How to prepare before buying a Marketing Automation tool?
What should Companies/Individuals do to have the best buying process and to choose the best-fit solution?
Choosing a new marketing automation (MA) tool is not an easy job! Not that rarely does it happen that companies or individuals rush into that process without proper preparations because they underestimate the impact and complexity of it. Choosing a new MA tool is a cake with a lot of layers and for it to be delicious in the end, every layer needs to be made with the utmost care.
Look at this process as a strategic in-house project and make sure all the people in the company are aware that this project will start. They need to know that it is a priority project that will have a strategic impact on the company. After all, the job of marketing automation is to connect sales and marketing efforts and increase revenue from owned marketing channels like email, SMS, push notifications, and website.
Don’t miss this opportunity because you think this is just one more way “marketing will drain money out of the company pocket”. If done well, marketing automation can increase company revenue substantially - but you need to choose the right tool for your needs.
In this article, I will cover what steps to take before you start your new tool search.
For an in-house project like this to have success, certain steps must be done beforehand so you go into it fully prepared.
Strategic Decision
The decision to buy a new tool needs to come from top management and needs to be explained and transferred to the rest of the company so everybody is on the same page and this will also make the adoption of the new tool a lot easier. People who will be direct users of the tool need to know that this is a proper decision coming from top management (this will vouch for their complete commitment to the buying process, the use of the tool, and the trustworthiness that the company is going in a right direction and it is not just one more random decision).
At first, this may seem like an odd thing to keep in mind, but reality has taught me so many times before, that it’s important. Once I had a client who failed to communicate a new MA tool purchase to the rest of the company so a complete mess was created when people heard about it. They had numerous questions like: Since when? Why is that? Who said that? And when you take all that into account, you get a messy atmosphere full of uncertainty and not much trust. Not to mention that a lot of time and energy goes to waste on endless conversations with every person who needs an explanation that should have been communicated from top management before the project started. All of that makes new tool searches and implementation even harder than it should be.
If you are an individual, looking to start with marketing automation in your business, the goals of your email marketing and MA tool must be aligned with your overall marketing strategy. What it means? It means that you need to know why you want to use the MA tool and how will you use email as a marketing channel. Will you send triggered transactional emails to your users or do you want to send out planned promotional campaigns based on behavior, and preferences to your subscribers' list or maybe you want to do both (always the best combination!)?
2. Forming a Team
It doesn't matter if it will be a one-person band or a team of a couple of members, the following topics need to be covered.
Let’s first cover the situation where we have small to mid-size businesses with a couple of people team choosing the tool. For a company to have a guaranteed positive process it needs to have a dedicated team that will have new tool search as a priority.
Usually, this team needs to have the following positions included:
Project Manager or Team Lead - someone who will be responsible for meeting all deadlines and coordinating everything. Be aware that the new tool search includes a lot of communication with different tool providers - sending emails, asking for documentation, demo arrangements… Make sure this person will be able to have authority over other team members so they can fulfill their assignments in the project (sometimes it happens that people want to prioritize their main position assignments and don’t understand the importance of their role in the new tools internal project). Also, this person needs to have good communication and organizational skills like a proper PM. In the end, when all tools are taken into consideration with their pros and cons, this person will most probably present the best tool/s to the top management that will in the end make a buying decision.
(Email/ Digital) Marketing Specialist - this person will be using the tool after it is implemented and during the search he/she will give advice and feedback about each tool's features compared to the company requirements (e.g. capabilities of building dynamic emails, user-friendliness of content builder/designer, capabilities for sending SMS or Push notifications, limitations regarding automated flows…).
Data Specialist - every marketing automation tool needs to have data inside it to be able to do its job! That is why this person is important for the process. He/She needs to know company data architecture very well and be able to give advice and feedback about each tool's capabilities/limitations regarding companys’ data requirements. Here he/she must be aware of the company's privacy policy.
If you are a team of one, then you will want to be able to play all of these roles. For you, this won’t come as something new because it’s most likely that you have to wear a lot of hats in the rest of the areas of your business. If some of the areas listed above are not your strongest, investigate them a bit to be ready for questions. You don’t need to know all the answers, this is not the point. Always share your doubts and concerns with the tool provider team because in this case, they can tell you what is a best-practice solution in a particular case similar to yours.
If you decide that this is best to be done with professional help, feel free to contact me and we will choose the best tool for you together. This way you don’t have worries on your mind, you can focus on your core business and I will do the job of finding and implementing the new MA tool.
3. Have a clear goals
Before going into the search for a tool there are some main things to take care of. Here they are:
What do you want out of the new tool? Do you want basic email marketing functionalities (send email - wait two days - send email…)? Or do you want more of the flow control capabilities (like having decision splits to send users in different paths based on their email engagement, sending users to Google/Meta ads from the same journey in the MA tool…)?
Will you do the Implementation of the tool by yourself or with professional help (Consultancy or Individual Specialist)?
Will you need help with using the tool after it is Implemented? Will you be able to use it right away or do you want somebody to train you?
Conclusion
All of these bullets are equally important for you to get ready for a new marketing automation tool search.
Okay, now you are ready to start the process, but what does that process look like? Take a look at this article to find out more about the process itself and what to look out for during it.
Good luck shopping!
