I’m a big fan of marketing automation, when used correctly. We use it at GreenMellen from time to time, and it can be an effective way to send out information.
However, automation doesn’t get you off the hook. People still ask questions and may want responses directly from you — and that’s a good thing! If your marketing automation has people interested in learning more, that’s a win. Make sure you’re listening and you’ve a great thing going.
Car Dealers
Over the years, I’ve seen how car dealerships suffer with technology. In started back in 2010 when Jim Tidwell Ford sent me a bunch of emails from a variety of different people, none of whom were talking to each other. A year later, I showed how car dealers tended to love to show off Twitter badges, but literally didn’t look at the platform. In 2016, I showed how Autonation had implemented some marketing automation, but really didn’t know what they were doing. In 2017, I showed how only one dealership was willing to chat via email (and the others seemingly weren’t) and that won the sale.
Mountain View Ford
So that leads me to now, and the most amazing sequence of automated auto dealer emails I’ve ever seen. It took me a while to figure out the order of everything, since they sent so many different emails. Here you go:
Long story short — email automation can be a good thing, but please don’t take the human part of the interaction out of it.
[…] a lot on here about how the human touch can make your business better (don’t use noreply, ease up on the automation, etc), and that is 100% true. However, you can also follow Slack’s lead and try to find ways […]