9 Easily Avoidable Marketing Automation Mistakes

A lot of marketers use automation to help them and their teams achieve their marketing goals, if they have them, but more eon that later. Of course this makes perfect sense because modern marketing has a lot of moving parts and global which means marketing is a 24/7 process for almost all businesses. However, there are some easy mistakes and traps that we can fall into, whether automation is newly implemented or has been a standard practice for a business.

In this post we’ll be taking a look at these easily avoidable marketing automation mistakes and how they can be avoided.

1. Dirty Data

According to reports. nearly 60% of B2B professionals cited quality data as the greatest amplifier of their automation efforts.

Dirty data can cost brands money and more importantly, time. because actions will be taken based on inaccurate or incomplete information. Dirty data can be anything from duplicated records, naming inconsistencies, to outdated information and incorrect attribution.

A common example of dirty data put to work is an email list that has never been cleaned. It’s an email list full of spam addresses, disengaged users, and duplicate emails.

For automation to work properly, it’s essential to work with clean data. Otherwise you’ll get out of it much less than what’s possible; maybe even nothing.

2. Using the Wrong Automation Tool

Finding the right tools for automation can be a serious obstacle for many marketers. Also, some marketers who have found the right tools, struggle to use the tools they’ve chosen to their full potential.

Perhaps it doesn’t need to be said, but we’ll say it anyways, the right marketing automation tool is essential. These are the features you should be looking for in a marketing automation tool:

User friendly and intuitive UI
Advanced reporting and analytics
Knowledge base and customer support
Integrations
Scalability options

3. Marketing & Sales Are Not Aligned

We considered placing this as the top spot on our list, but if you’re data is bad and you’re using the wrong tool, then alignment is the least of your worries. But, with that being said, if you’re using the right marketing automation software and you’re data is clean, you need to ask yourself if your marketing and sales teams are in alignment.

Marketing and sales shouldn’t be operating in a silo. Marketing is there to support sales, products, and other areas of the business. Marketing needs to pull in all stakeholders so they’re involved with the automation flow. Sometimes it’s difficult to do, but if you’re a marketer worth your salt you can persuade them to be involved.

The system that this alignment is most important for is when marketing qualified leads are turned into sales qualified leads, and then ideally into customers.

What processes could help the sales team? Maybe an automated email from a sales rep once a lead has performed a high-intent behavior. But,. do know what the behavior is, the sales team must be involved.

Marketing automation software can allow sales reps to focus on converting leads instead of mundane tasks.

4. Lack of Training

Two of the major roadblocks given by marketers for lack of marketing automation use is too little training or lack of resources. Automation tools are worthless if the team doesn’t know how to use them effectively. This is why it’s important to hold periodic training sessions to ensure that users know their capabilities and aware of current system workflows.

Here are some training tips:

Curated Training: Don’t information overload everyone via a single intense session. Keep things productive and train on only what’s relevant to a topic.
Invite Service Provider Reps: No one knows the software better than the provider reps. Reach out and ask about training sessions.
Multi-Step Training Process: This is another effort to avoid information overload. Hold multiple sessions that can be easily digested and use a combination of various learning strategies.

5. You Set and Forget

It would be great to just set everything up and let it run without ever coming back to it. But marketing automation is a very hands on process.

With marketing automation tools you can shift your attention from output to assessing performance and optimization.

6. Using Only One Automation Strategy

It’s common for marketers to learn an automation marketing tool, get familiar with a set of tasks and then never stray from that task set. This is unfortunate because it creates miss opportunities for a brand. Take advantage of all the features offered by your marketing automation software. After all, you’re paying for the whole suite and not just some tools.

Give a look at your automation software and see what seemingly minuscule tasks can be automated. These tasks might seem inconsequential independent of each other, but when combined consume a lot of your time.

Consider leveraging these automation strategies:

Chatbots
Task Management
Lead Scoring
Lead Nurturing
Quote/Contract Automation
Lead Rotation
Drip Campaigns

7. Automation Software Doesn’t Integrate With CRM

Marketing automation software is supposed to make marketing easier and a CRM is supposed to make managing leads and customers easier. If you’re automation software and CRM can’t integrate, you’re not making things easier for anyone.

before deciding on a CRM and marketing automation solution, be sure that they can be integrated with each other. Also, be sure to have the budget to make the integration happen.

8. You’re Without Goals

Determine your goals before setting up any marketing automations. By doing this you can ensure every automated effort has a goal assigned to it. Marketers need a way to measure success when it comes to automation, and one way to measure success is through goal attainment.

Goals could be a new lead transitioning into a marketing qualified lead based upon particular behaviors, such as downloading a guide.

9. You’re Email List Isn’t Segmented

You ahem an email list full of qualified leads but your marketing automation software is just spewing out emails without any level of customization. Your leads are churning because your emails aren’t practical to them.

The solution to this is by developing a lead nurturing strategy that uses email list segmentation so that certain individuals are getting the emails that are most relevant to them.

With marketing automation software this is an easily executable task that has the potential for delivering strong results.

Marketing Automation is Powerful

Marketing automation is a powerful tool for even the smallest of companies, but the trick is knowing how to use it and where to avoid the pitfalls that others fall into in their automations. Keep these 9 points in mind ensure your automation is at its maximum potential.