Dear MDT: My marketing automation workflow is better at gathering dust than driving actions from my marketing contacts. Help!
Ah yes, a fascinating consequence to automation.
When your marketing automation campaign is doing a better job collecting dust than driving actions you’re suffering from…
‘Set it and forget it’ syndrome.
But don’t beat yourself up over this. ‘Set it and forget it’ syndrome is a super common, real-world issue that occurs when…well, when anything is automated.
Broadly speaking, when you expect something to work a specific way automatically, it’s natural to feel that you should be able to wipe your hands of that project, and begin applying your time towards other work. But obviously, we know there are consequences to this. Just think about the stories we hear about Tesla drivers. Some have an expectation of full driving automation, so they set it and forget it while on the road, then crash when the automation glitches.
Thankfully, with marketing automation, rarely are there any physical injuries. Maybe some bruised egos.
But my point is, this ‘set it and forget it’ phrasing gets thrown around by angry executives who feel like their team has fallen asleep at the wheel, but the truth is, it’s just a natural consequence of any automated process.
So what do you, as the leader of your company’s marketing department, do to address this?
Standard Operating Procedures
Apply some simple standard operating procedures. Here are some that our team executes on a regular schedule:
- Mystery Shopping/Campaign Proofing: have a team member advance through your automated campaign on a regular basis to make sure it’s working as it should. Based on record volume, this typically should be done weekly (high end) or monthly (low end). This team member should be equipped with campaign reference material to proof against.
- Campaign Performance Reviews: Review the performance of your automated campaigns on a monthly basis. Look at trends in interactions to spot any potential deployment issues.
- Campaign Optimization Testing: At least twice a year, there should be an initiative to configure a test on campaign optimizations to outperform your existing campaign, helping improve performance and keeping the campaign running smoothly. 6 months is generally more than enough time to collect statistically significant data needed declare a test champion and begin planning a new test.
And if you can afford it, it’s best to have at least one employee fully dedicated to the oversight of your automated campaigns. If this isn’t possible, working with an agency who specializes in marketing automation could really help, and likely could deliver more value for the cost.
So if you find that your marketing automation workflow is kind of… gathering dust… get some simple operating procedures in place.
MDT has been helping businesses build and deploy automated, omni-channel marketing campaigns for over 15 years. From personalized video to wear & share technology, our suite of automated campaign boosts can help ramp up your targeted campaign conversion rates. We’d love to show you how.
Give us 15 minutes and we’ll show you 3 ways to improve the performance of your automated customer journey campaign. Schedule your discovery call here.
