• Marketing Land
  • Sections
    • MarTech
    • CMO
    • Social
    • SEM
    • SEO
    • Mobile
    • Analytics
    • Display
    • Email
    • Retail
    • Video
    • Home
  • Follow Us
    • Subscribe to Our Feed! Check out our newsletters! Join our LinkedIn Group
    • Follow
  • Marketing Land
  • CMO
  • Social
  • SEM
  • SEO
  • Mobile
  • Analytics
  • Display
  • Retail
  • MarTech
  • More
    • Subscribe to Our Feed! Check out our newsletters! Join our LinkedIn Group
    • Follow
  • SUBSCRIBE

Marketing Land

Marketing Land

Deep Dive

Facebook, Privacy and Cambridge Analytica

Email Marketing

Behavioral triggered emails beyond e-commerce

Events

Attend Marketing Land’s conferences

  • MarTech
  • CMO
  • Social
  • SEM
  • SEO
  • Mobile
  • Analytics
  • Display
  • Email
  • Retail
  • Video
  • Home
Martech: Marketing

Get the most important digital marketing news each day.


Get into the email automation game

If you haven't yet set up an automation program for your email marketing, now is the time. Contributor Ryan Phelan walks through the key steps that will help you build a successful marketing automation program.

Ryan Phelan on August 28, 2017 at 3:46 pm
  • More


Only 33 percent of marketers who use automated programs rate their efforts as “very successful,” according to a recent study (PDF) that Adestra, my employer, did in partnership with Ascend2 research. Because I’m a big believer in marketing automation, I worry about the 67 percent of marketers who aren’t seeing the same results. How can you beat the odds to achieve success?

In my experience, the way a marketing automation program is conceived and set up often dooms it to failure. Such a failure doesn’t indicate that it’s not worth investing the necessary time and money into automation. Instead, it shows that the marketer didn’t think the process through, tried too many things, didn’t test it or didn’t give it enough time to take hold.

Why build a marketing automation program?

I’m a big believer in automation, and I have two reasons why automation belongs in an effective marketing program:

  1. It’s a money tree.
  2. It makes your life as a marketer easier and gets you out of the office earlier (when it works the way it’s supposed to).

If those are important to you, too, keep reading. If not, see my alternate message.

Simply put, marketing automation takes the actions in your email program that are repeatable and predictable and puts them into a program you can automate. How you build your automation will depend on many factors: your data, your objectives, the resources you can call on, management priorities and other things.

Use my two-phase plan below to sketch out a basic course to follow. Then, fill in your own details and modify it to meet your needs. One caveat: You likely will add steps that I haven’t listed. Just be sure not to cut any corners. That’s where you set yourself and your automation program up for failure.

How to build a marketing automation program

Phase 1: Assess what data you have, what you can automate and what your greatest needs are.

A marketing automation program can be as simple as a triggered welcome email or as complex as a multilevel drip campaign. But it all starts with the same process: figuring out what you can do.

  • Look at the actions your customers take that are repeatable and which you can reasonably predict given your customer journey and behavioral data.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author

Ryan Phelan
Ryan Phelan brings over 15 years of worldwide online marketing experience to Adestra as the Vice President, Marketing Insights. In this position, Ryan is responsible for the marketing efforts of Adestra in the US. Ryan is a respected thought leader and nationally distinguished speaker with a history of experience from Acxiom, BlueHornet, Sears Holdings, Responsys and infoUSA. In 2013 he was named one of the top 30 strategists in online marketing and is the Chairman Emeritus of the EEC Advisory Board and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Email Sender and Provider Collation (ESPC). Ryan is also involved many companies in the start-up space as an advisor, board member and investor.

Popular Stories

How to increase B2B form submissions through conversion testing
YouTube ads found on extremist content channels, reigniting company’s brand safety issues
100+ Questions You Must Ask When Developing A Website
Three brands still killing it on Facebook

Related Topics

Channel: Martech: MarketingMartech Column

We're listening.

Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or our LinkedIn Group.

Attend Our Conferences

Gain new strategies and insights at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management. Our next conference will be held:

April 23-25, 2018: San Jose

Oct 1-3, 2018: Boston

×

Attend MarTech - Click Here


Learn More About Our MarTech Events

June 11-13, 2018: SMX Advanced

October 23-25, 2018: SMX East

×

Attend SMX - Click Here


Learn More About Our SMX Events

White Papers

  • The Growth Marketer’s Guide to Email Metrics
  • Evolve Now To Personalization 2.0: Individualization
  • How Mature Is Your Omni-Channel Marketing Strategy? The Iterable Readiness Assessment
  • Media Rich and Fast: Best Practices for Optimizing Web Page Speed
  • Knowing What Works for Growing Sales Faster: A Retail Marketer’s Guide
See More Whitepapers

Webinars

  • Unifying Your Search and Social Ad Strategies
  • Customer Data Strategies & Identity Resolution: Best Practices
  • Omnichannel Personalization at Scale: How leading brands drive sales across channels
See More Webinars

Research Reports

  • B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
  • Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)
  • Enterprise SEO Platforms
  • Call Analytics Platforms
  • Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms
  • Local Marketing Automation Tools
See More Research
MarTech Guide to Understanding GDPR
Sign up for our daily newsletter
Marketing Land
Download the Marketing Land app on iTunes Download the Marketing Land App on Google Play

Follow Us

© 2018 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.