Marketing automation is a must in the modern world. A robust automation system gives you the capability to capture new contacts, nurture current ones, manage data handling, and much more. It’s no wonder that newer professionals see marketing automation as an essential tool with limitless possibilities.

But establishing a good marketing automation strategy still requires a lot of work. After all, your system needs guidance from you to function. Failing to provide effective guidance can lead to unfortunate consequences, from annoyed customers to lost revenue.

Today, we’ll be looking at several of the most common mistakes we’ve observed in marketing automation and how you can avoid wasting your time on them.

1. Failing to segment: Having a segmentation strategy has always been a marketing basic. Long before Eloqua, or even the internet, identifying your top audiences has been essential to marketing. Many companies now take it even further with buyer personas and additional levels of segmentation. But now that marketing is primarily driven by and dependent on technology, it’s easy to forget to actually invest time in identifying segments yourself.
2. Making segmentation too complicated: Identical mass marketing emails simply don’t work anymore. Customers want materials that are relevant to them and their interests. Your marketing automation system depends on a robust segmentation strategy to do its best work. Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to overthink things and make your strategy unmanageably complex.
3. Weak quality and personalization testing: Amazingly, basic personalization mistakes still happen. And the more custom fields you use in a pre-generated email, the higher the chance of these mistakes occurring. A glaring error like this obviously makes it difficult to make a good impression on a prospect, which in turn makes the entire rest of your carefully crafted email less effective.
4. No inbound marketing strategy: Simply put, inbound marketing can be defined as the creation of content and incentives that reach your prospects by addressing their specific pain points and generating requests for more information. Whatever form your inbound marketing strategy takes, don’t ignore it. You need those leads!
5. Missing or incomplete compliance monitoring: With new privacy laws passing every year, and customers increasingly requesting more control over their own data, you’ve got your work cut out for you. It might seem like too much hassle. But legal compliance isn’t something you can just ignore. Marketing automation programs and processes that don’t account for legal requirements will suffer in the long run.
6. Too many marketing automation tools: Using too many tools can only slow you down if you lack the manpower or expertise to get the most value from them. You’ll spend money on tools you never use or only use rarely. You might see your website performance suffer as your tools consume bandwidth.
7. Relying exclusively on internal marketing automation expertise: Your campaigns might be going steady, but are they bringing in new leads and increasing revenue? Are you still relying on the same performance metrics you always have? In a rapidly evolving world, running your systems the same way year after year can make you fall behind. The reason is simple: you aren’t exploring every capability your systems and your marketing team have to offer. You’re passing up easy opportunities for growth.

Any one of these mistakes could significantly set back your marketing automation strategy. But fortunately, with a little time invested, all these problems can be addressed.

This article is an excerpt from our ebook, “7 Common Marketing Automation Mistakes & How to Avoid Them”. Download the full ebook for free here.