The survey was conducted in May 2017 by Liana Technologies.

1. BEING INORGANIC
2. FLIPPING THE WRONG PERSONAL SWITCHES
3. FAILING TO PLAN
4. GETTING THE FOCUS WRONG
5. TICKING BOXES
6. IGNORING BUYER PROFILES
7. INEFFICIENT USE OF TOOLS AND PLATFORMS
8. FORGETTING ABOUT DATA GENERATION

The majority of features, nine of them, are used by 33 percent or fewer companies:

A/B testing
Dynamic content
Social integration
APIs
Dynamic segmentation
Progressive profiling
Lead recycling
Account based marketing
Business intelligence integration
Even more surprising is that over 20 percent of companies have no plans to use the last seven features.   Not only does lack of adoption directly imped these marketers in achieving their business goals, it prevents them from capturing the data needed for a true 360 degree view of the customer. What is holding these companies back?  The study found for many companies it’s aligning “marketing automation activities across the business, and to demonstrate the impact these activities have”.  Having to prove in hard numbers the ROI and efficiency gains is a challenge that slows adoption.

Chart of the Day: Don't forget your Lead Scoring We all know about Email Marketing Automation, but what is Lead Scoring? In the chart, we can see that Emai. Marketing topic(s):Marketing automation. Advice by Kim Greenop-Gadsby.

How are marketers using their marketing automation systems? Some answers:

• 9% > informing about new offers/promotions
• 7% > sharing information on the company
• 5% > educating about products/related topics
• 3% > consumer onboarding

Some specific MA tactics used:

• 5% for email automation
• 6% Basic profile-based targeting
• 4% Personalization using dynamic content
• 8% lead scoring

So why spend time and money implementing a big solution if you aren’t going to use it? Start smaller, or start with a solution that provides a specific subset of functionality that you can grab onto and build on. There are certainly many options to choose from as we see above.

Asked to identify the three most important features of an email service provider’s technology platform, two-thirds (66%) selected marketing automation capability. This has now overtaken user-friendly interface (60%) as the single most important attribute of an email service provider.

The research also found that the proportion of companies who say they can send emails based on individual activities and preferences throughout the funnel at scale has almost doubled, from 8% to 15%. Almost three-quarters (71%) of companies adopting personalisation to this degree report an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ performance from their email campaigns, compared to only 35% for companies who say they ‘are not yet working towards this’.

Personalisation (30%) is the area of email marketing where most respondents say they need to focus on during 2017, ahead of automated campaigns (28%), which was the number one priority area last year.

Despite email’s continuing ability to deliver, companies are still under-investing in this channel. The gap between sales (22%, on average) and marketing budget (15%) does not appear to be closing, which suggests that marketers are still not taking advantage of email’s ability to drive revenues. Email peaked at 16% of marketing budget in 2014, and has not made much headway since then.

Almost two-thirds of email marketers worldwide use email automation, but more advanced automation techniques are not as popular, according to a January 2017 survey from email marketing software provider GetResponse.

When it comes to enhancing email with more advanced automation techniques, however, marketers are not as far along. Only a third of email marketers surveyed used automation for basic profile-based targeting, or targeting email content based on individual personas and behaviors. Even fewer—just over a quarter—used it for personalization through dynamic content, or content that changes depending on who opens an email and when it is opened.

What do you need to do to make automation work for you?

You need to understand your sales pipeline. What are the biggest problems your clients deal with and how are you positioned to help solve them? What stage in the pipeline are your clients in? How long should they be in each stage? What is the probability of closing at that stage? What objections can you overcome before you speak to your ideal client? How many times should you be contacting them before they make a decision and without you being annoying?

If you don’t have all this information, you will have to test it out. You also need to be able to track each and every step of the way – this is where tools and systems come in, so you can see how effective you are and have it displayed on a dashboard for easy access.

How are marketers using automation tools to improve lead generation? Many organizations say automation allows them to more efficiently identify, contact and nurture potential business prospects. In Autopilot’s study respondents said the most effective uses for automation included generating leads from acquired lists (40%), automating sales outreach emails (38%) and nurturing warm leads to be sales-ready (38%).