The top four marketing automation challenges – and how to overcome them
Apart from being ultimately inventive and creative, the truth is that the world of marketing has a flip side too.
If we want our campaigns to be efficient, there are numerous repetitive and tedious tasks to be done every day. Besides being menial, some of these tasks are too time-consuming, draining the energy marketers could use for more meaningful and productive tasks.
The rise of automation tools has been a real game-changer. Marketers can now use CRM platforms, social marketing, or email marketing automation tools to streamline a generous portion of repetitive low- level tasks and significantly free up their resources.
However, these tools don’t just pick up the slack and save time. When used appropriately, they complete tasks promptly and with much greater precision than humans, bringing the quality of marketers’ work to a whole new level.
Still, marketing automation comes with its own set of challenges that can block success. Read on to learn more about what these challenges are and how you can overcome them.
1) Setting up the tools to work for you
One of the most significant challenges in automating your marketing efforts is implementing the tool properly so that you and your team can make the most out of it.
When setting up a tool for the first time, some small businesses and marketers don’t have the right skills and expertise to set up and use it efficiently. As the software doesn’t work the way it should, such practice can often lead to disappointing results and unsuccessful campaigns.
The best way to overcome this challenge is to know how significant all the initial steps are. When choosing the software you will use for automation, it’s a good idea to opt for a vendor that offers not only a top-notch product but also great customer care and support. For example, you can use local marketing software like that from adplorer.com to automate most of your tasks while reaching your marketing goals
Your marketing team needs thorough onboarding and training to gain an in-depth understanding of the tool and use it effectively.
2) Lack of integration
Many businesses find it challenging to integrate data from different sources. Still, to fully take advantage of your marketing automation software, it’s necessary to integrate it with all the other tools that you use regularly.
For a start, this means integrating your marketing automation tools with your CRM software so that your sales team can be aware of the buyer’s journey before a particular prospect becomes a lead.
Furthermore, your marketing automation tool needs to be integrated with your website so that you can track your users’ behavior and enhance your website personalization.
Needless to say, integrating your marketing automation tool with your Google Ads campaigns, webinar software, Google Analytics, or whatever other tools you’re using will let you track attribution but also provide you with exact data and reports.
3) Automating tasks that shouldn’t be automated
On the other side, when switching to automation, you need to make a clear difference between tasks you should and shouldn’t automate. Sometimes, it’s a human touch that makes all the difference in your campaign’s success.
Chatbots can serve as a perfect example. While you can rely on a sales AI-powered assistant to support your customer and keep them engaged through their journey on your website towards a final purchase, you can hardly base your customer service on chatbots alone.
Similarly, many email automation clients come with predefined templates that you can use in your campaigns. However, without including your brand values and your unique perspective and approach in your campaign, you’ll hardly catch the attention of your recipients, and your marketing efforts will most probably be a failure.
Finally, even though certain tools can seem quite useful for content creation, it’s another task you should avoid automating, at least for the time being.
4) The quality of the data you use
As the automation tools work with the data they are provided with, the campaigns’ effects depend on the quality of the database they use. For a successful campaign, marketers need relevant, verified, and clean data.
Stats say that 60% of people change job titles within their company each year, while 25-33% of email addresses become outdated on an annual basis. In other words, data decays at a rate of 2.1% per month.
What does this mean?
Take email marketing as a most obvious example. Unless marketers don’t check and clean their databases regularly, the chances are that the database is full of obsolete, defunct, or outdated email addresses, unsubscribers, and cold leads that have never shown any interest in your product or service.
Email automation clients alone cannot prevent the adverse outcomes of campaigns that use low-quality data – your emails may still end up in spam, you can get blacklisted by or fined by email service providers for not complying with email regulations. Based on the unreliable data, the automation tool won’t properly execute campaigns, leading to poor results.
Despite these challenges, when used strategically, automation can give a huge boost to your marketing strategy and efforts. At the same time, it will save a lot of your time and energy and allow you to focus on more important, creative aspects of your work.
Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. You can read more of Michael’s work at Qeedle.
Photo by Christina
