201: Marketing automation campaigns will fail. Here's what to do.

Marketing automation is great. It allows companies to set up campaigns that run on their own without further human intervention, which saves a lot of time and increases what your marketing team can do.

Marketing automation campaigns can also fail spectacularly.

It usually goes like this.

Step 1: What could go wrong?
Step 2: How could we have known?

The classic example of a broken marketing automation campaign is a subject line that says “Hi [First Name].” The lesson is clear. It’s not enough to have data in some of your fields. Before you automatically insert a field into a campaign, make sure all the fields are appropriate, and make sure you have a routine to insert a generic value when the field is blank.

Ideally you want to catch things before they happen. Good operations, including detailed requirements documents and careful review, can help with that, but it’s hard to get people to follow procedures. Count on the fact that some people won’t.

Most marketing automation campaigns rely on data connections between disparate systems. Sometimes those connections fail. Make sure somebody is monitoring that.

Set a sunset date on every campaign. You don’t want to find some rogue campaign that’s been running for five years. Now it has the wrong logo, the wrong offer, the wrong product image. It’s not pretty.

Seed yourself in all your campaigns, but realize that’s not an adequate test. Your email won’t say “Hi [First Name]” because your database record has your name in it. But you can catch some things by looking at seeds.

Also, the seed doesn’t have to be on your account. If possible, get copies of live efforts sent to real customers. Some fulfillment companies can do that for you.

Involve customer service early. Make sure they’re aware of the campaign before it starts.

Also, for some odd reason it’s hard to get customer service to tell you when something goes wrong. Their mindset is to pacify the customer and move on. You don’t want that. Make sure your customer service reps know that you want to hear about goof-ups, and thank them profusely when they report them.

Make sure every marketing automation campaign is connected to a report in a way that you can track down the problem when something weird happens. For example, your welcome emails start to bounce at an unusual rate, or you’re suddenly getting complaints about too many text messages.

Things will go wrong. Often it will be human error. Sometimes there’ll be a software update in some obscure program that throws a wrench in your procedure. You can’t anticipate everything. Read reports so you can catch the error early and recover quickly.

Finally, make friends. There will be somebody in some other department that does something completely logical from his point of view that fouls up your campaign. You want people to think, “You know, this is so and so’s domain. I should check before I go messing with that.”

Mike Pastore read my article and posted this comment on LinkedIn. “If you ever find yourself needing to explain to your leadership how things go wrong despite your investments in tech tools and data, send them this article.” Here’s a link to the article.

How to keep your marketing automation campaigns from ruining your week
https://martech.org/how-to-keep-your-marketing-automation-campaigns-from-ruining-your-week/