Introduction – Audit Your Automations
I had a harsh realisation the other day that one of my most important marketing automations was not running.
It was an “Oh F@ck!” realisation. It’s an automation that I rely upon to keep my pipeline full of new projects.
The last few months have been much slower than normal so I was having a snoop around my marketing machine to see if anything was wrong, then bam! I saw it, my CRM automations were disabled.
I use a tool called One Page CRM to reach out to past clients every few months, I have an automation in place that does this for me on autopilot, I realised this has been switched off more than a year!
My internal post mortem
I took on a long term project that ended up lasting 18 months, I found that I was turning away clients that I had reached out to via this automation and offered to work with them, I didn’t have the capacity so this was not a good look. I disabled the automation and promptly forgot I had done it.
I thought those same people were in my email list and they were getting my regular content marketing emails, and that would serve as a way to be in contact with people on a regular basis. It turns about about 70% of my previous clients are not on my content marketing list, they have opted out of were never added to that email list.
My past client list are the most important people, they know like and trust me, they have paid for my services and usually come back for more. These people have not heard from me for more than a year. No wonder things were slow.
What’s the solution?
I’ll cautiously start to reach out to everyone on my list, I’ll do this manually at first making sure they still want me to contact them, then I’ll restart my automations.
Long term I’ll put a reminder in my calendar to review my automations every six months to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Wrap Up – Audit Your Automations
It’s all well and good to automate the processes in your business, it’s something I advocate, but I’m going to add a new mantra “always be auditing your automations”.
I’m furious with myself, has this ever happened to anyone else, they think they have a slick automated marketing funnel but it’s not running.
Onwards and upwards as they say.
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Photo by Aimee Vogelsang on Unsplash