Almost 63% (two-thirds) of very successful companies use their marketing automation tools extensively, while more than 37% (one-third) managed to become the best in class with limited use (Source: Three Deep & Ascend 2). 64% of marketers say that they saw the benefits of using marketing automation within the first 6 months of its implementation. (Source: Regalix).
So, have you jumped on the marketing automation bandwagon? If the answer is “No”, what are you waiting for? If the answer is “Yes”, great, now get down to work! It’s not like these tools are going to make your business flourish all by themselves. It takes a lot of time and effort to optimize your marketing automation to fulfill its full potential, and it takes only a few wrong steps to destroy all your endeavors.
Lack of Opt-In Form
Many companies follow the policy that they can and should contact their prospects until they explicitly tell them not to. Before you launch your first campaign, make sure that you’re well informed about legal practices, and follow all the rules. Just to be on the safe side, it’s recommendable to include an opt-in form.
No IP Warming
Once you decide to start with email marketing and automation, it’s crucial that you perform a so-called IP warming procedure, as that will prevent your emails from ending up in spam folders of your prospects. Launching a campaign from a cold IP address can result in damaging your reputation with your ISP. Although it’s usually said that B2B marketing doesn’t require IP warming up, it’s still recommended. One of the most important things is to start your warming up process with your most active contacts, as that will help you build your IP reputation.
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No sales and marketing alignment
This is one of the biggest mistakes that companies make. If marketing and sales departments are out of sync, there’s no seamless and smooth transition of prospects down the funnel. Sometimes a marketing department transfers leads to sales while they’re still cold and unqualified, which results in poor conversion rates.
Before anything else, the two teams should work together closely on creating the ideal buyer, because that’s the starting point for any other development and growth. What they should also do is agree upon a lead scoring mechanism, so that only leads that pass a certain threshold can be sent to sales.
Using It Only As an Email Marketing Tool
Although the primary role of marketing automation used to be launching emailing campaigns, that has changed and now there are numerous other useful options. Using it to its full potential can significantly improve your business and boost your ROI. Here are a couple of its other uses:
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- For example, marketing automation is an excellent way of nurturing prospects As you know, almost 50% of prospects are qualified, but not yet ready to buy (Source: Gleanster Research), and marketing automation can help you maintain personalized relationships with your prospects based on how they interact with your content.
- Marketers state the process of identifying warm leads as one of their biggest challenges, and marketing automation provides them with valuable insight into prospects behavior by tracking their activities on the website. That way it’s much easier to predict when your prospects are ready, meaning that you don’t have to take a wild guess.
- As we’ve already discussed, marketing and sales alignment is essential for productivity and increasing revenue. Again, marketing automation can be helpful for establishing better communication between these two departments, so that marketers can create content that sales need and warm up cold leads by nurturing them, while sales can focus on qualified leads. This kind of organization and delegation will result in a successful sales process.
Not Running Regular Analytics
Even if you do everything by the book, and if you warmed up your IP address, aligned your sales and marketing teams, and if you are using marketing automation to its full potential, not running a regular analytics can ruin all your previous efforts. You need to know your conversion rates, content consumption, and how all your tactics affect your sales funnel. Analytics will help you realize what you’re doing right, and what aspects of your strategy you need to change in order to improve your business and increase your revenue.   Â
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