5 Common Marketing Automation Myths

Marketing automation is a powerful practice that brands use across industries, but there are still some myths that prohibit growth and success. Let’s dispel those myths so your brand can realize its full marketing automation potential.

“It’s just for email and owned channels.”

Email is a common channel for brands to start in for marketing automation. It’s relatively low-cost to implement, and doesn’t require a far reach to access and leverage key first-party data elements to inform and enhance your touchpoints. Now, while the power of email marketing automation can not be debated, it can absolutely be strengthened by orchestrating touchpoints across channels. This increases brand reach and, when automation is in sync with the customer journey, can see significant results.

This is also not to say that email needs to be paired with other channels to be successful — direct mail automation, social media automation, paid media, SMS and mobile push automations can provide benefits on their own, depending on the audience and marketing scenario. Consider piloting automation within, and across, different channels to find the right fit, cadence and mix for your campaigns to drive results.

“My automation is only as strong as my platform.”

While the majority of marketing automation deployment capabilities stem from the marketing automation tools in your technology stack, there are a number of capabilities that brands can create via iterative test-and-learn, and creative application of core strategies.

Take, for example, lead and contact scoring. Some platforms will include this functionality natively, and enable brands to calculate across available interaction data to inform attribute values, such as lead quality or contact interests. However, brands that do not have access to this can still find value by incorporating context clues to a rules-based scoring method, or, in the case of a more robust data history that’s complex, leverage expertise like that of our Trajectory group for propensity modeling. All marketing automation tools can accept outside scores and data attributes as a core function.

“I need a lot of data to see the value.”

One of the key benefits of applying marketing automation is that it is flexible, and can grow with your brand and datasets. As data-driven marketers, we are always looking for more inputs to fuel intelligence and enhance our automated touchpoints. More data will come naturally as your program grows. However, at a point dataset expansion can come with marginal returns. Keeping that in mind, balance your approach to fueling marketing automation with the right data points that are actionable — ones that influence your marketing decisions and customer path most, and focus on quality and coverage rate over quantity when considering new datasets to onboard.

“It’s evergreen.”

Marketing automation is, by nature, intended to constantly run, requery and recalculate, but that doesn’t mean your campaigns need to take a one-size-fits all approach. When brands create a new automated program or journey, they commonly work with real-time criteria to fuel each audience’s touchpoint content and delivery. Consider variation and personalization in these areas, to ensure your programs remain relevant:

• Moment
• Audience
• Delivery Time
• Delivery Method (Channel)
• Content + Message

And, remember, just because a communication or touchpoint is automated, doesn’t mean it should be “set and forget” — to get the most benefit from your marketing automation, it needs to be continually reviewed, tested and optimized like any other marketing campaign.

“It really only benefits marketing.”

Yes, marketing automation does have “marketing” in it, and can create operational and executional efficiencies for your marketing department. Within Marketing, marketing automation can increase relevance, nurture relationships, retain customers and ultimately drive conversion and repeat sales. That said — that’s just the starting point for realized benefits.

Marketing automation can streamline your organization’s workflows, conversions from web properties and, for B2B brands, when marketing automation complements brands’ sales force efforts, it can increase sales productivity, ultimately accelerating customers through the sales funnel. We commonly pair marketing and sales automation to deliver results in that area at scale.

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