Marketers, we find ourselves in a quandary: We want to automate as much of our marketing as possible, yet we don’t want any of it to feel automated.

We’d love to be able to just set it and forget it. But great content marketing is designed to build relationships (that drive revenue). And unfortunately, automating our communication can make that goal harder – not easier – to achieve.

#ContentMarketing is designed to build relationships. Automating communication can make that goal harder, says @DrewDavisHere via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Sure, there are tools designed to automate posts on social media profiles and even the direct messages sent through LinkedIn. We can also choose to automate our most valuable interactions, such as our welcome emails and thank-you notes.

But when we do, the resulting messages don’t feel authentic. They lack personalization – a critical factor in relationship-building and revenue generation. In fact, research from McKinsey found companies with the fastest rate of revenue growth were more likely to prioritize personalization in their communication.

So, as much as we may want to put tasks on autopilot to increase productivity, we wonder how much our relationship-building efforts might suffer if we do.

What should marketers automate?

I’ve spent the last three months wrestling with that question, and it turns out I’m not the only one.

Even in 2017, 43% of marketers stated the most important objective of a marketing automation strategy is optimizing productivity. It’s not hard to understand why. The average marketer spends 1.25 days each week on non-core tasks, according to new research from Airtable. That’s 25% of our workweek spent managing, organizing, approving, reporting, gathering, and shuffling our marketing campaigns and content through the marketing mill.

Marketers spend 1.25 days each week on non-core tasks, such as organizing, approving, reporting, etc., according to Airtable research, says @DrewDavisHere via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

That’s 1.25 days we could reclaim by automating the right stuff.

Where do we start?

What is the “right stuff”?

Here’s what a few experts had to say on the subject:

“Automate the admin, the mundane, the data collection. Animate the rest with personality,” suggests Patrick Lyver, founder and president of the web design agency Kleurvision Inc. “It works for me, and there are a lot of tools that can help.”

Automate the mundane and animate the rest with personality, says @patricklyver via @DrewDavisHere @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Gloria Lafont, president of Action Marketing Co., agrees: “Automation does not mean set it and forget it, nor eliminate the human. It means eliminating as many repetitive tasks as possible in the marketing implementation, so you have more time to focus on making the relationship-building more effective.”

Automation does not mean set it and forget it, nor eliminate the human, says @GloriaLafont via @DrewDavisHere @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Our team set aside 30 days to experiment with ways to follow Patrick and Gloria’s advice. By embracing three simple, strategic ideas, we found an approach that automates mundane, repetitive tasks without eliminating the human touch.

1. Start with recently acquired customers

My core belief is all good marketing starts with the customers you’ve got. Instead of starting our automation activities with prospecting, social media, and lead generation, we focused on the processes implemented immediately after acquiring a new client.

From the instant we sign a new deal until the final invoice is paid, our team identified 49 separate multi-step automations that could save us time. More importantly, those automations allowed us to craft a unique, consistent, and high-quality client experience.

Designing these automations was surprisingly easy: List every little interaction, task, and deliverable in the client relationship. We just had never tried to formalize or automate them. It’s stuff we’ve done manually for a decade. It’s second nature. Then, we used our CRM’s built-in automation workflows and Zapier to turn each task into a tiny automation.

How much time did we claw back? It’s hard to say precisely, but I’d guess four to six hours per week. That’s six hours we can now spend on marketing instead of managing.

Yet, we have also recognized that to achieve marketing success with these automated efforts, we need to maintain a high-touch, highly personalized experience for our customers.

That brings us to our second strategy:

2. Ready-to-personalize communication

Any CRM can “personalize” an email or text message: Simply insert {first name} here, add {company name} there, and schedule it to be sent.

However, I am unaware of a CRM or even an AI tool that’s genuinely aware of the communication nuances across different client relationships. For example, some of our clients are “business-casual” communicators. Their emails feel like they’re wearing shorts to the office:

• They use extra exclamation points and emojis.
• They send short, punchy text messages.

Other clients communicate with all the formality of a black-tie affair:

• Their messages are crammed with corporate lingo.
• Every imaginable stakeholder gets cc’ed.
• Even their email signatures include legal disclaimers – just in case.

Then, there are clients that fall somewhere in the middle. I call this style “the mullet of marketing” – all business up front and party in the back.

These nuances matter in communication. They’re what supplies that human touch we’re so afraid of losing when we automate.

So, instead of sending pre-written, generically personalized emails directly from our CRM, our team generates ready-to-personalize messages.

Ready-to-personalize or RTP messages don’t get sent directly from the CRM to the client. They require a manual step added into the account management process: For each campaign, the account manager receives a notice that a draft needs their attention.

The CRM has already filled in all the critical customer data – such as first name, company name, and amount due. All the account manager needs to do from there is add some brand personality to the message. It could be as simple as popping in a few emojis, removing the exclamation points, or asking how the customer enjoyed their long weekend or a recent vacation.

Then, they hit send, and off it goes.

RTP has transformed our perspective on how powerful marketing automation can be.

Yet, that still leaves one last element of our approach that still needs work.

3. Create a single source

Zero percent – yes 0% – of marketers have a single source of truth for up-to-date information on marketing activities, according to the Airtable report.

On average, Airtable’s 300 survey respondents report they must reconcile between nine and 11 data sources to build a holistic view of their marketing activities and audience insights.

That’s a ton of work.

Any marketer who’s attempted to marry their Google Analytics with their customer database, email marketing platform, social media insights, and a pipeline of opportunities has faced this nightmare head-on.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: customer data platforms. CDPs used to be for massive enterprises blessed with a vast IT staff capable of building custom connectors for proprietary platforms.

But that was the old days.

Today, any company (even yours) can use free (or low-cost) web-based tools to build your own CDP.

We’re planning to use those tools to reduce the number of platforms needed to run reports and find new insights. We’re confident those insights will help us find the perfect balance between automated efficiency and authentic communication that builds client relationships. So, that’s next on our list.

With our initial 90-day automation experiment closing, we’re excited to see if we can achieve similar results when communicating with our prospects, leads, and open opportunities.

All tools mentioned in the article are identified by the author. If you have a tool to suggest, please feel free to add it in the comments.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute