What Is Marketing Automation? Definition, Types, Objectives, Best Practices With Examples

What Is Marketing Automation? Definition, Types, Objectives, Best Practices With Examples

Last Updated: August 28, 2020

Marketing automation is defined as the process of using tools and technology to automate repetitive marketing tasks, track and measure campaign performance, improve productivity, and drive efficiency by minimizing manual actions.

Using a variety of marketing automation tools, marketers today can automate anything between bulk email delivery and managing end-to-end, omni-channel marketing campaigns. In this article, we explain more on what marketing automation is today, its objectives, best practices and the various types of automations across the marketing funnel with the goal of audience engagement, lead generation and customer acquisition.

Table Of Contents

What Is Marketing Automation?
What is Marketing Funnel Automation
Key Objectives and Advantages of Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation Technology Maturity Levels
Types Of Marketing Automation Software
5 Steps To Implement Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation Best Practices with Examples

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the process of using tools and technology to automate repetitive marketing tasks, track and measure campaign performance, improve productivity, and drive efficiency by minimizing manual actions.

Automating marketing tasks allows the team to spend more of their time on creative and decision-centric tasks such as marketing strategy, workflow planning, customer journey mapping etc.

According to the 2019 House of Marketing reportOpens a new window , 48% of marketers are using at least 1 application of marketing automation, and a 2019 Markets and Markets study projects this industry from $3.3 B to $6.4 B in matter of 5 years between 2019-2024.

What is Marketing Funnel Automation

Marketing funnel automation is defined as the strategic look to identify stages within the existing funnels of customer acquisition in a business for effective application of automation to efficiently generate more leads/ conversions.

Below are the 3 key steps for planning the automation of your marketing funnel:

Step 1. Map your existing funnel, which may vary based on your overall outreach and conversion model. Some businesses, especially in consumer markets, the funnel is very short between awareness and purchase, since they require smaller investments. in the B2B sector however, the cost of purchase is significantly higher and buyers want to conduct more research before making a decision.

Step 2. Identify individual marketing processes for each funnel stage. For example, your awareness funnel will include social media channels, website blogs, email marketing etc. Similarly, your end of funnel will include digital ad banners, landing pages, conversion pop ups and CTAs etc.

Step 3. Identify key areas of marketing automation within each process that collectively create the marketing funnel. For example, at the very early awareness stage, most companies automate email marketing, social media post scheduling, syncing blog posts with social media, digital ad management etc, with good return on their investments. Of course, this is done to varying degrees depending on the company’s tech stack sophistication.

Goes without saying – you need to make this a bi-yearly or at least an annual exercise to analyze the whole funnel and identify areas of automation that will reap ROI and increase marketing delivery on business goals.

Key Objectives and Advantages of Marketing Automation

Key Objectives and Advantages of Marketing Automation

Key Objectives and Advantages of Marketing Automation

So what do you exactly gain at an organizational level from automating marketing tasks? What are the key objectives and advantages of investing in marketing automation (to varying degrees, as per organizational requirement)

Here are the 5 key objectives and advantages of marketing automation for businesses today:

1. Boosting marketing productivity

One of the most important objectives of implementing any automation is to minimize or eliminate human resource investment in manual and repetitive tasks, such that your human employees can instead focus on creative and imaginative jobs that cannot be automated and specifically requires human intervention.

The same applies to implementing marketing automation where the goal is to move repetitive marketing tasks and defined customer/ audience engagement workflows- from creative humans to efficient machines. This frees your thinking, breathing marketing human resources to focus on tasks where their attention is actually critical, such as, marketing strategy, calendar planning, digital customer experience mapping, campaign performance monitoring, improvement and reporting etc.

2. Improving marketing efficiency and ROI

As your organization grows, it is no longer efficient or cost-effective to have marketers and sales enablers manually keep track of individual prospects and customers and engage them. This can drop competitive edge, diminish your ROI balance sheets and can derail expansion as the company gets bogged down with bureaucracy needed to manage massive human resources who are largely doing meagre, repetitive and less motivating (and creative) tasks.

Marketing automation, when implemented even at a basic-to-intermediate stage, will enable your marketing team to schedule bulk emails, identity and segment prospects based on potential for conversion, nurture leads as per defined workflows, trigger engagements- such as sending customer feedback surveys after an interaction/ pre-defined time period and capture responses etc. Not only does this exponentially improve marketing efficiency in delivering outcomes with minimized manual work, your marketing team will now deliver real improvement in ROI as they engage in more strategic and creative tasks that are far more impactful.

On a side bonus, it also improves marketing team’s employee satisfaction and reduces attrition rates, as these members now find more fulfillment through real creative tasks and learning opportunities in their day-to-day work profiles.

3. Enabling and delivering campaign personalization

Personalization is critical to effective lead nurturing and with marketing automation you are better equipped to personalize how you connect with your audience. It’s because more data helps you understand your audience better. When integrated with your CRM, your MAP provides greater insights into your audience which can be used to define relevant segments and deliver content to the right prospect at the right time in their buyer’s journey.

4. Providing real-time performance measurement

The 2017 Adestra study also revealed that 37% marketers see measuring performance as an important objective of marketing automation. Rightly so! With real-time campaign data through your MAP, you can analyze how well your campaign was received. Metrics such as open rate, click-through rate and so on, let you know what worked with your subscribers and what didn’t. This allows you to make tweaks and optimize your marketing campaigns along the way.

5. Enhancing customer acquisition and retention

Prospects are attracted and customers stay when a brand offers well-managed personalized journeys that are relevant to their context and buying preferences. Additionally, with marketing automation marketers can focus more on strategizing customer acquisition and retention as the regular campaign management, follow-ups and customer interactions are taken care of. 39% marketers in the same Adestra study also agreed to acquiring more customers as one of the objectives of marketing automation.

Marketing Automation: Technology Maturity LevelsWhile marketing automation aims to simplify repetitive marketing tasks that would otherwise be quite manpower and time consuming, the extent to which it really achieves this purpose is subjective to each company, depending upon the maturity of its existing martech stackOpens a new window and customer data managementOpens a new window practices.

Let’s take a deeper look at the three levels of marketing automation technology maturity.

Basic: At this stage, a company/ organization is at the start of their journey when it comes to effective audience data management and multi-channel campaign orchestration. This is also when organizations are planning to integrate some of the data from primary audience/ customer engagement channels, and begin to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns- at least across some sections of the customer journey.

At this basic level, marketing automation exists only in the form of channel-specific campaign management and limited monitoring on tasks such as bulk email send out, scheduling social media posts, CMS for web content management etc.

This generic customer segmentation and siloed data (such as data spread across social media channels, email marketing campaigns, website traffic etc)- allows only rudimentary levels of targeting and personalization, which ultimately leads to an incoherent experience for the customer. Since it cannot rely on a unified audience lists from across channels, this kind of marketing automation provides limited data on real campaign outcomes and limited insights for future campaign optimization.

Intermediate: A level up from basic marketing automation, a company in the intermediate tech maturity stage has some degree of data unification and integration across channels. This means that most of the data is in one place, and some marketing activities are orchestrated across limited channels, but there is significant room for improving integration, data flow, technology and processes.

An intermediate level marketing automation system typically involves at least a CRM integration and some marketing automation capabilities on tasks such as audience/ customer data segmentation based on organization defined parameters, automating lead nurturing workflows, limited ability to track user behavior across brand interactions (without knowing their identity) etc.

However, it’s not enough to provide a comprehensive, omnichannel and individualized experience for every single customer/ user. The campaigns are more multi-channel, efficient and output-focused, rather than omnichannel, effectiveness and outcome-focused . Yet, this level of maturity allows a reasonable degree of personalized, relevant and consistent communication with the customer.

Advanced: An advanced maturity level of marketing automation technology is characterized by end-to-end integration of customer and audience data gathered across all channels and platforms, be it social media, email campaignsOpens a new window , webinars, website, adtech etc. This data is fed into a centralized data system like a customer data platform (CDP)Opens a new window , to successfully orchestrate and deliver sophisticated workflows for personalized, contextual, consistent and omnichannel customer/ audience engagement, digital advertising, re-targeting, lead nurturing and other marketing and sales enablement activities.

If you can identify where you stand amongst these three levels of marketing automation tech maturity, you will find it easier to advance to the next stage- but only if its an organizational requirement based on size of company, type of industry, priorities and capital available for investment.

Types Of Marketing Automation Softwares

Marketing automation can range from simple tools to aid brand promotion or a set of tools and applications to manage end-to-end workflows and campaigns. While the adoption of various possible marketing automation components or types varies based on your business needs, here are some of the common types you can choose from to build your platform:

  • Customer relationship management (CRM): This kind of an automation software stores, manages and helps retrieve customer/ lead data, purchase history and other business interactions between the brand and customers. This data is critical for aiming to plan and orchestrate customer journeys and bring some degree of personalization into their experience.

A CRM is essentially your central hub for automating the capture, storage and retrieval of all customer or prospect data. A business can also integrate their CRM with other marketing tools to automate a larger process. For example, you can easily integrate your Salesforce CRM with email marketing automation platforms like Hubspot, and create workflows based on audience segmentation maps for lead nurturing or upselling (depending on the stage of buying funnel and ultimate goal of the business).

  • Email marketing: This is one of the first and most common areas of automation adopted by companies, given the sheer use of this marketing method due to affordability and evergreen impact. Depending on the level of sophistication of the software, email marketing automation tools allow marketers to automate and to create audience segments based on captured data, create workflows for lead nurturing, create delivery and bounce reports, integrate with CRM/ other tools and of course, schedule and send bulk emails. Infact, smart systems like ActiveCampaigns, EngageBay and Hubspot, also allow you to configure email triggers based on a single or combination of factors.

Most tools also come with performance measurement dashboards that provide metrics on delivery rate, opening rate, click-through rate (CTR) etc.

You can personalize various aspects of the email’s content based on your CDMOpens a new window and dynamic contentOpens a new window capabilities.

  • Lead management: Lead management is primarily a B2B marketingOpens a new window need, where value and effort per customer acquisition is much higher and takes since each prospect has a unique persona, different buying potential and are at different stages in the sales funnel, lead automation helps you nurture, engage and serve them relevant content. Through automation of lead processes such as mapping buyer journeys, lead scoring, lead qualification and lead progression, you can efficiently move from lead identification to conversion with custom designed nurture campaigns. Buyer journey mapping tells you if a lead is anonymous, known, engaged, marketing qualified, sales accepted, won, lost, or closed. Lead scoring lets you determine if a lead is ready to be passed on to sales for further perusal or you need to spend more time nurturing it. You can also automate the process of passing the marketing-qualified lead to sales automatically by applying a threshold on the lead score value.
  • Audience Segmentation and Management: While every customer or prospect has their own unique preferences and behaviour, there are some common factors that a business can use to segment their audience. These factors can be stage of buying journey, purchase frequency and history, key account activities etc. Using these types of parameters based on what makes sense for your business, you can segment your audience to make their content consumption experience contextual to their actions and experiences. Today, platforms like Merkle, Marketo, MailChimp etc, enables you to do this segmentation and list management automatically. Using a data management platform further enables more micro-targeting and omnichannel campaign orchestration
  • Social Media Posting and Analytics:While Facebook, Twitter and other respective social media platforms provide free analytics for your account, there is an increased business appetite for scheduling multiple posts, deeper insights and connected, omnichannel social media analytics that are user/ customer centric and not platform centric only.

While it requires advanced software like a CDP to get a truly unified and single customer view (SCV) respectively, marketing automation software is readily available for obtaining deeper analytical insights on your audience across multiple channels.

For example, platforms like DataBox can track organic social media users (not just paid campaigns) all the way to your website and provides you with insights such as social media conversion rate, individual and grouped post analytics, impressions from audience vs real engagement and conversions, customizable KPIs etc.

  • Digital Ads and Retargeting: Digital ads are text and multimedia ads on search engines, social media sites and ad networksOpens a new window that are real-time and programmatically managed. Marketing automation today enables you to orchestrate and activate ads across multiple channels, centrally bidded and managed using a demand side platform (DSP)Opens a new window . So, while DSPs can be used for bidding, managing and retargeting operations of your digital ads, marketing automation platforms do much more. For instance, when comparing Marketo to SmartAds DSP, besides ad-ops operations and channel management, Marketo provides a host of additional post-click features such as contact management, audience segmentation, ROI tracking, affiliate management etc, that are critical for most marketing teams, especially in enterprise companies.

5 Key Steps To Implement Marketing Automation

What do you need to onboard and implement a marketing automation platform? How do you go about making a successful case to your boss? How do you define and ensure ROI?

Here are 5 key steps that will help you establish a strong marketing automation framework for your organization:

1. Define your requirements and goals

Organizations need marketing automation depending on size, organizational goals and resource prioritization. So, you need to ask yourself the following questions on marketing automation:

  • What are the various marketing activities that are critical to your business?
  • Do any of these activities have enough repetitive tasks to warrant an automation?
  • Does automation help bring in additional marketing capabilities that you need?
  • Will investing in automation tangibly help improve overall marketing ROI within a defined and feasible time period?

It is also highly advised to read and understand case studies of marketing automation implementation across companies in your market vertical or company size.

Also, consider if there are any gaps in your existing martech stack and the repetitive marketing tasks that you are looking to automate.

Study of various use cases to understand how you can use marketing automation within your own business.

2. Get a pricing estimate and get key stakeholders on-board

Based on your analysis of your marketing requirements and defined goals get proposals and pricing estimates from various marketing automation solution providers or consultants.

Once you have this information handy, study some use cases and let the other teams also know how marketing automation can help the marketing and sales departments become more efficient and the impact of the investment on the bottomline. It’s important that for smooth and seamless implementation, you need to have a buy-in from C-level executives and your own sales and marketing heads.

3. Find the right marketing automation platform (MAP)

Now that you know your specific requirements, you need to find out the best suited marketing automation software or solution for your business, from the many that are available out there. You need to consider your requirements, organization size, budget, features, etc. before zeroing in on a solution. Here are five key criterias you should consider before selecting one MAP:

  • Features: Look for a solution that offers the features you need and don’t give in to the temptation of spending more on a bulk of features that you may not necessarily need.
  • Ease of use: How convenient or user-friendly is the platform? It should require a minimal amount of learning and training before you can start using it.
  • Ease of integration: This is a critical aspect although most solutions available now are designed to easily integrate with third party systems. Ensure that the software platform you choose fits your existing Martech stack.
  • Modifications and customizations: discuss any special requirements you may need from the vendor and the impact on deployment timelines and costs for the same
  • Pricing: When considering the price of your MAP, add all the mandatory upfront costs for training and implementation, and other add-on features for the best estimate, and then tally with your budget. Also, consider the terms of the contract – is the payment monthly, or annual? What impact will scaling up the licenses or scope have on costs? .
  • Support: The post-implementation support from the platform vendor is one of the critical determinants of the effectiveness of your marketing automation platform.

4. Create an implementation/ deployment plan

Choose a few well-defined use cases to start with, demonstrate success and drive adoption. Ensure that data integration is completed from appropriate data sources.

Skilling and training of the right team members as well as putting a feedback mechanism in place where the vendor supports and handholds during the launch phase is critical.

You may even want to seek assistance from a marketing automation consultant, for streamlining all these tasks.

5. Start with the basics, then build on

We understand that it’s tempting to try out all the interesting features your marketing automation platform might offer, but don’t go all in, right away. Start with the essentials and experiment with more features as you move further and are able to demonstrate success with the early use cases. This approach will allow you to take a gradual course of learning, analyzing and improving upon the system usage and response.

Top 5 Marketing Automation Best Practices with Examples

While marketing automation eases out a lot of your marketing efforts, certain best practices will help optimize your ROI. Here are 5 marketing automation best practices with examples that you can follow for best results (with the main focus on B2B industry):

1. Set clear lead stages and qualifiers

The same way as you cannot explore a new city and its must-see places without a proper map, you cannot leverage your marketing automation well, without appropriate lead mapping. If you do not classify and identify your leads as per their maturity stages, your marketing automation system will not be as effective in moving them down the sales funnel. This is how you can map out the various stages a lead passes through on its way to qualification and conversion.

  • Anonymous: Someone who has been browsing your website but has not provided any personal data
  • Known: Someone who has self-identified and you can share your marketing campaigns with
  • Engaged: Someone who has engaged with you by clicking on an email, downloading content, or commenting on your social media posts but is not yet qualified and needs more nurturing
  • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): This is someone who has been qualified by your lead scoring process and can be passed on to sales for outreach.
  • Sales Accepted Lead (SAL): This is an MQL who the sales team needs to assess and determine whether ready for conversation.
  • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): These are SALs that the sales department finds approachable enough for a business opportunity.
  • Won: A leads that the sales team is able to convert to a customer
  • Lost: An SQL that the sales team fails to convert
  • Recycled: An MQL or SAL that does not pass the SQL stage and is returned to marketing for further nurturing
  • Disqualified: These are people who browse or visit you for research or casually seeking information about you, but will likely never buy from you.

Once you have these lead classifications you can create custom fields in your marketing automation system to track where each of the leads are in the sales funnel. With this, your marketing automation system will raise any bottlenecks in the sales funnel letting you know which leads are moving towards conversion and which need more nurturing to push further down the sales funnel.

2. Funnel and customer journey specific data capture

As established above, since each of the leads cross various stages before they convert, it is always advisable to treat them accordingly when it comes to expecting them to share personal information. The amount of information you collect from your visitors to convert them into leads should depend on the stage of the buyer’s journey they are in.

For example, if you have released an ebook targeted for prospects in the awareness stage, through your marketing automation platform, you don’t have to collect detailed information such as their phone number, designation etc. because they might not be a serious buyer yet at this early stage of information gather, and increasing data fields may reduce form fills/ conversion rate. Rather, at this stage only 1 critical contract info, like email address, is enough to at least start tracking them and eventually aiming to capture more details based on engagement/ interest that clarifies their intent of purchase.

Whereas, for a resource like The Buyer’s Guide: Marketing Automation, you need to collect as much information as possible like phone number, location, company size, and revenue, because the lead is quite possibly in the decision stage, and the chances of the lead becoming a customer are high.

3. Deliver a contextual content experience

Defining a content experience through marketing automation is critical to ensuring that users and customers get an optimum, contextual and cohesive content consumption experience, rather than generic, contextual channel-centric marketing.

For example, let’s say you are a product software company and a website visitor downloads one of your content assets related to your product offerings. Now, this is a sign of interest in the subject and possibly your products. The next step will be to email another asset in due time, which will potentially bring them closer to the end of the purchase funnel. Once the indicators from the prospect’s interest are clear enough, time for the next asset, say, a buyer’s guide to software selection in that domain. Based on the number of levels you have set, repeat this process as long as the prospect keeps showing interest, and till they are ready to make a purchase from you.

This is the right customer centric approach where rather than sending them content through a common email blast or social media posts, your next step is contextual to the steps taken by the prospect in previous engagements.

Similarly, for upselling for instance, if a person is using a low-end product software license, the next step will be to educate them on additional features available on higher paid licenses. If the user shows interest, time to up the game a notch till you successfully upsell the software to the customer. However, if the customer seems uninterested, which may be due to a variety of reasons, it’s best to not push them into annoyance and instead send them content that actually helps them use the existing product features allowed by the level of license.

4. Configure automated event triggers

This is a deep-drill on the case presented for content experience – that if a content is being communicated to a prospect or customer, it should be as much relevant and contextual as possible, rather than generic communication. This means, you need defined trigger actions from users and respective response configurations.

Your marketing automation platform can help you respond to specific actions from your prospects and customers in real-time, without delay. You can configure triggers based on one or a combination of qualifying factors such as company where the lead works in, demographics, stage of buying journey defined by type of content being consumed etc

For example, when someone subscribes to your newsletter or signs-up for your product/service, it is typical to send a confirmation or a thank you mail acknowledging their addition to your list of subscribers. Similarly, you can create different onboarding campaigns depending on the subscriber list, such as, if a user has subscribed to your newsletter, you can send them a series of emails with your most visited blog articles or downloadable content. Or, if someone signs up for a trial for your product, you can send them instructional material that will help them understand the different product use cases.

5. Set up alerts for social listening and monitoring

In times when a lot of brand engagement happens over social media, you cannot do without making it a part of your marketing automation strategy. Moreover, engaging with your prospects on social media is perceived as more personal than sending them your usual marketing emails. Though social CRM is one of the more advanced features of marketing automation, many MAPs now offer alerts for social media events that a brand can capture and act upon for lead generation and nurturing.

For example, your MAP will notify you when someone mentions your brand on social media, which will help you instantly connect with the prospect or the customer right when they have themselves initiated an engagement with you.

6. Set up automated audience segmentation and list configuration

With access to clean and relevant customer data that is sorted and segmented in real-time, you can ensure your marketing automation system remains effective in capturing and nurturing leads and increasing customer engagement. On the other hand, redundant and outdated data may derail a potential sale, wrongly classifies your audience and may hamper your overall marketing goals.

Thankfully, most marketing automation tools today come with automated audience segmentation, not just in the beginning of the campaign, but in real time even as the campaign proceeds and user actions are captured.

For example, duplicates may be a result of someone who already exists in your database, again completes a form using a different email address, name etc. Your system should then be able to match other fields and merge duplicates so that there are no unnecessary redundancies in your data. Similarly, someone may try to complete a form with a fake email address, in which case your marketing emails will land on an email id that doesn’t exist. Set up verification measures to identify fake emails and phone numbers to keep your data clean and do not allow form submission until one enters valid details.

Raj Roy
Raj leads the editorial sponsorship and premium content program at ToolBox. With over 8 years of experience in 360 digital marketing, his central focus has been on creating content and inbound marketing strategies that deliver the most engaged audiences. As an animal lover and nature enthusiast, he likes to spend free time with his pets and in natural landscapes.
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