Marketing Automation: What It Is and Why You Should Be Doing It

You know how time-consuming marketing can get. Automation can help! Explore a variety of ways to automate marketing activities to your benefit in this post.

Many marketing teams find themselves bogged down by manual processes that slow down campaign execution, leaving little room for creativity and innovation. Automation offers a solution, enabling marketers and other involved team members to streamline workflows, reduce errors and focus on what truly matters.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at marketing automation and its benefits, examples of what you can automate and how to choose the right tools to manage your marketing activities.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to processes that are, for the most part, machine-powered. While humans configure the initial systems and rules around which the systems work, the software handles the bulk of the work.

Marketing automation can be applied to nearly every aspect of a brand’s marketing strategy, including:

• Website and app content
• Email
• Social media
• Digital advertising
• SMS, text and push notifications
• Chatbots
• Contact forms
• Ecommerce
• Lead generation

Some automations are tiny, like enabling social media scheduling software to find the best days and times to post. Other automations replace tedious and time-consuming activities like managing email follow-up sequences sent out to leads.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

When done right, marketing automation should benefit everyone—from the employees who craft and implement marketing campaigns to the end users who encounter the content.

Here are some ways in which you and your team will benefit from automating your marketing activities:

• Offload small marketing management tasks to apps.
• Simplify the work involved in managing large-scale campaigns.
• Move data effortlessly from one app to another.
• Streamline complex workflows that involve numerous steps, apps and moving pieces.
• Process big data from disparate apps to generate more useful and comprehensive insights.
• Optimize marketing results by delivering the best messages at the perfect times.
• Scale your marketing efforts so you can reach more people over time.
• Leverage predictive analytics and other helpful insights to optimize campaign content.
• Configure triggers that dictate which journey you send users on.
• Get users through your sales pipeline quickly and watch your conversion rates soar.
• Decrease user churn by reengaging with users with the right offers and messaging.

Bottom line: While automation can free up your time and your team’s resources, it can also have a significant impact on how effective your marketing strategy is.

A Word of Caution

Just keep in mind that marketing will never be a hands-free activity. Nor should it be.

An overreliance on marketing automation can put your entire marketing strategy and brand reputation at risk. For starters, it can sometimes make your campaigns feel too machine-like and out of touch with your user base.

Also, apps and machines can only do so much. Let’s say you’ve automated the follow-up process when someone leaves a review on your ecommerce site or app. What if the wrong automated response gets posted under a negative review?

Sure, it saves marketers from having to check the site and thanking every reviewer for their kind words or expressing remorse over a bad experience. However, customer reviews are often temperamental. Leaving a cold and obviously automated response could create more frustration and anger, even creating doubt in shoppers who’ve yet to buy from you.

So, it’s best to start small with automation. Streamline tasks that aren’t likely to result in major repercussions if something goes wrong. Then expand from there when it makes sense to.

Examples of Marketing Automation

To see just how much work marketing automation software can take off of your hands, let’s look at some examples:

1. Customized Emails

If you’ve ever received a mass communication from a company before, you’ve likely seen this one in action. It all starts by syncing email marketing software with another app, like customer relationship management (CRM) software.

You then draft an email template with fields that pull in personal info from the database. For instance, you can automatically populate your email with dynamic content like your customer’s name, mailing address, order details and any other relevant details you’ve collected from them.

Here’s what that looks like in Mailchimp:

I’ve inserted tags for their name (|NAME|) and company URL (|MMERGE4|). When using dynamic content tags, just make sure the database you’re pulling from is complete. You don’t want to send an email to someone, only for the first line to populate as “Hi no name.”

You can also use email marketing software to do more complex customizations, like showing blog posts related to ones the subscriber recently read. Or showing a customer a list of subscription products they have and a list of dates when they’re set to renew and be delivered.

2. Follow-up Emails

Another way to automate your emails is by designing a sequence of follow-up emails. You can use this in a variety of use cases.

ActiveCampaign, for instance, has lots of templates that demonstrate the various ways in which you can automate your email marketing campaigns—both short and long ones.

Take, for instance, someone who abandons a product in a shopping cart. With ActiveCampaign, the platform would automatically email them an hour later to remind them about the product. And again a few days later to see if they still wanted to purchase it, perhaps even offering a discount if they do.

Another common use case for email sequences is lead generation and conversion rate optimization.

So, let’s say you have a landing page promoting a free course. To access it, the user has to watch a 2-minute preview video and then sign up with their email address.

Trying to send out the course to each subscriber would take way too much time and you have better things to do.

By designing an email sequence in a platform like ActiveCampaign, the lessons will automatically be delivered to each learner every week. In addition, you can add other emails like to follow-up and make sure the learner completed the homework or to share extra tips.

As a bonus, the entire sequence is visualized so it’s much easier to manage than if you were to do it manually from your calendar or project management software.

Email sequences also enable you to send different messages to a segmented audience.

So, let’s say you’ve sent out the lesson for the first week. 54% of the subscribers opened the email and played the video. You could add a trigger along this sequence to message the remaining 46% to remind them about the lesson a couple days before the second one comes out.

In this case, your automated sequence would serve a number of purposes. First, distributing content. Second, encouraging users to get the most value from your course. And, third, improving user engagement.

3. Social Media Ideation

Coming up with fresh ideas for content on any platform can be tough. That’s especially the case for social media where millions of thoughts are going out every second of every day.

Instead of scouring the web to try to find inspiration on what to share with your audience, you can use AI assistants to help you automatically generate ideas.

For example, in the Buffer, there’s a button in the Create section called Generate Ideas. After entering some details about your business, the tool will provide you with inspiration.

In response to this prompt, I instantly received ideas like:

“One post idea could be highlighting quick and effective 15-minute workout routines specifically designed for busy mothers with full- or part-time jobs.”

And:

“Get fit on your own time! Our fitness coaching is perfect for busy moms with full- or part-time jobs. No more excuses—we’ll work around your schedule.”

It’s not a perfect system, just like any other AI. The results were also inconsistent, as the first one was a post idea, while the second was a pre-written post suggestion. That said, these are great ways to shortcut the brainstorming and writing process and get something into social media so you don’t leave your audience waiting for your next update.

4. Market Research

Initial market and competitive research can help brands figure out what they’re competing against and to identify gaps in the market. However, this research has to be an ongoing process in order for it to be truly effective.

This is another area where automation can be incredibly helpful.

Let’s say you’ve designed a mobile app for a company in the beauty space, something like Sephora or Ulta. It would be beneficial to know how consumer behaviors and shopping trends are changing, right? This would allow you to show more relevant products and categories to shoppers while creating timely content for your beauty blog.

Feedly is an app you can use to create an aggregated news feed from different sources around the web. You can curate any kind of content you want.

However, it also has a new AI Feed feature. With it, you can track what’s going on in a market as well as threats to your brand.

In this example, I’ve set up an AI-generated feed for the beauty industry that automatically curates posts related to consumer behavior statistics.

In setting something like this up, I’ll have relevant news and data ready and waiting for me whenever I want to look at it. No more need to identify beauty industry sources or scour their blogs for content. This feed automatically grabs relevant stories for me from all over the web.

5. Dynamic Content

You spend a lot of time building the pages for the websites and apps you develop. Attractive layouts, beautiful imagery and well-written content are a must for creating a pleasing user experience. However, it’s often the personal touch that convinces visitors to convert.

Take, for example, a website like Etsy.

Top-of-funnel visitors will appreciate seeing sales and other special offers at the top of the homepage. They might also love seeing information on trending categories and products.

But we can’t just design websites and apps for prospective users. That’s why we need the ability to display dynamic content which shows up when customers log in. Or it could be triggered by a specific action—like putting an item in their cart.

Either way, we’d want our pages to transform so that each user sees personalized content like this:

What you see here is a result of my Halloween costume search as well as examples I needed for an article I was writing last week. For me, seeing content like this on the homepage is just as nice as knowing what kinds of sales are going on, as it allows me to pick up where I left off. It’s also a good reminder if I dropped my search or got distracted along the way.

Ecommerce sites aren’t the only ones that benefit from dynamic content. The homepages, in particular, of business sites, blogs and directory sites are the perfect place to automatically display dynamic content.

6. Chatbot Conversations

Just as many brands give their support representatives a prompt to read from when interacting with customers, you can do the same with your chatbot. You can even configure different triggers that will activate the chatbot when the user is likely to need its assistance.

One of the nice things about having a chatbot on your website is that you can program it to handle basic and common scenarios. For instance, the chatbot on the Uncommon Goods website basically serves as an alternative navigation for the site, just in a conversational format.

This can be really useful for websites or shops that are too large and unwieldy for some customers to navigate on their own. The chatbot also helps with popular actions, like initiating a return. While the chatbot itself won’t do the work, it directs customers to a link that describes the steps.

That said, you can program chatbots to perform more complex actions. For instance, some banks have configured their in-app chatbots to pull in customer data, similar to the kind of data you might get when calling into the banking center and providing them with your account number.

So, instead of your live customer support reps fielding questions about account balances, credit limits and things of that nature, the chatbot does it all for them.

7. Complex or Multi-step Processes

We’ve already seen one example of this with email sequences and automated follow-ups to transactions. However, that’s relatively simple compared to processes that involve multiple steps, different apps and even legal or compliance procedures.

Let’s take an example from real estate for this one.

Divvy is a website that makes it easy for people to rent-to-own a home.

Unlike traditional real estate websites like Zillow or Trulia, users don’t have to submit a form and wait for a real estate agent to email or call them back. With this website, the process is streamlined.

After clicking “Get pre-qualified,” users are taken through an automated process that consists of:

• Filling out an application.
• Answering questions about their move timeline, where they want to live, etc.
• Adding income information for verification.
• Submitting to a credit check.

Without automation, this process could end up feeling very disjointed and cumbersome for prospective customers.

They might fill out an application form via an app like DocuSign. Then wait for an email with information on how to verify their income, being forced to upload proof to a secure platform like Dropbox. And when that’s done, wait for another email to show them how to initiate the credit check process which is managed by another third-party service.

This type of fragmented process also makes your job more difficult and is prone to inefficiencies and errors.

Marketing automation software, instead, centralizes all of these steps within a single platform and process.

Wrap-up

Marketing was once a time-consuming responsibility because of how manual everything was. I remember having to comb over Google Analytics data for days, trying to make sense of what I was seeing with regards to user behaviors, acquisition channels and more. Now, most of these marketing tools come with machine learning and AIs that simplify our work while enhancing our results.

As you go about choosing marketing automation tools, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Start with one or two. The more tools you add, the more complicated things will get (even with the time saved by automation).
• Select tools that integrate with your existing business software, especially your CRM and CMS.
• Use free trials or demos to test out the ease of use of the platform. Anyone on your team who will use it should be able to do so without issue.
• Consider an all-in-one solution that consolidates various digital channels, marketing tactics, and analytics into one like Progress Sitefinity. It might cost more, but the efficiency and power you gain will make up for it.
• Make sure the software will scale as your marketing strategy does.

Marketing automation doesn’t just benefit marketers, but also the teams that work side-by-side with them. In addition to making all your lives easier, it can also help you to create outstanding user experiences for your audience wherever they encounter your brand online.

Learn more about Sitefinity by requesting a demo today.