There is no such thing as the perfect campaign. Good – even adequate – campaigns achieve marketing and sales goals. I have seen many marketing/communications departments fail to reap value from their marketing automation systems because they spend too much time perfecting messages, tweaking copy, curating internal company lists and picking colors or images – often for episodic, 1-off emails.

If you seek greater value from your marketing automation system, you need to send more messages to leads, customers and partners. 

You want to regularly ‘touch’ leads, customers and partners so that your organization can:

• Be top-of-mind at the point customers are thinking of buying.
• Drop tracking cookies on the browsers of leads, customers and partners to follow their behavior.
• Learn from them. Their digital bread crumbs reveal how they buy, solve problems, explore upgrades and recommend your product.
• Improve communications, targeting and sales.

Start with Strategy

Organizations obsessed with email optics over campaign outcomes often lack strategy. Just sending blast email is their strategy. 

To establish a simple marketing strategy, use this simple 2×2 matrix to set some goals. Start with reaping more value from existing customers.

1. Market Penetration – Sell more of your existing products to your existing customers. Goals may include customer retention, upsell or satisfaction support.
2. Market Development – Focus on expanding to new geographies or segments. Goals may include sell X number of product to a new market or gaining recognition in that foreign market.
3. Product Development – Sell new products/services to existing customers. Goals may include selling a new product/service to your entire customer base or a specific segment, learning from it and then going global.
4. Diversification – Launch a new product in a new territory. Goals may include launching a new product in a new geography.

Beware of Roadblocks

Now that you’re revved up, beware of the roadblocks that can slow you down.

• Seed list obsession. Product managers, sales professions and company leadership often care more about getting a copy of the email when it goes out than the segment to which it is sent. Marketing should never curate seed lists; people in the business should. Hint: get them to create a Salesforce campaign and put whomever they want in it. You can include that campaign list in the email send.
• Picture perfect slowdown. Everyone wants to be a graphic designer or programmer. Thus, they craft their own emails and web pages or waste a lot of time picking colors, fonts, pictures and other graphics. Eliminate this by picking templates early on and get the brand managers to approve. Use those templates for 2 years and then consider updating them. 
• Role confusion. Explain roles, timelines and responsibilities up front. If the business unit knows you must have 3 days to build and test the email before launching, they will get their act together early.
• List uploads. Okay, here’s my list. Upload it to the marketing automation tool and send.” Uh, no. Expect sales and business unit managers to upload lists themselves – to Salesforce. Excel or CSV files often need to be formatted or cleaned before attempting an upload, throwing off your timeline. If you upload the list and there’s something wrong, marketing you are held responsible, not the business.

There are no prizes for the prettiest email sent to most curated list. Don’t let good be the enemy of great. Don’t entertain perfect. Just get more email out – engage your leads, customers and partners.