Problems With Marketing Automation in 2023

Problems With Marketing Automation

Every day, marketers are tasked with attracting, nurturing, and converting leads into great opportunities for Sales, which can be extremely difficult even in the best of circumstances, let alone for marketing departments that may be lacking in resources.

Getting real results has traditionally taken a significant amount of time with resources, but marketing automation is creating easiness to alleviate the resource drain in a variety of ways. With many benefits, there are also some problems with marketing automation.

Marketing automation software, in addition to assisting marketers in doing more with less, provides three primary benefits to users.

Consolidate campaigns in a single platform that automates dozens of processes and tactics to save resources. Better, more personalized campaigns that are easier to track and optimize will increase the quantity and quality of leads. Align the sales and marketing departments to provide them with a better understanding of how leads are generated and where they are in the sales funnel.

When everything is running smoothly, those three bullets can have a significant impact on an organization’s efficiency and ROI. Nonetheless, many marketing departments fail to maximize their investment.

This can occur as a result of poor onboarding. But other times, it’s because the software intimidates marketers who are accustomed to doing things in a specific manner. Other times, it’s because the software just isn’t very intuitive or effective.

If you’re having trouble aligning your marketing goals and strategy with your marketing automation platform, you’re not alone — and it’s not all doom and gloom! Today, we will see at the three most common marketing automation challenges and offer a solution to help you and your team overcome them.

Problems With Marketing Automation in 2022

1. Adopting Marketing Automation Software is the first marketing automation challenge

Many businesses buy marketing automation software with the expectation that it will magically solve all of their problems right away. While marketing automation can significantly improve your marketing efforts, marketing departments frequently face an uphill battle when the necessary resources and expertise are not available.

This is especially common in smaller businesses, which is ironic given that these businesses have the most need for marketing automation as well as the most to gain from it. So, what’s the deal? Isn’t the goal of marketing automation to eliminate the need for additional resources and expertise? Yes, but it’s a little more complicated.

Marketing automation, of course, makes it easier for marketing professionals to streamline tasks and save resources while delivering more productive campaigns with higher ROI.

However, and here’s the catch, these marketers must be committed to learning how to use the software correctly from the start.

When marketers are not properly onboarded after making the purchase of the software, then they spend more time on setting up and troubleshooting their automated campaigns, tempting them to create each new tactic from scratch.

This lack of mastery results in a significant misallocation of resources, which leads to a general distrust of the software. To avoid this marketing automation challenge, choose a vendor who is dedicated to your team’s success through successful onboarding and ongoing support throughout your journey to marketing automation maturity.

This should include the following:

  • A customer community and support forum that is accessible online.
  • Training workshops will be held on-site to provide intensive training.
  • On-demand learning that is both informative and easily accessible
  • When you need them, there are customer success teams available.
  • Check-ins and success reviews on a regular basis
  • Assist in the alignment of marketing strategy and marketing automation
  • Help with technical configuration and CRM integration

If you choose a marketing automation vendor that does not provide all of these services, then you can spend months struggling to get up to speed with your new software — some organizations never get there at all. Hence, make sure your vendor of choice is willing to go the extra mile to help you succeed and is committed to providing the right training and support at every step of your marketing automation journey.

2. Difficulties with Email Deliverability are the second Marketing Automation Challenge

Excellent marketing automation platforms, such as Act-On, are designed to improve your organization’s email deliverability and sustain that success over time, but marketers must still adhere to best practices when crafting emails to ensure quality inboxing.

Unfortunately, many marketers are unfamiliar with the concept of email deliverability, so they have no idea whether or not they need to improve.

Email deliverability depicts the overall health of a sender’s email, which includes, among other things, inbox rate, click rate, delivery rate, , perceived email channel health, and ROI from email.

We cannot overstate the importance of email marketing because it is still one of the most successful digital marketing initiatives (and will probably always be). If your messages are being delivered towards the Spam folder or, worse, not being delivered at all, you have a serious problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

According to Return Path, a popular email deliverability company, roughly 20% of sales and marketing emails fail to reach the inbox, but how will you know if you have a deliverability issue? Poor engagement rates, being blocked by one or more email service providers (ESPs), more frequent email bounces, and being blocked by one or more email service providers (ESPs) — such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail — are three tell-tale signs of poor email deliverability.

Bringing Marketing Automation to Life

While there are many dozens of factors that could be affecting your email deliverability, there are a few simple steps you can take to improve your email reputation for better inboxing.

Make Your Email Template Mobile-Friendly

Because mobile devices now open and read more than half of all emails, mobile optimization is critical to improved email deliverability, especially since engagement rates are such an important part of optimal inboxing. In fact, as more people check their email on mobile devices, ISPs are increasingly likely to route non-mobile responsive emails to the Spam folder. That’s right, if your emails aren’t mobile-friendly, they won’t be delivered.

Act-simple-to-use On’s responsive email templates make the process easier without requiring any HTML knowledge. Our platform may include Litmus, which allows marketers to preview how their email will look on desktop and mobile, ensuring that your message has the perfect look and feel before sending it to prospects and customers.

Enhance Your Emails for the Inbox

as you know that your emails are first screened by ESPs, and the overall aesthetic of your emails has an important impact on your email deliverability. This necessitates the creation of smart, succinct messaging that provides real value to the recipient, as well as modern image-based design. 

Subject lines should be clear and explicit, preview text should relate directly to the subject line and what is included in the email body, and body copy and it should address an issue and then it may provide a solution in the form of a prominent call to action. Before sending each email, make sure you’ve considered the following:

  • Your recipients are members of your target audience and have voluntarily agreed to receive your messages.
  • The email is a component of your overall marketing strategy.
  • All links function properly and lead to secure sites.
  • The email is mobile-friendly 

Following these few simple steps should help ensure consistent inbox placement, gradually improving your overall email deliverability.

Use high-quality data and keep your lists clean on a regular basis

First and foremost, you should never buy an email list. You are not fooling ESPs, but even if you do get your emails into the inboxes of these recipients, the lack of engagement, unsubscribes, and spam complaints will decimate your email deliverability. Instead, use your marketing automation software to generate promising leads by creating landing pages and forms. Make a targeted list of prospects and customers, then segment those audiences to deliver the right messaging at the exact time to achieve the desired results.

As more regulating bodies implement more sophisticated compliance laws (such as GDPR), it’s critical that you send only to recipients who have actively consented to receive your messages and who engage with them on a regular basis. Review your lists of emails on a regular basis to determine the level of interaction and remove recipients who are not clicking on your emails or have higher bounce rates.

3. Managing Leads Using Marketing Automation is the third Marketing Automation Challenge

Another significant advantage of marketing automation software is its ability to integrate with your company’s CRM, allowing for more seamless connections throughout your MarTech stack. This reduces costs while increasing productivity and revolutionizing how you track and engage prospects and customers throughout the sales cycle. Of course, some platforms integrate better than others, but Act-On integrates easily with several popular CRMs.

The integration of your marketing automation platform and your CRM opens up a world of lead management opportunities, but it can be difficult for some organizations to fully utilize them. One of the most common reasons for this is poor scoring.

If marketing teams are not properly scoring and qualifying leads, and then attributing those leads to a specific content source broken down by marketing channel, they won’t be able to segment and promote those leads in a meaningful, effective way.

You should meet with your marketing and sales leadership teams to determine which actions are worth how many points and what the threshold is for a prospect to qualify as a marketing-qualified lead that can be passed to sales.

Make sure to base this discussion on the data you’re gathering about your outbound and inbound marketing efforts, the number of sales opportunities generated by these actions, and how much revenue is generated by each user interaction with a piece of content.

If you don’t have this exact information, you can proceed with some assumptions, but make sure to update your campaigns for better tracking (see below) and then revisit the conversation in a few weeks or months — whenever you feel you have more information.

Another common lead management blunder is failing to follow up on leads, which is also related to lead scoring and qualification. Your sales reps shouldn’t be waiting to contact higher-intent leads, but if those leads aren’t properly identified, they may be unaware that they need to speed up their follow-up process.

This means that, regardless of how your scoring is set up, you should be flagging actions that indicate high buyer intent. For example, a user who clicks on a Google Ad and downloads a thought leadership eBook on a topic related to your products and services should not be treated the same way as a known person who fills out a hand-raiser form on your website.

It all boils down to lead prioritization, which is certainly possible with most MarTech stacks, but you and your team must be informed, intentional, and proactive when scoring, nurturing, and managing your prospects and leads.

Bring in the right people to ensure accurate, purposeful lead scoring and to identify the behaviors that should immediately alert sales to a potential opportunity. Once you with your team are having those decisions, make sure to update your marketing automation platform and CRM to reflect those changes, and then test those changes to ensure accurate lead management.

There are always challenges to overcome when integrating new technology into your marketing tech stack, but the benefits of marketing automation far outweigh the challenges of successfully implementing a robust program.

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