Automation vs. application - getting the balance right for sales and marketing communication

Time saving. Increased engagement. Process efficiency. High-volume campaign outreach. 

The goals and outcomes listed above are reasonable expectations for automation, but it doesn’t change the fact that automated communication done poorly is unengaging and damaging for marketing and sales teams.

In the quest to automate everything and anything, teams often suffer from over-automating contact and prospect communications, leading to uninspiring content, lack of personalisation and even a mismatch in tone and approach between personalised outreach and automated content.

Getting the balance right between automation and application is hard, and it’s key to understand the thinking behind these terms when it comes to marketing and sales communications:

Application: Providing timely and relevant content and information to a contact or prospect to help engage them with an aim to educate, entertain or inform. The outcome could be to further the contact’s brand knowledge, industry knowledge, product knowledge or even to start/continue a sales conversation.

Automation: To save time and increase efficiency when communicating with multiple contacts or prospects as part of a marketing campaign or sales outreach, where the contact is not already engaged in an opportunistic conversation.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of a badly set-up sales or marketing outreach automation, and while marketing shouldn’t be excused entirely, sales emails can be particularly bad, due to the nature of supposedly being “one-to-one”.

While on parental leave, one of the only times I’ve been completely switched off from work, I received multiple automated sales emails. That’s expected. But what struck me as interesting was how many of these poorly optimised email workflows continued to run, despite an out of office and absolutely zero engagement from me. I went through the entirety of multiple sales automation emails, from ‘Hey, just wanted to…” through to “thought I’d try you one last time”. This approach misses the point of both application and automation.

AI might even get the blame in many cases, but it’s actually just badly thought out processes and a misunderstanding of when to automate and when a more personal approach should be applied.

Simple rules for any automated communications

Automating marketing and sales communications is a good thing to do, especially in high-volume industries where there are simply too many people to speak to one-to-one.

Done well, automation can be a powerful way to engage with contacts, providing it aligns with the application previously mentioned, with emphasis on the timely and relevant content.

For marketing, consider these simple rules of engagement for automation:

• Trigger automation based on a positive engagement with the brand, for example, a content form submission, interaction with the website where the contact is known, follow-up to an event etc.
• Keep the automation simple - apart from maybe a bit of branching logic to either further segment contacts or to check engagement, automated communication workflows should be kept short and simple. Multi-email nurtures spanning over months become hard to track and update if there’s an issue.
• Remove contacts from the automated communications if they no longer meet the goal of automated workflow or become highly engaged with sales. This reduces the number of emails or comms someone might receive when they are already in one-to-one discussions with sales or at the point where they are ready to be passed to sales.

While sales should also follow the rules above, the nature of sales outreach means automation needs to be spot on and these are some of the things that can help:

• Pause or stop the automation as soon as the contact engages, taking into account out of office responses, email replies or planned meetings.
• Ensure any automated communications, such as email, match your tone of voice and how you would communicate with a prospect. Nothing screams automation more than badly written sales pitches and a tone that you just wouldn’t use in conversation - especially if you’ve spoken to the prospect before.
• Build in as much personalisation and context as is reasonably possible, without overcomplicating the automation. With sales communication often feeling more personal, automated communications need to try and cater to this too!
• Know when to stop automating and when to switch to actual one-to-one communication. This might be based on lead scoring, general engagement or having a meeting in the calendar with a prospect. Don’t over-automate when the opportunity arises.

Getting the balance right between the automation and application of sales and marketing communications means sending more relevant, timely and engaging content to contacts and prospects.

For marketing, it’s generally okay for people to feel like the communication is automated, but that doesn’t excuse over-doing the number of communications or the quality of content being sent. While it might not come from one person, the brand experience should be consistent and remain strong when automating comms.

For sales, it’s about knowing when to automate and when to switch to one-to-one to get the most out of the conversation. Don’t send anything via automation that you wouldn’t send from your own inbox, and don’t let automations run wild when people aren’t engaging.

Planning your next sales or marketing outreach campaign? Get in touch