Are you making these marketing automation mistakes?

Marketing automation is being developed at a rapid pace. From email marketing, sophisticated AI to new methods of analysing data, increasingly, big business is utilising marketing automation to drive sales and extract business intelligence.

With the rapid increase, however, it is very easy to make mistakes and not utilise your marketing to its potential.  Are you making these marketing automation mistakes?

You have no automating marketing strategy

Before you start setting up your marketing automation you need to have worked out your inbound marketing strategy. This will help you generate more leads and come up with ways to get them. If you’re unsure how to generate leads for your business bring in experts who can help. Without a strategy, you will not be able to market effectively let alone automate your marketing.

You’re not utilising email marketing

Although email marketing is used extensively despite taking a bit of a hit after the implementation of GDPR, it is still one of the most highly thought of conversion tools in marketing circles. Here is a brief guide on how to use email marketing effectively:

• Lead capture – you can design giveaways such as brochures and free trials that ask for an email address in exchange for your offering. This is a good way to build leads.
• Follow up/welcome email – Most email providers such as Benchmark Email allow you to send a welcome email and or follow up email. This email is great for branding and allows you to introduce your business and your offerings.
• Onboarding campaign – With a good email marketing solution, you can build an onboarding campaign that can be utilised to introduce different aspects of your business. This can fire off at intervals set by you so you do not have to bombard your prospects. Well presented emails can keep your brand alive in the minds of your potential customers and clients.
• Matching products with customers – Email marketing facilitates building different lists for the different type of customers you have. This process can be automated with little effort and helps considerably at putting the right offering in front of the right target audience.

If you’re not utilising email marketing and all of the facilities it offers your business you’re missing out on building trust, customers, and revenue.

You’re not engaging potential new clients

Chatbots are becoming more sophisticated and run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They have become an invaluable customer service tool. The more sophisticated ones can answer potential client and customer queries while the rest of your staff is asleep.

Unlike the backlash received when major corporations outsourced their customer services overseas, surveys suggest that people have no objection to using a chatbot as long as it can do its job. They have an advantage of being able to give meaningful responses and actually suggests products and services based on queries.

If you’re not utilising this kind of marketing automation you are missing out. The key to successful chatbot marketing is not to be too pushy. Keep practising until you get the balance right.

You’re not automating onboarding

If your business is highly regulated such as the finance industry onboarding new clients takes time. Regulation is getting tighter all the time, and unlike other industries where checks are not so stringent, the process for some clients can take months.

This can lead to a negative brand image. Clients want to get up and running as fast as possible. Automating as much of this process as possible is advisable, and the more sophisticated automation tools that rely on AI can do just that.

They can help make preliminary checks faster and work on batches overnight. They can flag up errors and are less likely to make mistakes than your staff who are probably under considerable pressure to get the job done.

They can even help with deep data dives to identify corporate structures and other such entities.

Given the possibility that you could face steep fines and penalties for getting this wrong, it makes sense to minimise errors and implement this automation now.

You’re not taking a holistic approach

Marketing is a holistic affair and you should take this approach when putting together marketing automation. It is a mistake to automate one aspect of your marketing and not look at your whole marketing strategy and see where you can automate it. Automation saves time and money and gives a better service to your customers and clients.

Marketing automation is a powerful tool.

You’re not auto scheduling social media

Social media updates can have their scheduling automated and there is a range of tools to help you in this regard. Some claim to be able to publish the updates in tune to when your audience is online. Like all aspects of automation, this will free up your time and make your marketing more effective.