I admit I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, so take this with a grain of salt. When someone says “marketing automation,” it usually annoys me.
That’s mostly because people speak of “marketing automation” as if it’s a new concept — as if we’ve only recently been able to configure systems to automate messages or content in response to customer behavior.
But … that’s wrong. We’ve been doing it for decades. Renewal notices and welcome letters are “marketing automation.”
However — taking off my curmudgeon cap for a moment — there is something fundamentally different about marketing automation in the digital age. It’s not a difference in kind. We’ve been able to respond to customer behavior and automate repetitive tasks for a long time. It’s a difference in degree. The types of marketing automation that are available today are truly amazing.
So, for example, It’s not just that we can program systems to reply to customer actions. It’s that we can do it more precisely — in smaller numbers, and with more fine-tuning.
With that introduction, here are a dozen thoughts about marketing automation.
1. Don’t ignore it just because the evangelists are annoying. As with anything tech and marketing related, the hype can be too much. Dial back the enthusiasm if you need to, but look for the part that could actually help your business.
2. Be skeptical of “solutions.” The marketing automation you need is unlikely to be a new platform that you plug into your existing systems and, hey presto, cool things happen. Rather, it will be a series of tools and methods that are always changing.
The problem with a “solution” is that there’s no guarantee it will work with your current configuration. If you buy some comprehensive solution it’s very likely you’ll either get less than you paid for or you’ll kill yourself trying to hook up all the bells and whistles.
3. It comes down to integration. The essence of modern marketing automation is Instant connectivity and the ability to respond based on customer data. That means you have to connect the data to the logic, the task and the message.
As with most of these gee whiz marketing technologies, the devil is in the details. The “system” might have all sorts of capacities, but it needs your data and your business rules. To put this in practical terms, it doesn’t help you if the marketing automation system can send an immediate message upon purchase if it can’t access the purchasing system in real time.
If you can hook up all your systems to a comprehensive solution, that’s great. Just be very sure it will actually work.
4. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Sending customized messages based on consumer action is a great thing, but somebody has to write the templates from which all those customized messages will be created, somebody has to create all the appropriate rules, and somebody has to test it. Nothing’s easy.
5. There’s a strong probability of major screw-ups. Think of the last time you got an inappropriately worded customer service note from a company. That was an automated system. Either some rep pulled up “Template A” when Template A didn’t apply, or some programmer wrote a rule that didn’t quite work.
Automating such tasks can be a labor saver, but it can also be a customer service nightmare.
6. Think long and hard about how you’re going to test it. You would never send out a renewal notice without reading it carefully, but how are you going to check your “renewal notice” if there are 2,437 different iterations based on customer data? The more customized you make things, the more things there are to check, and the more likely somebody’s going to get a weird message. (“Welcome back, Mail Stop 27.”)
7. You might already have some of the tools you need. Your list broker might be able to model your market for you. Your email system might be able to send automated replies. Your shopping cart might be able to add new customers to your lists. Don’t buy a completely new “solution” before you find out what you can already do.
8. Think about how you’ll measure success. Analytics need to be a part of the discussion from the start. There’s no point in building a new system if you can’t determine if it’s doing what you want it to do.
9. Question whether this will work with social media. A lot of “marketing automation” solutions include a social media component. Is that a good idea?
Social media isn’t really my thing, but the people who claim to be social media mavens say “authenticity” is very important. I’m not sure exactly what the intersection of authenticity and automation looks like, but I imagine it will look silly more often than you’d like.
10. Don’t do it just because you can. There’s an enormous amount of data that’s potentially available to marketers. That doesn’t mean we should always use it. And I’m not only speaking of ROI. At some point, you’re going to creep people out.
Given the right data and the right systems, you can send an email selling your jelly bean maker to somebody who just viewed your web page on jelly beans. But … is that a good strategy?
11. “Analytics” gets awfully scary. I’ve already mentioned the need to measure things, but now you can see just how big a monster you might be dealing with. Measuring whether panel A did better than panel B in an email campaign is easy. Measuring all the effects you’re going to unleash with marketing automation might result is analysis psychosis.
Let’s say you do the jelly bean thing I just mentioned and you get an uptick in sales. Great, right? Sure, but what if that level of intrusion makes people mistrust you and they install ad blockers and delete the cookies from your site? Was it worth it?
Behavior is an incredibly complicated thing and it’s very difficult to evaluate. Getting into the deep waters of marketing automation is almost like becoming a social scientist. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe social science.
12. The bottom line. By all means, automate stuff where you can. But be conservative about it.