Leveraging marketing automation to create continuity campaigns can increase repeat business, or support lost cost subscription based models by providing great content to current customers and additional support information about product improvements, new revenue opportunities and other relevant customer values.

Arturo: “lack of focus” is actually a good reason for failure too

Barry: good point, I can also recommend the Marketo Lead Nurturing guide, and the Genius.com Content Mapping webinar

Rebekah: campaign gone wrong, but – I must say – very quick follow-up from Marketo to improve the campaign.

Charles: “failure to define success” is a great point to add to the list. And to your second point: if I were a marketing automation vendor, I would also make it look easy, but in reality it’s indeed often quite hard to get the full benefits.

Addtionally; Don’t assume it will be easy (whatever the vendor claims)! Not only will marketing and marketing ops managers need to get fully engaged with the tool(not something that comes easy to many marketers) but some will need to have a 2nd level under-the-hood expertise to support users and fix stuff. Addtionally you will need to expect to commit addtional time and resource during the definition, customisation, user testing and training phases; these things do no just arrive fully formed one Monday morning!

Finally; Don’t fail to define success! You need meaningful and robust success indicators; they might be empirical (cost/lead, conversion rates) time related (fully implemented by XX/XX/XX) or related to efficiency (XX campaigns/manager/month).

regards,

Charles

I don’t have an example of a project gone wrong from an insider perspective — but I totally have an example of automation gone bad, from the outside perspective.

From the Shocking Marketing No Nos Department
http://blog.b2bcommunications.com/2009/03/13/from-the-shocking-marketing-no-nos-department/

It went wrong b/c there was an underlying issue re assumed permission — then automation spread the problem like a nasty sneeze. Ok, not a great image to implant in everyone’s minds… sorry.

Not only start-ups but whole corporate teams aiming at high-growth market sectors try to automate marketing processes to help them exploit that grow opportunity faster. However, lack of focus is indeed a problem, but not merely in targeting the wrong offer to the right kind of audience. It is a problem in keeping the marketing team from understanding which work process, if automated, will produce the most significant impact on the business’ bottom line.

This is why work flow simulation is so critical in determining what to deliver to marketers as part of the automation solution.