your marketing automation success.
2) Integrating quality data
Your marketing automation campaign is only as good as the database you have. If you want to set a cart abandonment workflow, you need to have your customers’ transaction history data ready in the automation platform. Simply having data isn’t enough, your data has to be clean, relevant and verified in order to make your automation flow really successful. Unfortunately, not all businesses are well aware of data quality. Wrong customer info, mismatched status or missing data are often spotted when we review a customer’s database. These small misses can potentially ruin the user experience.
Our tips:
- Review your data before using: A golden rule is to always review the data you are about to use and check the data completeness and timeliness. Setting up some data validation rules can be very helpful here, but if not, a simple glimpse with the human eye is still better than nothing.
- Perform a regular data health check: We advise you to check your database at least once per quarter, and examine a set of metrics such as bounces, invalid emails, marketable vs. unmarketable people, incomplete fields, data inconsistencies etc. For some businesses that are short of hands or knowledge, Ematic can provide necessary resources as part of our marketing automation service.
- Don’t forget to set a default value in your automatic messages. You wouldn’t want to show something like “ , this is a gift for you” – a long blank in the sentence due to a missing customer name.
3) Managing automation as a system
Although building a visual flow is straight-forward, it is the troubleshooting aspect that many marketers find challenging. When a workflow doesn’t perform as expected, there could be various reasons behind it, such as the contact was not added (or added too many times) to your automation, the email was not properly sent due to deliverability issue, or the contact went down the wrong path in the “If/Else” statement etc. For marketers who are less equipped with technical knowledge, it’s an overly complicated puzzle game to play.
Even for some companies that managed to build sophisticated marketing automation programs over time, it is not uncommon to see that when the CRM manager leaves, the new in-charge drops the existing flow and starts all over again because they are unfamiliar with what’s inside and fear of breaking the flow with even a tiny change.
Our tips:
- Don’t overlook technical support. If you don’t have a dedicated engineer for CRM in your business, having an external agency as a long-term technical partner can be to your benefit. They are not only able to help you remove all technical related blockers, but can also monitor and ensure the system runs smoothly all the time. Even when there’s a personnel change in your organization, the partner can help you pass the experience through the transition and make sure the next person receives necessary training on how to operate your system.
There are always hurdles to overcome when you implement new technology, but the benefits are certainly rewarding. If you are looking for ways to exploit more potential out of marketing automation, let us be your helping hand. Our professional service can assist you in all aspects of marketing automation, from strategy planning, technical setup, campaign creation/management, analytics to optimization. Whether you want to simply compliment in designated areas or require end-to-end support, we can tailor an action plan for you. Learn more about our service or Contact us to talk about your marketing automation plan.
