By Craig Klein, SalesNexus.com CEO
Some promise that marketing automation is a “set it and forget it” way of doing business. Unfortunately, the idea of setting up an email marketing programming and then walking away from it to spend time with the family is a pipedream.
There is a way to take back your time and spend more of such a precious resource doing what you want to do. It’s called “set it and watch the dashboard metrics” to make adjustments to your email automation.
Without the dashboard monitoring giving you real time metrics on what creates revenue, you will spend way too much time trying to figure out what to do next. If you aren’t lucky about finding the magic messages for your email campaigns, you may end up throwing your hands in the air, truly believing that email marketing automation does not work.
Email Marketing as a Science
Creating content for an email campaign may be considered an “arts and crafts” type of exercise. However, email marketing affects the bottom line when it is brought into the world of math and science.
Before we had the ability to set up dashboards to monitor the numbers, a lot of marketing (including email) was based on time-tested direct mail results. While direct marketing has always been tested and proven with numbers, the numbers were general and the task of measuring was forever time consuming.
Scientific Method of Email Marketing
Wikipedia defines scientific method this way: “The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.” It goes on to say that, “Theories in the scientific method must be based on measurable evidence.”
You know your company, products, benefits, and customers well enough to develop theories about what will be useful to them. It is only when you implement dashboards that you can get the measurable evidence that your theories are correct. You get the data in a time-effective manner so you can adjust as needed to improve results.
Dashboards Save You Time and Worry
Sure, simple observation and logic will also give you the information you need – eventually. You can pay attention to when revenue goes up and down. With reasonable observation and your experience in the business, you can probably retrace the revenue fluctuations to events in your marketing or staffing.
The human element of observation is critical to finding the right mix of marketing and sales activities. No sales automation system can take away the need for experienced management and talented salespeople. What it can do is give you specific numbers tied to specific activities.
With these numbers, you are able to react quicker and more accurately to the changes of the marketplace. The time and mental anguish you spend about where to allocate money and staff time are more easily determined. When you let the numbers speak for themselves you will free up time.
Implement Dashboards Slowly
Don’t get so excited about the data that you jump into measuring lots of unimportant things. According to Jim Lenskold, a marketing profitability expert, “You should prioritize when and what to measure based on the answers you need to make decisions that will improve your profits.”
Take a close look at what you want to accomplish. Trace those outcomes back a step at a time to uncover what metrics you need to know that you are on track. Set up your dashboards to monitor those specific activities.
When you use metrics to know what they want, email marketing is welcomed by sales leads, active prospects, and current customers. Get the message right, continue to use marketing metrics, and you will find more time to do the things you want to do while also seeing revenue growth.
Craig Klein is the founder/CEO of SalesNexus.com which is a leading provider of CRM, email marketing, and lead generation solutions for business-2-business sales teams.
