The Truth About Marketing Automation in 2021 Can It Feel Personal Without Feeling Fake?
to work delivering personalized content to those email addresses. The customization options are nearly endless.
By now, most small businesses rely on some form of automation. Countless tools and apps on the market allow you to automate various aspects of your business and day-to-day tasks, such as emailing, data gathering, and data compiling. Marketing is one area of business where automation has really taken off and made the lives of marketers much easier. THE PERSONALIZATION PROBLEM When it comes to automation, some businesses fear that automation takes away the personal touch of doing business. In some cases, this fear is completely justifiable. Take, for example, the chatbot. Businesses use this tool to communicate with visitors to their website. You may have encountered this before, if you don’t already use one. When you navigate to a website, it pops up, usually in the bottom right-hand corner, and the bot asks if you need any help.
However, if you become too heavy- handed in the process (like sending emails too frequently, too personal, or with too much information, etc.), your email marketing campaign can fall flat. If you’re sending too many, it will either be sent to the spam folder or the reader will unsubscribe. The same will happen if the emails are too personal or contain an overwhelming amount of info. So, you have to find the balance. If you’re running an email campaign, you don’t want to send out touches infrequently, but you also don’t want to be forgotten about in the weeks between emails. What is the right balance? Well, the answer ultimately depends on the campaign focus, the intended audience, and the intended result. This means you’ll have to do your research ahead of the campaign to determine frequency. A NEW KIND OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE When you bring new automation tools into the fold, whether they’re for email, chatbot, project management, or literally anything else, count on a lot of trial and error. That’s one of the upfront costs of shifting to automation — you have to spend a lot of time dialing it in. Once you have it dialed in to suit your needs, or the needs of your marketing campaign, that’s where it pays for itself. On your end, the customer experience becomes more efficient than ever. On the customer end, your business becomes more accessible than ever. The bottom line is that, yes, you can automate your marketing without losing the human touch. While parts of your campaign may be plugged into various tools that do much of the work for you, it starts with a human and it ends with a human. Plus, a human can intervene at any time. As long as someone is on the back end making sure everything runs smoothly, the human touch never really leaves. It comes down to the effort you want to put into your automation, your marketing, and by extension, your customer experience.
In the past, chatbots were largely unhelpful, impersonal, and intrusive. But when we say “past,” we mean the 2000s into the early 2010s. Today, chatbots are a completely different experience. Thanks to advances
in artificial intelligence (plus years of data collected by chatbot developers), chatbots are much better at mimicking a real conversation, but more than that, they can perform specific functions and don’t feel nearly as intrusive. This level of advancement applies to virtually all forms of enterprise-level automation. It’s easier to plan, coordinate, and execute email campaigns. Marketing teams can basically set up entire marketing campaigns, and the automation tools will take care of the rest (at least, up to a certain point). How much they do is up to you. In some cases, you can even automate parts of the sales process. THE PROPER BALANCE Of course, while automation makes things easy, it’s also possible to make things too easy. Email is a good example of this. There are several email automation tools out there. You set up your email campaign any way you like, put in the contact information, and your tool of choice goes
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