What Parts of Your Marketing Should You Automate?

Managing your marketing starts with finding the right systems and tools to help you streamline and automate marketing activities like lead nurturing and lead generation. These systems and tools typically help you save time, increase customer engagement, and create new opportunities like generating referrals and repeat business.

Cool, right? The thing is that you can't let the cool new shiny technology blindside you. You can't automate every single thing. An extreme example is when telemarketers try to trick you with those robots that sound like real people. They have you fooled until roughly three sentences, but then you realize they aren't a real person. Click.

Not everything can be automated. Almost every form of marketing, automated or not, requires a minimum level of human interaction. In short, not everything that can be automated, should be automated. That's not to give the impression that marketing automation is cold and inhuman or to scare you away from it. It is easier than ever to send personalized, one-on-one targeted messages. Marketing automation makes communication easier so that you can focus on the quality of your messaging. You just need to be aware that you can't just "set it and forget it."

Here's a brief summary of marketing activities that should be automated and activities that should not always be automated.

Good (automate these activities)

• Generate leads from your website, landing pages, and social media through forms that drop directly into your email automation platform.

• Sending follow-up emails (autoresponders) based off a link action, like "click here to RSVP."

• Schedule social media posts and emails to maximize your time.

Bad (try not to automate these activities)

• Impersonal customer contact. An extreme example would be the time that Progressive was being insensitive about a touchy matter and proceeded to send out the same exact reply to every customer that tweeted them.

• The blanket approach has proven to be ineffective. One marketing message won't work for every member of your audience. Customize the content of your emails based on the category they belong to. In real estate, for example, you will have new buyer leads, new seller leads, FSBOs, past clients, and another list of the loyal clients that keep sending referrals to you and keep coming back to you. Each of these categories should be getting information based off of their interests and their needs.The majority of your past clients and customers may qualify to receive your newsletter, but the client you just sold a house to will only put up with your "Featured Listings" a couple of times before they unsubscribe or mark you as spam.

• Sending too many emails. Drip campaigns are a great way to get leads down the conversion funnel (from "I'm interested" to closing the sale), but you don't want to send too often. Two emails per day is too much, and in a lot of cases one email per week may be too much.

To view the original article, visit the eMerge blog.