Normally I would never suggest not using a marketing automation for anything, but it is a funny title so I'll let this slide. I would even argue that bad marketing automation is better than no marketing automation, but not by much.
Generic Broadcasting – The time that you save with marketing automation should be used to not only improve your content in the first place, but also to personalise through segmentation. Consumers in all market places are becoming more and more sophisticated, and can spot poorly executed marketing automation. And their perception is likely to be that you don’t care about the communication.
This is the first step of marketing automation. So many times the implementation strategy of the marketers installing the new system is to do what they are currently doing, but in a new fancy tool. I think this is an okay step if the desired outcome is to QA the output to make sure all the data is correctly hooked up. Other than that, marketers should have an understanding of what the new capabilities of the tool they have purchased and at least start with a few general segments to make sure there are some differentiation in the messaging.
My advice is to bring in a group that has experience in the tool who focuses on the strategy behind utilizing the tool to help build a roadmap. It's okay to start broad, in fact I recommend it. But don't tart from scratch. Start implementing the "low hanging fruit" opportunities in your business right away. This will be your baseline and then you start to grow from there.
Being A Spammer – Automated emails are a great way of engaging with recipients who have shown an interest in your email, but you should still spend time focusing on the quality of your communication. Avoid the usual spam trigger words and don’t go sending an email to thousands of people all at the same time. Marketing automation can increase the risk of spam, but a good email provider will help you with this.
All the good Email Service Providers (ESP) will provide services to assist you in "warming up" your domain to the Internet Service Providers (ISP). This is a necessary first step to make sure everyone can see your emails when you send them (deliverability %).
However, this does not mean your job is over. If you decide automation will allow you to send emails to your customers everyday with messages which do not resonate with most of them, you will quickly be flagged as spam. If this happens too many times, the ISP's will block your emails. When I started at one property, Yahoo was blocking all the emails and the deliverability rating was in the high 60% range. It took a long time to get unblocked, so make sure your content is relevant and you stop sending to customers that are not opening your email.
Bad Time Automating – Automated communications are tricky: you’re writing them at a time where the context of how the communication will be received isn’t known. Most of the time, this is absolutely fine as you are only scheduling a few hours ahead, but beware of shifting events.
Most of the time your emails will not be "set it and forget it". You may run with an automated email blast for customers that signed up today with an offer to engage further, and that is fine in most cases. In a lot of the cases the automation is used to increase the segmentation capabilities, not to create a generic email blast to all your customers over and over again.
If you run into this problem of timing, then forget about scheduling too far in advance. Take your time and make sure the message is relevant to the customer at the time the email is sent. This will save you from looking like someone that doesn't understand the customer at all. That is the worst thing that could happen.
Communicating Constantly – With marketing automation, communications with your audience should become a lot easier. But don’t get carried away. If it is easier, then the temptation will be to communicate more often, but this is as off-putting for a recipient as communicating poorly. It can also have a detrimental effect on the size of your audience.
The quickest way to being marked as spam or unsubscribed is to over communicate through email. Just because its easier to do, doesn't mean you should. Make sure you are communicating a little more than your customer is engaging with your brand. Its okay to communicate everyday if your customer is buying something everyday, but this is usually not the case. If your customer purchases a product once a month, maybe every other week is a good cadence to start. Remember, the beauty of a marketing automation tool is your customers don't have to all be on the same communication cadence, they can be on their own, as long a you have enough content to make that strategy make sense.
Send And Forget – One of the objectives of most communications is to elicit a response. Whether that is an open from an email, a click on an advert or a reply / share from a social media post. So when you are automating, you should always have a process in place for monitoring their impact – you should be able to set this up as an email or smart phone notification. Ignoring this can result in recipients not talking (positively or negatively) to anyone, something to avoid at all costs.
As I said above, this strategy can be detrimental to having a marketing automation tool. Never send without analyzing the results. All marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities, they need to be changed and enhanced constantly, because as you change behaviors the communication cadence and the offers need to change with it. There are also segments of customers in the campaign who are not getting what you are throwing out, so constantly look for opportunities to enhance the campaigns taking these customers into account. Analyzing is the most important step of the process.