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Man Vs. Machine: Get Better Sales by Keeping Marketing Automation Human

Posted By Guest Blogger 27th of November 2014 General 0 Comments
Image via Flickr user Peyri Herrera

Image via Flickr user Peyri Herrera

This is a guest contribution from Veronica Taylor.

Marketing automation without a human element is just a robot on autopilot. Before, during and after each automated campaign it is essential for real people to plan, edit and review. When campaigns aren’t working, they need to be tested and updated. Most people think of marketing automation as efficient yet impersonal. When used correctly, however, most automated marketing solutions now provide the possibility for highly targeted messages based on each customer’s personal interests, preferences and history. Here are a few tips for making your automated campaigns efficient and dynamic while also building stronger connections with your customers.

Have a Specific Goal

For each campaign you create, it is essential to know what you are trying to accomplish. Are you seeking more new signups? Trying to get leads to download your whitepaper? Simply raising awareness about your business or an upcoming event? If you have automated messages going out to customers but you don’t have a clear idea of what results you are trying to measure, you will not know if the campaign was successful. You won’t know which messages were effective and which ones need to be changed. If you are not measuring the response to your messages, you are not listening to your customers. The automated campaign will continue to run robotically, with no edits or improvements. Know what you are trying to achieve. If it’s not working, update it.

Survey and Track Customers

The best way to give marketing automation a personal touch is to use it to its full potential. Marketing automation now has the capability to track and store each individual customer’s preferences, history, important dates, interests, personal information and much more. With this wealth of data, it is possible to automatically create highly personally targeted campaigns for each customer. This way, the customer receives information that is directly relevant to them, making the experience much more personal. You can send out automated appointment date reminders, bill payment notifications, birthday messages, personalized promotions and so on. This type of personalized messaging builds stronger connections and reduces customer churn. When you want to update your customer information in order to provide even better targeted messages, survey customers to learn more and keep information up to date.

Know When to Write a Personal Message

Sometimes automation just isn’t appropriate. There are many instances in business where it is essential to take the time to manually write a message or a response to a customer. In these cases, a prompt message sent by a real person has a much greater impact than an automated message ever could. These are just a few examples: when a customer makes a very large purchase and you want to thank them with a special discount or free product/service, when a customer has been with you for years and you want to show your appreciation, when a customer takes the time to write to you with feedback, questions or comments, when you make a mistake with a customer’s bill, purchase or account, when a customer has a complaint, and when you have time to make personal comments on social media (automated social media management saves oodles of time, but you absolutely need real posts or tweets thrown in).

Review and Analyze

As mentioned before, if you don’t keep track of how customers are responding to your automated messages you are simply letting a robot control your marketing, which is going to show in your sales. Real people are essential to a marketing strategy because they try different things when they see something isn’t working as well as they had hoped. One of the greatest advantages humans have over machines is that they take chances and make mistakes rather than doing the same thing over and over again. The best way to increase revenue, boost customer life span and attract new customers is to listen to what your customers want. Automated marketing solutions provide you with all the data you will ever want. Keep a close eye on your reports, open rates, unsubscribes and other data. Review your campaign data after each campaign you send. Learn what customers respond to, learn what they don’t want and learn how to react positively when you need to make a change.

To summarize:

Your marketing is ultimately in your hands. Marketing automation makes it possible for businesses to save time and money, reduce the daily effort their staff has to put in and connect more effectively with their customers. Marketing automation is a powerful tool, but like any other tool it needs a skilled operator to make it work.

Veronica Taylor, Assistant Marketing Manager at SimplyCastenjoys writing about small business marketing, improving communication strategies, social media trends and more.

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Hi Veronica,

    Great post !!! You’ve well explained the automation of marketing. But as you said each one should’ve specific goal of what he/ she going to achieve by making human automation process. It’s not as simple as possible making a human automation. We need to have robust link to customers to make it success, isn’t it ?

    Survey and Track comments : Yes, it’s main thing that the human automation does, now a days new tools will does a great job, may I know which tool you prefer to the same ?

    Personal message: This is the most appropriate one that you’ve well stated in one point, manually writing message or responding to customers reply is more worth than the human automation message does. Most of people sounds to read mail when it’s a manually entry mail from some human rather than the automation mail ( shift + del ).

    ” Man can’t do like machine, Machine can’t think like Human ”

    Thanks
    Siva

  2. Content automation is good and away when the content is unique and not reposted from another site such as a new site or article directory.

  3. I agree, to much automation ends the human touch. Communication on a one-on-ones basis is quite essential at times.

  4. Hi Veronica
    Your tips are worth noting. In my opinion, marketing automation can work. But it needs a lot of testing and tweaking. There is no fixed formula. You have to try things and find out what works for you. One quick question. How does marketing automation work for you compared to human work? Let us know.

    Regards
    Neil (blogician.com)

  5. article automation is time saving then again it lacks human touch, automation help in saving time and effort but then things looses that human touch which connect writer with readers

  6. Great post !!! You’ve well explained the automation of marketing. But as you said each one should’ve specific goal of what he/ she going to achieve by making human automation process. It’s not as simple as possible making a human automation. We need to have robust link to customers to make it success, isn’t it ?

  7. if our intelligence is better then we can create automation technique and it will much better for blog content post and of course human is human.

  8. I have tried both through my social media marketing and I have noticed much better success when doing this manually. I agree that having that “human touch” works much better at times but other times it is much more efficient through automation. Good post!

  9. Great post !!! this is nice automation is time saving then again it lacks human touch.You’ve well explained the automation of marketing. But as you said each one should’ve specific goal of what he going to achieve by making human automation process.

  10. Article automation is time saving then again it lacks human touch, automation help in saving time but we can not do all things on automation basis. We need to improve automation just like human.

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