5 Ways for Marketers to Optimize Marketing Automation ROI

Are you making the most of your Marketing Automation Platform? Or is it a white elephant you wish you’d never bought because it’s simply not helping (and in fact could be increasing your workload)?  With MAPs, you need to get the basics right before any of the fancy features can do any good. Here are 5 ways to ensure you are set up for optimal marketing automation ROI

Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) became a runaway success as a product mainly because it allowed the effective automation of tasks that till now were manual and mundane, prone to errors, delays and irrelevance. Yet, many marketing managers feel that they are not making the most of their MAP investment. Used the right way, you could be saying ‘best investment we ever made’, and used ineffectively, you could be saying ‘what a waste’. Either way, MAP- like any technology- is only as good and effective as the team that uses it. Here are 5 ways to get it right.

1.       Email marketing is not Marketing Automation – while email marketing is the mainstay of marketing automation, it is certainly not the whole of marketing automation

2.       Know your data, know your strategy, know your data strategy – leveraging any marketing tool is all about using the data smartly to get the right message to the right customer at the right time in the right format: MAPs are no different

3.       Think beyond campaigns – obviously, to optimize the ROI on any marketing activity, you need to convert the prospect and then retain the customer at the lowest possible cost

4.       Steer clear of silos from the start – a good MAP can do lots of stuff: from creating landing pages and forms for data capture, to drip campaigns via email, event management and social media integration

5.       Avoid the ‘fancy feature’ syndrome – you want that shiny new phone because its got 400+ features…oh can’t you just see yourself using that ‘blindfolded bird sketching feature’ one fine Sunday!

Perhaps most important to optimizing ROI is the team that will manage the MAP.A lot of brand teams have organically grown into modern day marketers who need to use technology to execute what was traditionally done otherwise. Making the most of a MAP or any marketing tool is not just about knowing the features but also need some degree of technical expertise, familiarity with the terms and the focus on outcomes in terms of conversions and revenues instead of reach and awareness.

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