Three Myths about Marketing Automation
If the concept of marketing automation makes you think of spam e-mails and robocalls, you’re not alone. Many organizations that have yet to harness the power of marketing automation may still be confused about the exact nature of this technology and whether their customers will respond positively to receiving automated messages. Let’s address three of the most common and prevailing myths about marketing automation.
Myth #1: Marketing Automation is just a fancy way of saying “Spam”
Fact: In the early days of e-mail marketing, some companies purchased or compiled mailing lists with hundreds or thousands of prospective buyers and would send out massive e-mail blasts with uniform messaging to unsegmented, unqualified leads – a process that could absolutely be described as spamming.
With today’s technology, marketing automation has gone far beyond sending spam e-mails. Marketing automation can be used to create detailed buyer personas that inform the content of messaging and to send individualized marketing messages that are relevant to the prospect’s current position in the marketing funnel. It is also important to account for the preferences of buyers when automating your marketing efforts, and that means having prospects opt-in to receive communications from your organization.
Myth #2: Marketing Automation is only for e-mail marketing
Fact: E-mail marketing is just one of the ways that marketing automation tools can be applied. There are marketing automation tools that can be used to present customized landing pages when someone visits your website, including more targeted sales copy. You can also use dynamic forms to capture more personal information from prospective buyers and combine the data with progressive profiling to learn more about your prospects.
Marketing automation tools can be used to A/B test content on your website, including headlines, specific offers, images and the length of forms (request demo, e-mail submit, etc.). Marketing automation can be used to better qualify leads with features like subjective lead scoring and grading. Lead scoring helps your organization identify target prospects that match your ideal customer profile and may represent the best opportunity for a sale.
Marketing automation software tools can also be used to schedule social media posts and maintain a steady flow of content to social platforms without requiring constant attention. With these myriad features and possibilities, it’s safe to say that marketing automation today extends way beyond e-mail.
Myth #3: Marketing Automation is configured once and works perfectly forever
When some people think of automation, they think about “set it and forget it” systems that, once configured, will work perfectly, harmoniously and continuously to provide a steady stream of perpetual leads.
While marketing automation can help you gather and nurture more leads than you ever thought possible, it is not something that you configure once and then forgets. Marketing automation systems need to be consistently tested, refined, updated and improved upon. Once you can serve content to prospective buyers automatically, you’ll still need to optimize and refine that content over time to generate the best results.
Marketing analytics plays an important role in determining the true effectiveness of your marketing automation efforts and providing business insights into how those efforts can be refined and improved to generate more leads, more product demos, and more sales.
