Wouldn’t it be great if you could set up a marketing automation campaign, turn it on, and then sit back and let the leads start rolling in? That would be so awesome. Unfortunately, that’s not the way marketing automation (or any other software) works. Instead, setting up the campaign is just the beginning. After you set it all up, you have to manage it and continuously optimize it. Which brings us to three of the most common marketing automation mistakes people make.

Mistake #1: believing marketing automation is a set-it-and-forget-it solution.

The truth is that marketing automation is just like any other tool you use in business – the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. So the solution to mistake #1 is to carve out dedicated time where you can analyze and optimize your campaigns. In other words, instead of setting them up and forgetting about them, you should constantly look under the hood and make tweaks and adjustments.

You’re probably already checking the normal metrics associated with running a campaign – the open rate, the click through rate, and the unsubscribe rate. But are you keeping track of the larger, more expansive questions you should be asking yourself as you run your campaign? These are “big picture” questions that can help you ensure that your boss and your boss’s boss are happy with what you’re doing.

Here are some big picture questions you should be asking youself:

• Do I have a clear set of goals and objectives for the campaign?
• Do I have realistic expectations about the results of the campaign?
• Do my supervisors have realistic expectations about the campaign?
• What are the 3 or 4 primary metrics I’m going to monitor during the campaign?
• Are there any other metrics I should also keep an eye on?
• Have I notified my marketing team and my sales team that we’re going to launch the campaign?
• Is the campaign personalized in some way, shape or form?
• How often am I going to report on the results of the campaign?
• How quickly can I make adjustments to the campaign based on the results that come in?
• Is there anything I should be doing with the campaign that I haven’t already thought of?

By focusing on the big picture questions as well as all of the detail questions, you’re more likely to have the success you’re looking for.

Okay, now that we’ve covered mistake #1 and some solutions around that, let’s move on to mistake #2, shall we?

Mistake #2: believing that knowledge is the equivalent of action

By my estimate, about 75% of the business people I know confuse knowledge with action. What does that mean? It means that most people who identify a problem forget that that’s only half the battle. The other half is to put that knowledge into action – that’s where the gold is.

Recently, GetResponse ran a series of events in the U.S. called ResponseCon. One of the people who presented at the event was named Alaina Nutile, who runs OnlyInYourState.com a website that gets millions of page views a month (and an organization that uses GetResponse as their marketing automation platform).

Does Alaina know some secret about the digital world that makes her website get millions of views per month? Although Alaina was very smart, she didn’t have a secret weapon the rest of us don’t have. The difference for Alaina is that she executes flawlessly. In other words, instead of just knowing what a best practice was, she took action on it.

Every. Single. Day.

Do you have that in you? Can you take action on the knowledge you have every single day? If so, you might be the next Alaina Nutile.

Mistake #3: believing that good enough is good enough.

If you’re like many people, by the time you get a marketing campaign out the door – any marketing campaign, not just a marketing automation campaign – you’re exhausted. You spent a lot of time creating the campaign, getting approvals, proofreading the campaign, and then deploying it. By the time you start getting the results back, you’re ready to move on to the next item on your To Do list.

While it’s always a good idea to stay focused on your To Do list, it’s also important to re-visit your campaign and continuously optimize it. After all, improving your conversion rate from 1% to 1.25% may not seem like a big deal, but by doing so, you can increase the revenue from that campaign by 25%, which can contribute a significant amount to your bottom line.

A Final Thought

We’ve covered some important topics in this blog post. We talked about how marketing automation isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it tool. We mentioned that knowledge isn’t the equivalent of action. And we talked about how to continuously optimize your campaign. But the most important thing to remember from this post is to actually do the things that we discussed. After all, if you don’t take action on what you’ve learned, there’s no point in having learned it in the first place, right?