10 Best Marketing Automation Practices and Strategy in 2024

A marketing department and its moving parts will work like a well-oiled machine if it automated much of its operations. With integrated marketing software, marketers can construct workflows, sequence activities, and have the software automatically perform digitized tasks like scheduling and computations. In theory, marketing automation enhances operational efficiency, improves conversions, and eventually raises returns. So, how does one bridge this theory with reality?

We have gathered 10 marketing automation best practices that you can apply. The strategies cover automation solutions for ad sequencing, internal affairs, lead qualification and retargeting, and email and social media campaigns. After reading this guide, you should have an idea of how to effectively leverage your marketing automation software.

Before we dive into any strategy, we should define what marketing automation is first. It is the act of automating monotonous marketing work across various channels, accounting for both internal and external operations. This is performed through marketing automation software, equipped with project, collaboration, communication, and workflow management solutions to thoroughly streamline operations.

So, how effective is a marketing automation platform? According to recent marketing statistics, automation causes an estimated 14.5% increase in sales productivity as well as a 12.2% decrease in marketing overhead. Increased productivity leads to more work done, which results in more buyers. This lends credence to the fact that 45% of companies that leveraged automation significantly improved their ROIs while over a third experienced an increase in the number of leads and conversions.

With its benefits established, marketing automation software is riding a wave of increased demand worldwide. In fact, its global market size is expected to grow from an already impressive $3.6 billion in 2020 to $11.46 billion by 2027, with an annual growth of 17.67%. Reaching this valuation means that many platforms provide marketing solutions to most industries, with their usage considered a high-value trend in the business sector.

Any business can benefit from this type of software, provided that it is set to streamline lead, customer, social media, and communications workflows. We have prepared several marketing automation tips so you would know how to fully leverage your software.

1. Build a Customer Journey for Each Persona

Mapping out customer experiences — from initial interactions to receiving purchased items — increases engagement, speeds up the process, and generates satisfaction. However, before you can apply this market automation strategy, you must conduct research to properly segment your market and align your marketing goals with the journeys. In this way, you can tailor the journeys to the preferences and buying habits of each customer group while simplifying the workflows involved internally and externally.

There are many possible starting points for your customer research, and thankfully, you need not leave a marketing automation platform’s interface for most of them. According to the latest available statistics, 85% of shoppers conduct research online before making purchases. These searches leave data trails that automation platforms pick up, along with the online profiles each shopper carries on social media, Google, and other sites.

Gathering Data

To start, it’s best to gather data on your target audience. Some strategies you can try include:

• A/B testing. Marketing automation systems can conduct split testing, which enables marketers to segregate leads and customers based on demographic data, searched terms online, and social media. The test results can serve as the basis for the groups that will entail customer journeys.
• Social media analytics. Marketing automation platforms scour social media platforms for data on your followers and potential markets and generate insights. Likewise, social media sites also generate insights about your business page’s followers.
• Web analytics sites. Google Analytics generates information on your website’s traffic, visitor activities, conversion rate, and search terms surrounding your product, among others. Similarly, analytics websites like Alexa and SimilarWeb provide valuable data.
• Coordinate with the sales team. Your company’s sales team carries data surrounding the different types of customers and leads as well as the common concerns of your customer base. The former can be used to identify customer groups while the latter stands as the problems that your automated workflows will resolve.
• Customer surveys and interviews. Should you need more information about your customers’ concerns, you can conduct interviews and release surveys with which your buyers can describe them in detail and offer recommendations.

Assembling a Workflow

Upon gathering information, the data would then be processed into reports on the dashboard, which you can use to build your workflows. Each workflow stage reflects a milestone in a customer’s journey, so it is advisable to create multiple pathways to have solutions to every possible scenario.

Plot out the content that would go with each stage, be it on social media, a new web or blog article, or a visit to the landing page, then sequence and schedule them accordingly. Likewise, map out and sequence customer communications like email, instant messaging, and SMS through the relevant stages. When everything is set, your operations will run like clockwork with more engaged customers and far less work involved on your end.

2. Enhance Internal Communications

Marketing departments are typically composed of several teams with varying competencies, from writers and editors to web designers and social media managers. In some companies, these teams tend to be siloed given their different disciplines and workflows. This impedes the flow of information, especially when other departments need data or instruction to perform tasks. It is important to note that poor communications cost businesses a staggering $1.2 trillion each year and cause teams to lose 7.47 hours each week.

As such, many marketing automation best practices center on integrating internal communications and keeping everyone on the same page. With a comprehensive approach to building communication workflows, you can leverage a marketing automation platform to not just organize the use of communication channels within the team, but also coordinate with other departments that carry essential information.

For instance, you can loop in the sales department to match your projections with actual sales figures and for strategic alignments. Likewise, you can extend a workflow branch to the accounts team so that it can provide accurate forecasts to clients. Another branch can also be added to keep the managers connected and updated through every significant development, and so on. The point is that any relevant activity from other departments can be included in a marketing automation platform’s workflows.

3. Automate List Segmentation

Customers do not share the same interests. Sometimes even those who have similar demographic information carry different interests. As such, sending the same series of emails to the entire group will likely turn off many people. This highlights the importance of segmentation, and you can have your marketing automation software perform it automatically.

Segmenting means organizing your customers into groups based on their commonalities, preferences, and locations. These segments will then be the subject of specific strategies within campaigns, so that promotions, invites, and messages are tailored to their interests. As a result, each segment will find more interest in a company and its products, potentially leading to purchases and brand loyalty. Segmentation also makes communication easier since marketers wouldn’t need to manually send individual messages to the members of each segment.

Marketing automation platforms can automatically segment customers in a variety of ways, and the ones marketers apply the most include the following:

• Demographic information. This pertains to basic information about customers. The data includes age, gender, race, ethnicity, educational attainment, and income level.
• Geographic information. This pertains to the geographic location of customers as well as their proximity to your nearest branches.
• Engagement. This denotes the level of perceived interest customers display on various channels like email and social media posts. It is measured through various factors, including email open rates and the number and ratio of social media likes, shares, and comments.
• Purchase history. Customers are more likely to buy certain products, so you can group them together based on the similarity of their previous purchases.

4. Boost Lead Qualification

Knowing the types of customers who appreciate your products and their commonalities helps determine new audiences to target in succeeding campaigns. Similarly, brands can develop new products that appeal to those common characteristics to effectively raise sales. This knowledge comes as a result of lead qualification. And marketing automation systems enable you to easily qualify potential customers using two methods: analytics and lead scoring.

The software seeks common qualities of customers such as the items purchased, buyer demographic info, social media data, landing page activities, and the like. It would then visualize trends among your customer base, which serve as references when targeting leads. Likewise, these reports can be leveraged for grouping existing customers into segments. You will surely amass a wealth of customer information. However, quantifying the information may pose a challenge, especially when deducing the likelihood of conversions.

This is where lead scoring enters the picture. You can assign numerical scores to certain actions based on your marketing priorities. For instance, sharing a social media post merits 10 points, signing up for a newsletter yields 20, and clicking on the price packages merits 15. The total score of each reflects the likelihood of making a purchase. Of course, the initial scoring systems might not be accurate. And so, you’ll have to continually make adjustments until you arrive at one that works.

5. Empower Lead Retargeting

Sometimes, no matter how well-thought-out your marketing automation strategy is, your leads simply won’t perform the desired actions. Some abandon carts, ignore sign-up forms, or refuse to purchase items amid the latest discounts.  This calls for a special tactic to woo them back to your site and influence a purchase. After all, they have already shown interest in your products, albeit with commitment issues.

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty, just how effective is lead retargeting? Judging by recent retargeting statistics, retargeted leads are more likely to purchase than those who have yet to encounter a brand. Retargeting boosts ad responses by as much as 400%, which stimulates engagement. As such, they are 70% more likely to commit to a purchase.

To make it work, marketing automation best practices convey that creating a retargeting campaign is necessary. Establish juicy special offers aimed at the interests of each segment and create a landing page for them. After which, build banner and pop-up ads, create email templates promoting the special offers, and then arrange their action triggers in the sales funnel’s workflows. Finally, cue the marketing automation platform to track the browsers of every site visitor.

If you do this correctly, the software will automatically populate your banner ads on the sites visited by people who left your website. For those who signed up for newsletters, the platform will send them a retargeting email that promotes your special offers and links them to your landing page. As for the pop-up ads, these can be set to appear the moment a visitor attempts to exit your website. This is just a basic template, so feel free to adjust the plan based on your operation’s requisites.

6. Establish Automated Ad Sequences

Marketing automation platforms empower any campaign by automatically queueing and performing tasks. However, 64% of marketers who use one are only somewhat successful in meeting their objectives. One of the reasons is that they haven’t fully integrated the system into their operations, with 49% still primarily relying on email instead of automation to drive leads. A top-tier platform not only streamlines the mass sending of scheduled emails but also automatically posts ads and content. What’s more, you can plot out the moving parts of ad campaigns.

With the use of customizable boards or forms, you can arrange all the activities into actionable flowcharts. These include the ad design process, the sites on which the ads will be posted, the emails to be sent to groups, and the schedule of posting. The platform does the posting and email sending for you. So, your primary responsibility is to direct how it should act.

Among the marketing automation tips you can try here is to carefully weigh the benefits of reach and frequency in driving brand awareness. Prioritizing reach works when you intend to garner immediate sales or signups. Meanwhile, frequency is ideal for brand building. When dealing with a highly targeted market, balancing the two is advisable. As for Facebook, the recommended posting frequency is once or twice a day.

7. Consolidate Social Media Workflows

Brands nowadays leverage multiple social media sites and apps for marketing. After all, as of January 2022, there are 4.62 billion social media users, which account for a whopping 58.4% of the global population. With this, popular platforms like TikTok and even Snapchat have come up on marketers’ playbooks, given their immense userbases. And it has been working for them. However, the added workflows cause confusion for social media managers, leading to many posting errors. As a result, posts that need more reach aren’t boosted while others end up on the wrong social media platforms.

Social media errors can be avoided by using marketing automation software. In using one, marketers get to bring together all social media posting activities into one workflow. What’s more, an integrated system automatically posts content on various social media sites based on the set schedule of each. Actions that the platform can’t perform, say boosting posts and setting boost parameters, can come as reminders, accompanied by automated mobile notifications.

A marketing automation system also helps marketers determine the types of posts and the social media platforms that generate the highest engagement. Equipped with powerful analytics, the platform lists down the posts and their corresponding “likes,” comments, and shares. This enables you to focus on content types that your audience responds to the most. Meanwhile, you can let go of social platforms that do not deliver engagement or reorient your content and marketing automation strategy for them.

8. Automate Email Campaigns

The objective of email campaigns is to build meaningful relationships with customers by stimulating engagement and making them feel good about buying from your brand. For one to gain traction, a company needs different types of emails, sent at specific moments. As such, email campaigns are tedious and time-consuming without the proper email marketing tools. Thankfully, marketing automation platforms carry all the functionalities necessary to conduct successful drip email campaigns.

In leveraging one, marketers can create then schedule or assign to specific action triggers different types of emails. There are emails that inform customers of the latest promos and company developments. Others carry special discounts or promos for customers who abandoned their digital carts. And some serve as confirmation for buying, accompanied by a receipt and a short thank you message. A marketing automation platform accounts for all these and allows you to sequence them properly throughout the collective customer journey of each segment.

Things to Consider

If we are to look at marketing automation best practices, the keys here are comprehensive marketing research and crisp content.

• Identify the target market and email quantity. While a marketing automation platform has tools for market segmentation and mapping out sales funnels, you still need to understand your market. The messages should be based on their interests and strategically appear before and after purchases.
• Clear and sharp content. Recent email statistics suggest that a lot of people do not have the time or patience to read long messages. The sweet spot falls within 50 to 200 words.
• Analyze the email triggers. While observing a segment’s workflow, determine the stages that would need emails as well as the conditions for them to be sent. Account for special cases like cart abandonment, product returns, and delayed orders.

9. Build and Automate a Content Library

At the heart of every marketing automation strategy is content that entices customers to support and buy from a brand. Messages, in the form of social media posts, videos, blog articles, newsletters, and emails, need to be stored in advance before routing them to the appropriate channels at the right times. To eliminate confusion in this process, the different types of content have to be properly categorized and sorted according to the channels on which they will be published. This makes it easy to assign them into the workflows for each channel and automate their scheduling.

Besides regular messages, action-based content like landing page pop-ups, abandoned cart reminders, and post-purchase promos should also be stored in the library. In doing so, last-minute adjustments to the posts and their triggers can be performed before the messages are seen by customers. You will have full visibility over every type of content, with the engagement data quantified by the platform. With everything measured, you will have all the data you need to create better campaigns in the future.

10. Apply Mobile-first Automation

Prioritizing the creation of mobile experiences over desktop makes perfect sense in this day and age. As of February 2022, 56.05% of internet users browse the web via mobile, outnumbering those who use desktops (41.52%) and tablets (2.43%). Moreover, a large number of internet users have been reliant on their mobile devices for food and shopping ever since the COVID-19 outbreak. More internet users would likely view the mobile versions of websites first, which means brands will have to adjust.

Taking a mobile-first approach reverses the development workflow of apps, websites, and marketing campaigns. Companies work on mobile platforms first before scaling these up for desktops and other devices. In doing so, their target markets will find the sites responsive and conducive for transactions.

Marketing automation solutions enter the picture with their ability to customize and automate workflows. Users get to map out the entire development process and have the software automatically perform actions. This hastens and simplifies the process, reducing errors and raising the potential for conversions.

Examples of Marketing Automation Software

There are a lot of viable solutions in the market, but only a few can be considered top-tier marketing automation software. As such, we have listed some of the leading solutions available.

Freshmarketer

An all-in-one marketing automation solution, Freshmarketer enables marketers to build satisfying customer journeys across the entire marketing funnel. It centralizes communication and potentially streamlines the entire marketing operation, before quantifying most activities with detailed dashboard reports.

HubSpot MarketingVISIT WEBSITE

HubSpot Marketing is an end-to-end solution that unifies marketing automation, workflow management, lead management, and social media monitoring into one platform. It also comes with landing pages that marketers can customize in accordance with their brand initiatives.

monday.comVISIT WEBSITE

monday.com is a powerful collaboration system that effectively marries marketing automation with sales, project management, and portfolio management. Designed to foster company-wide efficiency, the platform enables marketers to design and automate workflows. It also acts as a communications hub as it provides various communication channels and integrates with popular communication apps.

Maropost Marketing Cloud

Maropost Marketing Cloud is a reliable digital marketing solution that enhances engagement with consumers across various channels, including social media, websites, and email. It also enables users to build and automate workflows that simulate customer journeys and provides customizable landing pages.

Marketing Creatio

Marketing Creatio is a versatile marketing automation system that streamlines the workflows of marketing campaigns, lead management, and customer journeys. It is also equipped with a rich no-code interface that allows new users to easily master its major functionalities and incorporate marketing processes.

Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

Today’s marketing automation best practices underscore the flexibility of automation software. These systems make a difference in various areas of marketing, from finding leads to serving as a customer experience management solution. They can even bring back customers who didn’t buy from a website. Basically, anything that has a digital workflow can be streamlined by the platform.

However, this does not mean that installing and integrating a marketing automation platform will instantly improve your strategies. At the end of the day, it will only execute what you have planned, albeit with high efficiency. Much planning is involved for you to raise profits and brand awareness. And a significant part of that plan is to monitor your competitors and the industry leaders. In doing so, you will learn about their markets and how they manage to capture them.

Interestingly, a marketing automation system can also help you in that regard. It can assess the segments, market penetration, and social media performance of competitors, and generate insights surrounding these. As such, you can emulate or build on their strengths while avoiding their common mistakes to form better marketing initiatives.

Speaking of marketing, should you wish to know more about the latest marketing developments, you check out our guide on the latest marketing trends.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.