Marketing Automation Specialist
Has anyone ever tried to sell you the ‘marketing automation specialist dream’? It goes something like this:
Build your systems once. Create all your flows and automation. Pour in a steady stream of qualified prospects, and watch customers pop out the other end! Semi-retire to work from the Caribbean, running your insanely profitable business from the beach, holding a cocktail.
The problem? It doesn’t work. It’s a dream.
Marketing automation is great, but it has limitations. One of those limitations relates to your communications…
In the ‘automated dream’, you pre-schedule all the emails a prospect might ever receive ahead of time. I’ve even seen clients pre-schedule automated emails for an entire year! This is a lot of work, but the theory then is it runs by itself.
What I’ve seen in practice is that:
- Creating all your email content upfront is too big an investment (of time or money), even if you are repurposing from other formats. The transcript of a webinar, for instance, could be converted into an email sequence.
- It’s easy to lose track of what emails are going out, and what offers those emails make.
Choosing The Right Marketing Automation Specialist For Your Business
There’s also a deeper, more fundamental problem. If you only ever send automated emails, those emails represent an ‘old’ version of you. A snapshot in time, if you like.
Ask yourself: is your perspective the same as what it was in 2019? Have the conversations you have had about your work changed since then? Have you learnt anything about yourself?
I’m not saying you should never send automated emails. Not at all. You should do so extensively. But you should also send some live emails too.
Alternatively, this could be a live print newsletter. Or a live monthly webinar. You don’t have to tie your flag solely to email.
The people most interested in your products and services want to hear from the current version of you. They want your current, most up to date perspective on things.
The weekly email you’re readying now is sent ‘live’, or near as. It’s usually written the weekend before you receive it.
Sometimes we’ll convert these emails into blog posts. Sometimes we’ll convert these emails into an automated evergreen sequence. Recently I’ve been writing a lot about webinars, and we’ll be repurposing those.
If you don’t like to write or feel it isn’t a core skill, you need to work with a copywriter to do this. Somebody who understands you, and to some degree your work.
What I’m describing isn’t exactly the glitzy marketing automation dream. But we deal in truths here, not dreams.
If you need to build trust with potential buyers, a steady stream of ‘live’ comms, sent fresh out of the pan will usually pay dividends.
We’ll carry on with another ‘confession’ next week :-).
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