3 Common Reasons Why Marketing Automation Campaigns Fail

Human interactions are the bread and butter of marketing. You don’t need a bunch of statistics to prove the benefits of high-quality content, personalized messages, and multi-channel marketing. Common sense dictates that consumers respond better to companies that care for them.

That’s the reason why marketing automation was a very important topic back in 2014. David Moth stated on the Econsultancy Blog that it’s a very important tool to bring order to sales and marketing by optimizing lead nurturing and scoring.

Quality is everything when it comes to leads. This is why marketers should ensure that they are delivering quality emails to the right people at the right moment. Marketers need to communicate to prospects on an individual scale which sounds very easy until your database of customers reaches 5,000 people.

Imagine the effort required to reach out to five thousand people on Twitter, Facebook, and through your blog site. Everybody who did business development and marketing know that human relationships are difficult to establish, cultivate, track, scale and optimize. Our brains only have limited processing power and that’s the reason why marketing automation is important so that we can work on multiple tasks using only one body.

When thinking of marketing automation campaigns we automatically associate it to bought email lists, spam email, and untargeted advertising. The phrase “marketing automation campaigns” sounds too technical for most people. Even setting up the campaigns can feel overwhelming for most beginners.

Marketing automation campaigns is a people-focused strategy for scaling your market and growing your customer base. It has the potential to make your existing customers love your brand, but if you do a bad job – it also has the potential to make your customers annoyed.

Success in marketing automation campaigns starts with knowing where your deficiencies are and addressing those deficiencies. There are 3 common reasons why people fail at implementing marketing automation campaigns for their companies, along with tips on how to fix them.

3 Root Causes of Marketing Automation Campaigns Failure

One of the common reasons why marketing automation campaigns in companies fail is because these companies aren’t making solutions for their entire sales funnel. They don’t use top of the funnel means to push traffic to their site that can be converted to leads. If you struggle to get leads to the top of your funnel, you should stop reading this and focus on making a lead generation strategy. Now if you have adequate leads for marketing automation campaigns then keep reading.

1. You Have Bad Timing.

Think of yourself as a marketer being an influencer. Your successful campaigns shouldn’t resemble non-personalized broadcasts. You should master methods that help your business reach leads at strategic decision-making points. Buyer’s journey typically span these 5 steps:

• Discovery – People find out about your product or brand for the very first time
• Need Realization- People start realizing that your service/product adds value to their lives
• Consideration – When people start to learn about your service/product; at this point, they will become your leads
• Conversion – When people finally make a purchase or avail a subscription to your service/product
• Customer Retention – First-time customers will repeat this process to later become regulars

Imagine looking for a new service or product, a salesperson from a company emails you or calls you to encourage you to buy their service/product. Now you feel annoyed.

The sales focused message isn’t to blame for your annoyance per se. The situation is that the sales pitch was done at the inappropriate stage of the sales funnel.  If you just got started to learn about a business the first time – what you would want to receive is a message which speaks about “awareness”. A message focused on sales will only yield a better impact on leads when they are set to make a purchase.

Let me give you an example of this idea in action with one of the great entrepreneurship companies, Clarify.fm. This company connects newbie entrepreneurs with a lot of experts of certain subject matter. As someone who just launched a new business myself, I heavily relied on Clarity to reach businessmen who are ahead of me.

Just recently, I got to reach Poornima Vijayasahanker, an engineer whose work I have been reading. I searched for her on Clarity a lot of times but I never did book a call. I was a prospect who wasn’t converting at all on her website.

But I then got an automated message from Clarity that reminded me to book a call from her – and so I did. The email wasn’t aggressive or annoying at all. I was elated that Clarity sent me the email.

I instantly became a customer of Clarity and I had a wonderful experience. I should have scheduled more Clarity calls before.

2. Too Many Bells and Whistles.

Here are some interesting data:

74% of customers prefer receiving commercial messages via email, but the average clickthrough statistic for B2B emails in the 2nd quarter of 2013 was only 1.7%

Why is that?

Here’s a simple fact: Marketers all are aware that email marketing is very potent when used correctly. That’s why consumers receive a ton of automated emails.

It’s very frequent for marketers to make very complicated plans for their strategy in marketing automation campaigns. They invest in flowery newsletter templates and designs with a ton of information written in text blocks. What then happens next is that the message’s central value proposition is lost along the lines. Marketers often write too much that their readers can’t properly digest the message and so their readers are quick to proceed to the next email, forgetting your message.

Neil Patel, the founder of CrazyEgg and Kissmetrics made a fix to this customer pain point — Neil encourages marketers to keep their messages simple, short and straight to the message. The message must also be rich and personalized with relevant information that is appropriate to the sales funnel.

Rather than email blasting his followers with boring offers, he strategically sends out brief emails that encourage his audience to read his content.

3. You’re neglecting mobile users.

Marketers today advertise cross-platform, cross-device environments. If you fail to penetrate these platforms, you’re missing out on a lot of customers. You CANNOT manage to ignore mobile users.

48% of emails are estimated to be opened on mobile devices. However, only 11% of those emails are optimized for mobile reading.

So what happens then?

Your audience stops reading — 69% of users on mobile devices delete emails that aren’t made for the smaller screens.

Here are some tips for optimizing emails for mobile:

• Make links easy to click
• Always keep your message simple and short as possible
• Edit chunks or blocks of text, and make long paragraphs easier to read
• Use bullet points for key pieces for information
• Don’t pack a lot of images into the emails
• Don’t use design elements which require re-sizing
• Keep in mind to not make users scroll too much

Here’s a good example from PayPal which keeps content simple:

Final Thoughts

Details are essential to the success of your strategy for marketing automation campaigns. Imagine yourself in the place of your targeted customer, and you reverse engineer the campaign. Always think about the end user experience before you think about making it easy for the software.

Think about the consumer first.

Source Article: Why Marketing Automation Fails: 3 Common Reasons