One of the modern-day businesses’ struggles is what tasks and processes to automate. After determining these tasks, the next hurdle would be finding the proper workflow that would drive the entire marketing automation strategy. For example, your initial plan was to automate your invoicing system. Still, in the process, you realize that it’s necessary to automate follow-ups of late payments, records payment, and invoice sending.

The good news is accounts payable automation is just one of the many marketing automation strategies you can consider. This article will share over 25 marketing automation examples you can apply and contextualize to suit your industry’s demands. But before that, let’s get to know more about marketing automation and its types and importance.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to the strategy of leveraging different software to automate repetitive marketing processes and tasks. Marketers utilize marketing automation software to nurture leads by integrating the same to their existing customer data platform (CDP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software. These marketers also use these automation platforms to personalize and automate marketing content and messages.

The goal of automation is to streamline processes and yield faster and better results. To highlight this point, think about having over 5,000 VIP customers to send personalized emails to. You want to encourage them to buy your newly launched products, so you need to craft messages that will move them to grab the offer. Yes, these messages can be sent out manually, but if you want to send them quickly and accurately, you need a system to complete the said repetitive task. If you have an automation tool, you can get this job done quickly.

What Are the Different Types of Marketing Automation?

There are different automation types, and each of them represents every part of the entire marketing process --- from lead generation to customer engagement, sales closing, and customer retention. Generally, there are four main types of marketing automation, and they are provided as follows:

Lead generation marketing automation

This type of marketing automation aims to generate a significant volume of leads without hiring more people to form your sales team.

Lead nurturing marketing automation

While lead generation automation systems bring in prospects, lead nurturing helps turn these leads into paying customers. Through this automation process, you guide your customers through the entire buying process, effectively turning moderate interest into a strong purchasing intent.

Engagement marketing automation

This type of marketing automation simplifies and streamlines the processes involved in engaging customers along the purchasing path.

Customer retention marketing automation

As the term suggests, this marketing automation strategy helps nurture your customers and turn them into repeat buyers. Popular brands invest in this strategy a lot because they understand loyal customers’ value to their business.

Why Is Automation so Important for Growing Your Business?

The four main types of marketing automation strategies can be broken down further into seven more specific automation strategies provided below. Businesses need to invest in marketing automation to save costs, hasten critical processes, eliminate redundancy, lessen errors, and maximize profit. Above all, these strategies can also improve your brand reputation and relationship with your target market.

Save operational costs

Imagine hiring dozens of people to work on your email marketing campaign when you can simply invest in a lead generation automation tool that will get things done in a jiffy. Think about the savings you can enjoy when instead of forming a 20-person team to run your customer engagement campaign, you adapt a CRM that automates your customer relation process. These are points that could convince you that automation can save you money spent in running your operation.

Eliminate redundancy and hasten processes

Automation eliminates repetitive processes, hence effectively saving resources otherwise spent in getting these redundant steps done. If a system takes care of the repetitive bulk tasks, you can take these tasks out of your workforce’s have-tos. They will have more time to do the more tedious parts of the operations without sacrificing speed and accuracy. With more hands working, tasks and projects get completed faster.

Lessen errors and maximize profit

These automated processes may not be 100% fool-proof, but they’re undoubtedly more accurate and less prone to errors than any human being doing repetitive tasks over extended periods. All you have to do is set the tool to perform specific tasks, and it will deliver. It also goes without saying that since the software performs the functions that human team members used to make, you only pay for the system. Though it might need you to shell out money one time, the returns are more significant than the initial spending; hence, allowing you to maximize your profit.

Improve brand reputation and relationship with the target market

When you automate, you give more premium to the quality of service and experience your customers are receiving. For example, if you personalize the curated marketing emails and product offerings you send, your customers will think that you spend time learning about them. And when what you offer matches what they need, you quickly earn their trust. Taking care of them through your automated marketing strategies allows you to grow closer to them, enough to convert them into paying customers and repeat buyers.

Marketing Automation Examples

Here are the seven more specific automation strategies we previously mentioned, along with even more specific examples of each of them.

Lead Generation Marketing Automation

Every marketing effort starts with lead prospecting. Your business’s success or downfall largely depends on your target market; hence, you must know where and how to find them. Lead prospecting is crucial for new businesses trying to get a share in the sales pie. But instead of manually locating and identifying your leads, it’s more productive and easier if you invest in a lead generation automation tool. Here are a few examples of this automation strategy.

1. Content downloads

This lead generation automation strategy doesn’t only aim to gather users’ email addresses. The more important goal here is to capture your lead’s attention by showing suggested content topics when they search for keywords or items they’re interested in upon sign up. Through this, you can send relevant and customized follow-up offers and emails that are highly likely to gain commercial interest. To illustrate this point, imagine software that can create content for people in specific industries like law, accounting, creatives, marketing, etc., to highlight a platform’s benefits vis-a-vis the need of every niche.

2. Webinar sign-ups

B2B studies reveal that webinars are currently the most effective B2B marketing content form. However, many businesses find this strategy demanding and too complex to keep up with. Fortunately, webinar sign-ups are another strategy you can automate 100%. Aside from being a good lead generation tool, it can also offer insights into how your institutional leads behave and interact.

3. Warm-up cold leads

Most of the time, cold isn’t a desirable state --- cold disposition, cold coffee, and cold weather. The same is true for cold leads. Cold leads are not the easiest leads to talk and persuade. The good news is you can improve your relationship with cold leads by automation. One of the strategies you can try is creating landing pages aside from blog posts. Update your landing pages regularly by offering fresh content and insights. Duplicate this campaign and run it as frequently as necessary.

4. Quotes and proposals

Earlier in this article, we mentioned sending invoices, right? Quotes and proposals can drag your processes even more. At least when you make invoices, you can expect payment from them. That’s not the case with quotes and proposals. Though there’s a possibility of a closed deal, it’s not 100% guaranteed. This goes without saying that allocating much of your resources on this task is a waste of money. So, why not automate it? With the right tool, you can set up templates with reusable features to speed things and processes.

Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing automation allows marketers to send out timed and triggered promotional emails to all the subscribers registered on their mailing list. This will enable them to curate personalized messages to customers and perspectives when certain conditions are met or on a schedule.

1. Email lists

One of the very first workflows you should create puts all new email subscribers on a list. For example, those who sign up for your company newsletter shouldn’t be mixed with those who request a quote, make a purchase, or buy repeatedly. You can also take things further by placing email subscribers on different lists, mainly depending on the type of content they engage in upon sign up. You don’t need to input their emails to the respective lists manually --- let your automation tool do that for you.

2. Welcome emails

Treat your new subscribers as VIPs by sending them a well-designed and well-thought personalized welcome email. They recently signed up, gave their email address, and checked all the boxes that indicate their willingness to receive notifications from you --- it’s like telling you to ‘call them’ when you have something valuable to share. You can automate this process by scheduling the sending of thank you emails that could come with exclusive welcome discounts and other promotions.

3. Reminder emails

You already sent an email to your client, but you still haven’t received any response from him. Instead of manually sending follow-up emails each time you need to remind your client that he is yet to reply, you can automate this process. With an email automation tool, you can simply write an email template and set a schedule for the said email.

4. Re-engagement emails

When your clients or target market stopped engaging with your brand, you can send them a re-engagement email to remind them how long it has been since your last active encounter. Not all users who stopped interacting with you are no longer interested in what you’re offering. Most of the time, they’re still interested, but there is something in the way that prevents them from reaching you. Through automated re-engagement emails, you can open the communication lines again.

Social Media Marketing Automation

If your time gets eaten by answering DMs and thinking about an excellent hashtag to use, you will have less time to brainstorm for better content ideas or plan a long-term social media strategy. Spend more time on more meaningful activities and set up a shortcut for the repetitive ones.

Tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, IFTTT, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pocket can advance your social media marketing automation workflows. Consider these social media automation examples below.

1. Automatic Posting

You don’t have to manually post your social media content every hour or every day. Instead, you can invest in a social media scheduling tool that will schedule and post your chosen content to your social media platforms.

2. Social Listening Tools

This automation tool will monitor and analyze your brand mentions across social media platforms. The data you’ll gather from these tools can give valuable insights about your brand, online presence, competitors, and industry.

3. Custom-Made Chatbots

With chat boots, your brand can automatically engage with all received messages. You don’t have to have your customers wait for feedback from a live chat moderator. You can even set up actions every time your customer mentions a specific keyword.

Advertising Automation

Coming up with ad campaigns is one of the most laborious parts of the marketing process. Your ad should resonate with the needs, values, and preferences of your target market. Aside from that, you need to ensure that it is shared through an effective medium that will yield the most favorable actions from your target market. Thankfully, even your ad campaigns can be automated. Check out some examples of this marketing automation strategy.

1. On-boarding drip campaigns

As soon as a user signs up via purchase, download, or newsletter, your onboarding drip campaign should commence. Here, you can automate the scheduling and sending out of emails to keep them engaged.

Part of this campaign includes welcome emails, instant responses, and order confirmations. Your drip campaigns should run for months. Take note that sending emails at the proper interval is the key to keeping your market engaged. Your role here is to pinpoint which message will your target market keep engaging to.

2. Newsletters

Newsletters are considered an excellent lead generation strategy, but they can also be designed to keep your customers engaged and hooked on an ongoing basis. You’ll know it’s a good newsletter if people keep checking their emails, clicking websites, and engaging with content. Instead of sending generic newsletters for everyone, create relevant content based on tags and segmented lists.

3. Seasonal messages/offers

The main concern when it comes to personalization is maximizing value and relevance without appearing creepy. You can achieve this by automating seasonal offers and messages. Here, you only need to take note of seasonal events that vary from person to person. For example, August is not the summer season for all parts of the world, and not every person celebrates Christmas. So, exhaust all information you can get from your prospects and don’t make unnecessary assumptions about your target audience.

Customer Relationship Management Automation

One of the downsides of dealing with customers is that even if you help them every step of the way, they might not buy at all. Your customer management goal is to support and assist customers until you close the deal and your company profits from it. You can use tools like Pipedrive CRM, Freshworks CRM, Salesflare, EngageBay, and Salesmate to leverage your CRM automation initiatives. You can also try these automation strategies to improve your customer engagement.

1. Upselling and cross-selling

If you’re dealing with new customers, one of your goals is to set up workflows that will encourage them to make more purchases soon. Bombarding them with messages blatantly asking them to open their wallets is a shameful strategy and a cheap one. So, instead of doing that, launch upselling and cross-selling drip campaigns to constantly lure and tempt them to make continuous purchases.

2. Customer life cycle messages

Your customers’ needs and preferences will always change, so you need to set up workflows that will allow you to cope up and sell with these changes. By setting up automation processes that will curate messages and offers that align with the changing needs of your target market, you can survive the competition.

3. Customer service auto-responses

If your customer comes to you with a service complaint or a technical issue, you don’t want to keep them waiting. Studies suggest that people easily forget an unpleasant experience if it’s addressed and resolved quickly. Use this fact to your advantage by automating your CS auto-responses. You can assign individual IDs to your customers and add labels like ‘unresolved,’ ‘currently resolving,’ or ‘resolved’ to identify each problem’s progress.

4. Feedback requests

You need to gauge your customer’s level of satisfaction with your services by asking for feedback. You can automate this process to be triggered after a specific issue has been resolved.

5. Winback programs

This strategy’s ratio is quite similar to re-engagement, wherein you try to re-engage inactive customers to win them back literally. A good and effective automated win-back program is four times more likely to guarantee you a customer referral. It can also increase the likelihood of earning a loyal repeat buyer five times. And lastly, it also increases the probability that your recipient will try your new products out by seven times.

6. Customer reviews

Studies suggest that customer reviews influence 93% of buyers. With that said, your brand should also invest in automating this process to gain leverage. You can set up a workflow triggered by a single purchase wherein you send a satisfaction survey or email to your customer.

Sales Automation

The best way to improve your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly sales performance is to mechanize processes to create an efficient workflow that will hasten the sales process. Here are some automation samples in this category.

1. Beta invites

When software companies launch new products, they often enter into testing agreements with their prospective customers. The said agreement allows the latter to use the new product’s beta version to get user feedback. This approach is very similar to the foot in the door principle in sales.

You let your target market use your product for free, hear their feedback, and tweak the same according to their review. This is the best way you can explain how your product works. If they’ve tried it and it works well, there is a high chance that you can close the sales deal.

2. Cart abandonments

Here, you send out reminder emails to your customers who left items in their shopping carts while they’re shopping online. Because they’re already a step closer to making a purchase, you know that they’re interested. This automated workflow will allow you to determine why your customer never made it to the check-out phase. Once you identify the issue, you can use the same points to improve your platform.

3. Form abandonments

Though in ratio and logic, this strategy is quite similar to cart abandonments, you will need a specific analytics tool to check which parts of the form were missed out. From there, you can automate workflows that will send reminder messages to your customers about the specific fields in the form that they failed to answer.

Marketing Analytics Automation

These strategies, with the help of Google Analytics, Alexa Internet, Databox, Google Data Studio, Mixpanel, Plotly, and Robolytix, aim to provide data and analyses that can help determine areas for improvement in your system, offering, or processes. Here are some sample strategies.

1. Social media engagement scores

Your metrics matter because it shows you how you fare in customer engagement in a given platform. By automating this process, you will get regular and correct insights into how many people interact with your brand.

2. Forecasting and Modeling

This strategy aims to make reasonable forecasts about specific items like market risks, economic risks, financial trends, and customer behavior.

3. Data visualization/business intelligence (BI)

When you want to improve your service and offerings, you need to establish and identify connections between variables. The best way to show and explain the interrelation of complex data connections is through data visualization. With this, you can easily understand the main point and conclusion.

4. Remarketing

This strategy aims to re-engage target audiences that are highly likely to convert. If you remarket an audience through automation, you get a list of mobile advertising IDs and cookies representing the user group that you might want to re-engage because they exhibit high chances of converting into paying customers.

Takeaway

The good thing about automation is you can slow down or speed up the process according to your needs. You don’t have to make a major system overhaul to introduce changes. Instead, you can start with workflows step by step until you’re ready to go 100% fully automated. Hopefully, the examples we shared will give you enough choices to improve your system and ways of working.

Want to up your business game? Read ”Top 5 Reasons Business Translation Is Important” to learn more.