As a brand marketer, you probably know that if you want more conversions, you need to spend more on marketing. As usual, the problem with marketing automation, is that it is usually very expensive to adopt. In the case of ecommerce marketing automation, it is not something that you can pick up a part-time job to do. Every employer is either happy or it is harder to hire these people than before. Unfortunately, having marketing automation in the company is not as simple as having payroll or benefits.

In this article, I will talk about some of the things that really improved my marketing automation and opened me to a new world of possibilities.

Most companies did not understand how to achieve ROI with their marketing automation

Most companies adopted marketing automation without thoroughly understanding how they would make money from it. In most cases, they just wanted to realize automated campaign management and were very vague about how exactly they would get ROI from the platform.

Most marketers didn’t understand why their users loved using marketing automation.

After launching marketing automation, most brand marketers didn’t even understand that it helped them generate more conversions with a few clicks. Sometimes, even those that know how to make money from marketing automation still had a hard time doing so. Even more annoying is the fact that some marketers had integrated Google Analytics without understanding that it is the most intuitive CRM platform.

Most marketers had only one core behavior when using marketing automation

When it comes to marketing automation, a lot of marketers are yet to realize that they need to optimize their marketing campaigns for multiple touchpoints. Marketing automation makes sense only if you have a solution that perfectly fits your specific marketing needs. That is why I included that category above.

Many marketers just use marketing automation to automate weekly emails

When it comes to marketing automation, most marketers only used email marketing automation to automate their weekly emails. I decided to change that to weekly campaigns. This way, you were able to automate one weekly campaign at a time for each mailing to subscribers. Even better, you got a better customer insights and targeting. Instead of only manually optimizing email content or managing daily campaigns, you were able to take action at every campaign action.

I learned to lean on marketing automation to customize email content

Marketing automation helped me to tailor the emails to the exact interest of my subscribers. In most cases, this was just another way to make customers happy, instead of wasting time with repetitive features.

Most marketers were surprised when they received a one-time email campaign

When it comes to marketing automation, a lot of brand marketers were surprised when they received one-time emails. Again, it is so important to optimize your automation to the customers needs. I don’t know any marketing automation provider that doesn’t support this in some level. This is also one of the reasons why I cannot justify spending money on an ecommerce marketing automation platform.

They confused the best for marketing automation with the most advanced for SEO

Despite the fact that marketing automation was initially set out as a solution to improve SEO, it is slowly becoming the best way to go. This makes sense because most marketers only get really excited when they see something new and only use the best for SEO. But, it is very important to spend the same budget on marketing automation. The CMO should first take a basic overview of the companies user base and make sure that only the best product suits their users.

Most marketing automation vendors, were surprised when I told them that I want to focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming very popular among marketers. Many vendors treat them as modules for everyone and the addition of artificial intelligence is now expected. Marketing automation should do the same by adding AI into the mix. That is why I wanted to give my own product the smarts. The first thing I added was AI into my inbox. After that, my email was triggered when I was pushed by a new email to focus on a particular scenario or against my customers preference.

Most marketers do not have full knowledge about marketing automation

Even if it is an unfamiliar program, one needs to understand how it works to benefit the brand. This is why I took a very detailed look at the userbase before it started offering any products to the brand. I believe it’s a mistake to start marketing automation with a piece of jargon. Marketing automation should be leveraged in real life, not broken down into little pieces.