Seven Ways to Fail at Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation Best Practices. If you’ve been a marketer for any length of time, chances are you’ve come across your fair share of articles, white papers, and webinars on ways to succeed using marketing automation. Many of these are really useful tools in helping to determine when you’re ready for marketing automation and how to choose right product.

Additionally, our clients are always asking us for best practices for getting the most out of their marketing automation. We happily provide them of examples of what’s working for others in their industry and give them examples of excellent ways to implement functionality within the platform.

For today though, I want to have some fun. It’s time to flip the script. Let’s talk about worst practices for a change!

We recognize that marketing maturity takes time. But, if you can avoid the common pitfalls organizations fall into, you will jump to the head of your class. Do yourself a favor and avoid these seven ways to fail at marketing automation:

1. Batch and blast.

Be honest. We’ve all done it. Sales comes to you with a new product they want to promote. By the way, it’s launching tomorrow. You can send an email by then, right? It doesn’t matter that the content may not be relevant to everyone in your audience. Forget segmentation or the buyer’s journey – just send the email to everyone in your database! Statistically some small fraction of the people will engage with your email. Some beats none, so fire away!

2. Don’t ever let marketing talk to sales.

Why would sales and marketing need to talk anyway? It’s not like they have any common goals or metrics. The sales team does one job and marketing does another. There’s no need to define a common definition of a lead or nurture contacts through a buying process. If marketing sends enough emails, sales should be able to close the deals.

3. Avoid the metrics.

Speaking of deals – once a deal is closed you don’t ever really have to think about it again. If you’re really embracing worst practices, only look at basic metrics like email open rate. Come to think of it, don’t even reporting on key metrics at all. And don’t even think about A/B testing.

4. Skip the plan. Do whatever feels right.

Why do you need a strategic plan when you can just wing it? Align every decision to a KPI? Nah. Developing and executing on a strategic plan is a surefire way to gain some key marketing wins… but let’s stay focused. We’re talking about fails here.

5. Keep that data dirty.

Sure Oracle Eloqua has a number of features like the Contact Washing Machine app or Data Tools, but where’s the fun in maintaining clean data? Gambling with your data always makes things more interesting. While you’re at it, skip the CRM integration. Is the data in a CRM different than what’s in Oracle Eloqua? Who cares!

6. Documentation? Maybe later.

You’ve got lots of processes that are unique to your team or your company. Only problem: you don’t have those processes written down anywhere. What could go wrong? No one on your team is leaving anytime soon. Besides, having all that knowledge in your head is just good job security. You’ll get around to documenting your processes eventually.

7. Email only. None of that other stuff.

You probably know you can use Oracle Eloqua’s cross-channel orchestration to go beyond simple email campaigns with things like event registration, webinars and SMS campaigns. But that would be a lot of work. It’s easier just to send a bunch of emails.

That rounds out our list of ways to fail at marketing automation. Now let’s get serious for a moment here. Is your company guilty of one of these seven deadly marketing automation sins? It’s okay to say yes. Very few companies have a perfect marketing program. What’s important is that you take stock of the areas you’d like to improve upon and make some adjustments.

Maybe your company’s doing all seven of the worst practices! Pick one that you know you can have a positive impact on, come up with a plan, and execute. A/B testing is a great place to start. Once you have a quick win under your belt, it will be much easier to bring about larger changes. Need help getting there? Let us know.

Did we miss something? Leave a comment below. Or tell us about how you’ve turned a marketing automation fail into a big win for your team.