Marketing automation refers to software that automates your marketing communications for you. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.

The main benefits of setting up marketing automation are that it will free up some of your time, while not compromising the authenticity of the content you’re producing. And it will help you reach your goals faster.

Automation is triggered by pre-defined ‘workflows’

The number one goal of marketing automation is to waste less time, define the rules that we want, and be able to automate it. Workflows make that possible, and – better yet – workflows makes that easy.

With workflows, you can trigger actions based on any information you have about your leads, allowing you to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

As an example, here is what a basic automated email workflow could look like:

Step 1: You send an email invitation to download your latest podcast to a targeted list of contacts

Step 2: You send a thank you note to all the people that downloaded the offer

Step 3: A few days later, you send a follow-up email to the list of people who downloaded the podcast, sending them a blog post on a related topic

Hot Tip: Sending one big email to all of your leads and hoping it’s relevant enough for some of them to click through or engage with isn’t a good investment of your time or budget. Strategising an automated email workflow is smart email marketing.

Indicators you need to start automation

1. You’re generating leads but ignoring the ones that are not yet ready to buy
2. Your sales team is unhappy with the quality of the leads you’re sending them
3. You’re sending the same emails to your entire list
4. You’re not targeting your offers & messaging based on your leads’ needs
5. You’re sending or following up to all of your emails manually
6. You’re mass updating contact information manually
7. You want to convert more leads to customers with better lead nurturing