It’s good to be across the positives and negatives of marketing automation, because you’ll need to understand its potential and limitations to make it work for you.

Prescheduled posting

The blessing: Loading up a batch of blogs and social posts ahead of time can save a lot of repeated action later down the track. Once the content is generated you can ‘set and forget’ – only monitoring is required.

The curse: The need to monitor the trending subjects in fast-moving social media channels is vital here. What may be an innocent post on Monday could be an accidental generator of negative press on Tuesday. Keep an eye on the news and social feeds so you can reschedule or retitle posts in light of recent events.

Machine learning and email generation

The blessing: There’s some fascinating work being done with machine learning and generating email content. Some programs are able to create pitch-perfect sales emails without any human input (after an extensive learning period). This can save e-commerce brands plenty of time and money as the technology evolves to be consistently reliable.

The curse: Automating content can also backfire, badly. This is particularly visible on social when bots use canned responses to customer queries. If there is a newsworthy incident, all eyes will be on the brand and the restricted responses come across as tepid and uncaring. Social media is predicated on a two-way relationship and having a genuine complaint met with a boilerplate answer only fuels the upset.

Customisation

The blessing: Tracking can be a real boon to e-commerce operators as clients can be served relevant ads reflecting their recent purchases and abandoned cart items. These memory triggers can convert into sales quite well if deployed appropriately. The reminders and advertisements can be served through social media and email.

The curse: The automated reflection of customer’s purchasing can start to feel invasive if the content appears too often or in too many separate locations. Some customers are uncomfortable with the idea of being ‘followed around the internet’, particularly if products are considered sensitive or private. A fine line must be walked to get this balance right. Deploy this strategy lightly to see better results.

Lead generation

The blessing: When automated marketing is done well, lead generation can explode. Well targeted campaigns can work extremely well and drive more inquiries and purchases, sometimes very quickly.

The curse: A viral spike in leads or orders can be overwhelming particularly if the response team isn’t prepared to deal with the additional workload. Make sure you have the capacity to meet your best-case expectations. If you don’t, make sure your pipeline strategy is equipped to communicate expected wait times.