It’s driving me crazy! It seems everywhere I turn, I read yet another survey or article touting how Marketing Automation has raised response, boosted conversions, created more activity, and led to better sales results. All I’ve got to do is sign on for one of those systems and POOF! – watch my company grow. Ugh.
Here’s the rub. When I read the actual parameters and definitions of such studies, I often find they are comparing apples and oranges.
Here’s an example from a highly regarded company’s 2014 email marketing survey –
Gross Open Rate for Manual Sends – 38.3%
Gross Open Rate for Automated Sends – 44.4%
At first blush, it looks like Automation wins, by 16%.
But, if you read how they defined a “Manual Send” and an “Automated Send,” you will see the problem.
“Manual Send” — a person presses a ‘send’ button, as for a broadcast or segmented campaign.
“Automated Send” — a message automatically triggered by digital behavior on your site, demographic data, past related email messages, and other rules.
That’s an unfair comparison. A targeted, behavior-driven email effort will outperform a broadcast, general effort every time. It has nothing to do with whether a human being pressed the send button or a computer sent it automatically. NOTHING!
We’ve got to stop crediting Marketing Automation as solving the problem.
Marketing Automation is not a solution, it’s a tool!
And like any tool, it’s only as good as the craftsman wielding it. It’s up to you! Not the tool.
You create the “better response,” not the automation. And to make it work best, you have to adopt a user-centric approach to your marketing thinking.
You need to understand what makes your target audience tick. What they’re concerned about, what they want to know, how they’d like to learn it, when and why it will matter to them, and more.
With Marketing Automation, you can create a series of “automatic” contacts that will occur based on how you program the system to analyze and categorize the person interacting with you. You can tailor the response each step of the way. And you can create as many series as you wish, meaning you can have a different series for each persona who enters your lead nurturing campaign. Automation is a great tool to create a more personalized campaign to win over the prospect.
But, if you don’t have the right understanding of your audience, you won’t be able to build the right rules and right messages to make Automation work. It’s that simple.
Marketing Automation doesn’t “do” anything. You do!
It’s a matter of you understanding your target market and building strong, user-centric messages that will move them to act.
Marketing Automation is a great tool. I love it! But, stop believing it alone will solve your problems. The old GIGO rule (Garbage In – Garbage Out) still applies.