Before explaining the mistakes to avoid in marketing automation, we will do a brief review of marketing automation and its most used techniques, lead scoring and lead nurturing. If you want to learn more about these concepts, we recommend you to check out the following articles:
But don’t worry, as we said, we provide you with a small summary so that you can follow the article perfectly. Let’s get started!
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to the use of specialised tools to schedule automatic or automated email blasts.
Many companies leave direct email marketing campaigns out of the core strategy and focus all their efforts on other channels, such as social media, believing that these can be more effective. Having a well-designed email marketing strategy is essential and today you can make use of a multitude of tools that facilitate this task.
When we talk about email marketing campaigns and, especially, automated ones, we move in a reality where not only conversion is important, but also the efficiency of the resources involved in having several tasks programmed automatically that are executed with triggers.
With these techniques, marketing teams can focus their efforts on creative tasks instead of wasting time on repetitive tasks.
Benefits of marketing automation
As we have already mentioned, marketing automation campaigns achieve greater efficiency and profitability by saving teams time. But that’s not the only benefit, here are a few more:
- It is highly effective and helps to reduce costs.
- It helps to have more control over the various marketing actions that you are going to execute.
- It makes it easier to identify the users who are most interested in your products or services and, consequently, they are likely to receive a much more direct commercial offer.
- It is 100% configurable and customisable.
- It provides the ability to have a conversation with your subscribers and therefore maintains the interaction from the beginning until they buy.
Lead scoring and lead nurturing
There are several marketing automation techniques, but in this post we are going to focus on lead scoring and lead nurturing.
Lead scoring
Lead scoring is a technique that basically allows us to classify the leads in a database. This classification is based on a points system or “scoring” that depends on how close the lead is to the buyer persona you have identified for your company, considering all the interactions it has had with the various channels, as well as the stage of the buying process or “pipeline” in which it is.
Through a good lead qualification you can:
- Send much more personalised and therefore more effective messages.
- Align marketing strategies with the sales team to be able to execute more specific actions.
- Identify the level of interest of users in your products or services.
- Locate the leads that are closer or further away from purchase and define strategies for each of them.
- Develop better loyalty strategies for your leads and customers.
Lead nurturing
Once we have classified the leads (through lead scoring) we can implement a lead nurturing strategy. The objective of this strategy is to add value, capture and retain leads to achieve your business objective, which can be a direct sale or the contracting of a service.
Through lead nurturing we can define several interactions that the company will carry out with the user in a fully automated way. Thanks to tools and techniques such as remarketing, chatbots or smart CTAs or intelligent “call to action” we can carry out a good lead nurturing strategy after having done the scoring.
The strategy that usually works best is to carry out lead scoring first and then lead nurturing. In this way, the most direct techniques, such as sending an email offering a product, are executed based on the knowledge of the customer or potential customer to whom the email is addressed.
What should you avoid when implementing marketing automation?
Having introduced the concepts of marketing automation, lead scoring and lead nurturing, it is important to explain the mistakes to avoid in marketing automation when implementing or automating these types of techniques.
1. Skipping the scoring phase
A common mistake that you should avoid at all costs is not carefully analysing and properly segmenting your database. If you send all users the same email chains, you will lose many opportunities.
Suppose you contact a user who is already very qualified or advanced in the sales process, if you have not segmented your database properly, you may start sending them emails with too much educational content that perhaps they have already read. That would be bad nutrition and you could end up losing them.
As we remember from previous articles, usually, the optimal way to classify our leads depends on three characteristics:
- The affinity or closeness that this lead has with our buyer persona
- The knowledge that this person has about our company
- The phase of purchase in which our potential customer is
The most appropriate would have been to have perfectly identified this type of users and send them the automated email chains indicated for the phase in which they are, in the previous case should have been sent a more commercial content focused on the sale.
2. Failing to personalise content
This is one of the most common mistakes, not personalising the content of emails. Having segmented the database through lead scoring and knowing the user’s data, we have the ability to personalise the content so that it is aligned with their needs, as all users are different.
The ideal is not only to address them by name, but also to contacts in which we follow the steps they have taken on the web to offer them help, for example, or an email thanks to which they can follow certain steps to continue with what they have left halfway through on your page. This is perhaps one of the most important mistakes to avoid in marketing automation.
3. Email chains linked with nurturing
Another typical mistake in marketing automation and scoring and nurturing strategies is that the email chains do not have the necessary means to advance the user through the nurturing.
For example, let’s suppose that we already have scoring and we have already segmented users according to their maturity level. On the other hand, we have nurturing with three different chains of emails depending on the sales phase in which the user is: educational emails, brandings and others with a more commercial tone.
The criteria for a user to move from nutrition chain 1 to 2 is that they have read a minimum of 3 blog articles, have opened at least 2 emails and have downloaded 2 ebooks. If in the nutrition 1 emails we do not invite the user to read articles or download ebooks, it will be difficult for them to move on to the next nutrition one day.
4. Not creating enough interactions for a sale to be made
The amount of interactions needed to close a sale is different for every business. Not fine-tuning your email chain (i.e. making it too short) can cause you to miss out on business opportunities. In this way, you miss out on records that, perhaps, if you had contacted them more than once, they would have requested information.
To get it right, the key is to understand that each lead has a different maturity phase and we must adapt to it in order to send the right content, as often as necessary.
5. Not analysing and optimising your campaigns
Lead nurturing should be dynamic, adapting to the context and the database. It is very important to periodically analyse results in order to think about improvements that will increase results. Remember this!
Analysing aspects such as the number of emails sent, opened, clicked… is of vital importance to adjust the following campaigns and achieve better results in future mailings.
After this brief introduction to marketing automation, you will have understood why it is essential within your marketing strategy to have the ability to move your database through your buying funnel.
In summary, for your marketing automation to be a success, it is vital to have a well-defined and well-segmented lead scoring approach, personalised email chains for each type of user and to constantly analyse the strategy in order to optimise it.
Closing
I hope that with this short video you have understood a little better.
What is Marketing Automation?
What are its benefits?
Mistakes to avoid in marketing automation
If you found it interesting, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel because in the next video I will introduce you to the essential tools that we use in all our marketing automation projects.
