3 ways to optimize your marketing automation beyond technology

Memo

To: Marketing directors, VPs, SVPs and CMOs

Re: Recommendations to optimize your automated marketing campaigns

Your investment in technology to support marketing automation was smart. Automated campaigns increase relevance for your target audience and boost the productivity of your marketing team, which together should improve your bottom-line performance. 

But why aren’t you getting the returns you expected on your investment? Or, if you’re happy with your ROI, how can you improve it to generate even more revenue for your organization? Here are my recommendations — along with a warning. 

Warning

Don’t be held back by an over-reliance on technology. You have to balance your investment in tools (like technology) with investments in knowledge and expertise for your team.

Your team must know how to log into your platforms and navigate the interfaces. But the expertise you need to make your digital marketing campaigns and programs more effective, successful and optimized goes way beyond that. 

Dig deeper: The email marketer’s guide to effective marketing automation

What you need to optimize

The expertise you need to improve your bottom-line results can broken down into three key areas: 

• Data analysis.
• Strategy.
• Execution.

You might be wondering: can’t AI do this? I’m a fan of AI and use it myself, even teaching others how to use it. But at a recent conference, a speaker called ChatGPT the smartest person in the room because it had “read” most of the web. However, knowledge and expertise are more than just reading a lot.

I see generative AI as a tool you collaborate with and sometimes have to micromanage to increase your productivity — not a tool to provide all the knowledge and expertise you need on its own.

1. Data analysis

To optimize the bottom line performance of your automated campaigns, it’s not enough for your marketing team to just report on your metrics. They need to:

• Understand what the metrics tell them about your subscribers’ interaction with your marketing efforts.
• Know which levers to move to improve performance. 

You might need to look at some data and metrics your platform doesn’t provide. This is where having data analysis expertise on your team really helps boost your performance above your competitors — who are likely just relying on what the platform provides. 

2. Strategy

I’ve had vendors tell me that the strategy is built into the technology and that the tool and someone trained to use it are all you need to be successful. Sadly, this is not the case.  

You would not expect to become an excellent tennis player just by purchasing the racket, balls and shoes Aryna Sabalenka used when she beat Jessica Pegula in the 2024 U.S. Open women’s final. Tools are good, but it takes more to optimize performance. 

An effective strategy is based on a mix of qualitative and quantitative inputs. You need the data analysis we discussed earlier. The strategist translates the quantitative data into qualitative recommendations to improve performance. 

But you also need the qualitative foundations of your brand and/or products, such as target audience descriptions, personas, prospect/customer journeys, features/benefits/advantages analyses, common obstacles and how to overcome them, key messages and more. The number of marketing teams that don’t have these is concerning; it’s limiting their ability to succeed. 

3. Execution

Executing the strategy effectively is just as important, if not more important, than the strategy itself.

Many marketing teams are over-extended, which is why marketing automation is appealing. It boosts productivity dramatically. But it’s important to remember that it’s not the automation that makes a campaign successful. It’s the segmentation, copy, wireframe layout, calls to action, offer and other things automation can’t do independently. 

Your team must have the time, knowledge and expertise to implement the strategy faithfully and incorporate standards and best practices into the program. 

Dig deeper: 5 marketing automation quick wins

How to get what you need

When adding technology to your business, you often decide whether to buy a solution or build one yourself. You should apply the same process when deciding whether to hire outside experts or develop non-technical expertise within your team.

Build

The easiest way to build is to provide targeted education opportunities to your team. This could involve free or paid sources of knowledge. Free events, whether online or offline and special reports fall into the former category; paid events (again, online or offline) and certificate or degree programs are part of the latter. 

Investing in your people is a great way to build expertise. But it takes time, and even with a certificate program, the knowledge is still untested in the real world. 

One note: A senior marketing manager recently told me what a revelation her first industry conference not hosted by a vendor was. She said she was excited that she was learning to think about things and come up with hypotheses to test, not just how to use a tool to do a task she was assigned. If you’re going this route, don’t just send your people to the conferences your vendors run, look for conferences that are technology agnostic.   

Buy

This usually involves hiring a new employee or a consultant. This is usually quicker than a build solution since you don’t have to wait for the expertise to be learned, and there’s a proven track record of real-world success. But it is usually more expensive. 

Bringing in a senior consultant on a fractional or project-based engagement is a good strategy if you’re looking for someone to be an agent of change. Often, the people who are good at this don’t have the skills or interest needed to stay on long-term. Not paying 40 hours a week plus benefits can be a good value.

Combination

Sometimes, the best approach is a combination of build and buy. Perhaps you bring in a consultant (buy) to train your marketing team on an area in which they are lacking (build). Or maybe you hire a consultant (buy) who rolls up their sleeves to improve your program and educates your team on what they are doing (build). 

Now’s the time

If your fiscal year coincides with the calendar year, you’re probably already in budget season or about to start. Here’s my advice: make sure that investments in knowledge and expertise balance your past, current and future investments in technology. This will make your technology more effective — and give you new ways to reach your bottom-line goals. 

Dig deeper: 7 tips for using marketing automations to drive leads