One of the drivers toward automation in marketing is the economy. In bad economies, budgets get cut, staff is reduced, and despite what you hear about Marketing ROI, marketing is often the first to get cut. This has forced many marketers to become more efficient. The growth of direct email marketing and web technologies are examples. They are more efficient than the old outbound techniques.
I am a big believer in automating. Whenever I am faced with some arduous task, I ask myself, how can I automate it so I don’t have to do this again? I hate doing stupid manual work. And I don’t like it when my clients or employees do stupid manual work either.
The interesting thing is that it’s almost always easier to do what you need manually. Take for example a process I recently ran across. I call it the Webinar Shuffle. Prospects register for a webinar on line in one system. After they have attended, the names are then exported in a tab-delimited file and entered into another system for follow-up. It doesn’t take much time, but it’s a manual step.
The same goes for batch and blast emails. Just send the same email to everyone on your list? This is a case of using automation, but using it in a lazy way. If the logic of your email campaigns doesn’t look something like this… then think again. 
In both these examples, you can save time in the short term by doing the process manually, but in the long term you lose lots of time. Time that can be spent on other important issues.
So here are three key questions to ask yourself the next time you find yourself faced with marketing drudgery:
- How many times am I likely to repeat this?
- How long will this take to automate?
- What will I miss or not be able to do if I don’t automate?
The ugly part of marketing automation is facing up to the issue that you really do have more time than you think to stop and automate. If you don’t, it’s your own Catch 22 fault.
The bad part is that automating requires you to think about what you really want to do. Most times this is good.
Do Great Things!
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)