Marketing Lessons From the Jetsons

by Tom Ruwitch

When I was a kid, I loved “The Jetsons,” the animated television series about a space-age family. Their house was filled with fantastic gizmos and gadgets. My favorite: the Foodarackacycle. Select a meal from the menu, push a button and – voilà – a delicious machine-cooked meal.

When the show premiered in 1962, we had not stepped on the moon and the gadgets depicted were fictional dreams. Still, the show reflected a very real aspiration to which we still cling today. We dream of an automated future in which once-difficult tasks can be performed with the push of a button – or the click of a mouse.

Back in 1962, many imagined that future would be realized by 2015, and, indeed, the jetpacks and wristwatch telephones depicted on the show are with us now.

On many fronts, though, automation seems like an elusive dream. Ask small-business marketers who spend so much time fussing and fiddling with technologies that are supposed to make their lives easier.

I recently met a prospect at a networking event. In an email the next day, I asked whether I could add her to my company’s email marketing list. She said yes. Then the fussing and fiddling began. I had to copy her name and contact info from my Gmail account, open my email marketing system, click to create a new contact and add her to the list.

We invest in email marketing solutions, customer relationship management (CRM) software, website content management systems, event registration programs, social media management applications, web conferencing systems – all in the hope that they will help us market our businesses and close sales more quickly and efficiently.

I believe in these technologies and think they can deliver on their promise. I am, after all, president and founder of an email marketing company. But it disturbs me when I find it time-consuming to move a contact from my Gmail account to my email marketing system. So, in the spirit of the Jetsons, I searched for a better way.

One option is to invest in a “marketing automation” application that combines many tools in one – website landing pages, CRM, email marketing and so forth. Such systems deliver on “automation.” But they can be too expensive for many small businesses as well as inflexible, and their email marketing, CRM and other tools are not as good as some of the stand-alone applications in those categories.

Another option is to choose the applications you like and integrate them so they talk with one another. Here’s an example: I “integrated” Gmail and my email marketing system so they talk with each other. Now when that Gmail contact says, “Sure, add me to your email marketing list,” all I have to do is click a checkbox in her Google contact record. Her contact information is automatically sent to the email marketing system.

We’ve integrated our CRM, webinar software, landing pages, email marketing system and event registration system so they all talk with one another and one-manual processes are now automated.

It would make the Jetsons proud, and it doesn’t require space-age rocket science to accomplish.

There are a variety of tools and applications that help businesses connect their applications – without having to hire software developers to code custom integrations. Some of our favorites: Zapier.com, IFTTT.com and ItDuzzIt.com.

Tom Ruwitch is founder and president of MarketVolt. To attend a free webinar in which Tom demonstrates how to quickly and affordably set up automated marketing processes, go to MarketVolt.com/automation.