Drocca said:
That's my (always evolving) opinion. If you have a different one I would (seriously) love to hear it fleshed out. Also, I know my experience, being primarily B2B informs my bias.
I wrote a blog post on automated marketing if you are interested. derekmaine.blogspot.com
With B2B experience, it really surprises me that you feel automated marketing is useless. I've seen time and again a significant increase in conversion metrics (A/B test comparison) between targeted/segmented automated marketing campaigns, and non automated pieces. More importantly, the ability to automate things like drip/nurture campaigns with a segmented audience ensures timely & relevant content specific to a buyers needs.
Being able to deliver automated digital content that a buyer finds useful while triggering a task for a sales rep to call that user within minutes of that content being delivered (ensuring the reps voice is heard while a lead is consuming that deliverable) is a fully automated process that drastically shortens a sales cycle and increases exposure throughout the entire funnel, significantly improving ROI and maximizing entire departments work hours.
That says nothing about the automated and intricate process of creating lead scoring that can fine tune the ability to ensure reps only contact the most sales ready leads.
Make no mistake, marketing automation will be the focus of every sales/marketing organization 10 years from now. Companies that traditionally lag behind in this field (financial organizations, for example) are already investing millions of dollars in building teams around platforms like Marketo and Eloqua, integrating with legacy systems, and reorganizing their internal structure. Powerhouses like Salesforce.com are pushing integrations with automation leaders so they can bundle it in with their own systems because they know it's use and importance to have automated ability with databases.
Being able to target a specific buyer based on traffic patterns, web pages visited, IP address (ensure maximized deliveribility window), active customer vs inactive customer (your qualifications will vary) vs new customer vs legacy customer vs hot lead vs cold lead vs etc (what/when/how often to communicate) and the other thousand ways to segment them into a bucket greatly increases the chance that you'll deliver content they find useful in a timely manner, and that goes ten fold for B2C. If you only offer limited products for B2C, you may not be able to hit them when they need a product, but you can certainly automate communication when you think they do ("you bought a fridge 6 years ago, the average home owner buys a fridge every 7 years. Check out our badass fridges!") which helps drive engagement with existing customers and will greatly increase customer experience.
There's a thousand things I could talk about on this topic, but since this is BbtL and my fingers are numb from slapping them onto this iPad, I'll just say "I strongly disagree."
Edit: BTW, I read your blog post, and your main gripe seems to be that their automation is very poorly executed and the companies internal communication (marketing never got your email to a sales rep? Shameful.) sucks. A well executed automated workflow wouldn't allow any of the problems you experienced. Unfortunately, companies think doing it poorly is better than not at all, and that isn't true.
