Nailed It! Marketing Automation is NOT Email Marketing
The very first point made by Andrew Moravick in this article really resonated with me. If you are only using your Marketing Automation Solution as an Email Marketing Tool, then you are wasting your money. I’ve had a few clients over the past year who have been guilty of this, and then came to me for a consult because they didn’t understand why they were not getting the expected results from their Marketing Automation efforts. They had not defined segmentation lists, they had no forms to get website visitors onto these lists, they had not mapped their live events to these lists, and they had no content to send to these prospects as part of a nurture/follow-up campaign. They were paying thousands of dollars per month for what could have been done for a few hundred dollars per month with a basic Email Marketing Tool. Outbound email is just one tool among many when it comes to effective Marketing Automation: landing pages, segmentation and targeted lists, scoring, tracking and analytics, and a solid process for passing Marketing Qualified Leads over to sales are all necessary for success.
Setting up an effective Marketing Automation program is difficult. It takes lots of planning and the creation of content long before the first prospect is ever acquired from the program, converted and eventually closed.
Your Marketing Automation Reality Check: Calculating the Costs of Misuse.