Simply put, marketing automation refers to the use of technology or software to schedule and complete routine marketing tasks. While often associated with email marketing and CRM, marketing automation systems and processes can reduce the manual work in any aspect of your marketing tasks and facilitate marketing on multiple digital channels.
If you have ever scheduled a few social media posts in advance, then you understand how automation can help you deliver content effectively and efficiently. For the purpose of this discussion, we will explore marketing automation that businesses use to save time and money, from its simplest tools to its most complex applications.
Email Automation
SMES often use marketing automation to create timely email communications, such as:
Email marketing drip campaigns – an automated email series that sends targeted messages to subscribers at predefined intervals. It is also commonly used to send welcome emails to new subscribers to introduce a brand and its products or services, often offering customers a discount or free shipping on their first purchase as incentive to buy.
Retailers often use abandoned cart emails that are automatically sent to customers who have added items to their cart but haven’t completed the purchase.
Lead nurturing email strategies send targeted emails to leads to move them through the sales funnel. These emails are based on the interests and behavior of prospects and be hyper-personalized to increase conversion rates using tools such as ActiveTrail forms, and Pipedrive CRM (through Zapier).
Another smart way email marketers boost open rates is t segment users by their active hours by tracking and logging the hour of the day when users opened their emails and added them to specific segments based on those times. According to a case study by ActiveTrail, this strategy led to the following results:
- A 62% higher conversion rate thanks to email optimization and proper segmentation by time zones.
- Over 90% of the time spent on lead management could then be put to better use.
- Almost no manual work was needed as everything was automated.
- All leads received their emails in the proper time-zone and at the chosen hours only.
Social Media Marketing Automation
Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok all have their own built-in scheduling capabilities, while Meta enables you to schedule posts on both Facebook and Instagram from your desktop.
If you are posting on multiple channels, there are many platforms available to businesses to batch and automate social media scheduling, posting, monitoring, and replying to DMs and comments. Here are a few choices:
Hootsuite, SocialPilot, Sprout Social (which can integrate with Salesforce), Content Studio, Marketo, HubSpot, Magento (with Adobe Commerce services), WordPress (All WordPress.com plans include Publicize, a feature that lets you automate posting to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr) and Adobe Experience Manager. Each have pros and cons, so expect it to take a few hours to explore these and others to determine which best fits your organization based on scale, functionality, and integration capabilities with your current systems.
Here’s a resource you can access that includes user feedback: 13 Stunning Social Media Automation Tools to Use in 2024 (socialpilot.co)
Content Marketing Automation
From automatically publishing social media content to examining your blogging data analytics, content marketing automation is enabling businesses to free up time and resources while making their marketing efforts more effective and effortless.
There are many content marketing tools available that can track the performance of your content, so you can better optimize your content strategy going forward. Dashboards, graphs, overviews, and key indicators can strengthen your content marketing efforts and help you create relevant content.
Certain marketing software programs even feature project management tools, so you can spend more time doing creative work rather than administrative work like editorial scheduling and tracking the progress of various projects.
Here’s a resource that outlines 16 content marketing tools and features: 16 Content Marketing Analytics Tools That Finally Do What You Need (hubspot.com)
Automation tools can assist in generating content ideas, curating relevant articles relevant to your business, and even creating basic content pieces. For example, you can set up alerts for specific keywords or topics and the tool will notify you when new content related to those topics is published. Here’s how:
- Go to google.com/alerts from your web browser.
- Type the keyword you want to track in the text field that says, “Create an alert about…”
- Click on the “Create Alert” button to instantly create a new alert for the topic you just entered.
For campaign management, a platform worth exploring for small business is Instapage at Instapage: The World’s Best Landing Page Platform. According to Instapage user Tamar Friedland, Sr. Director of Global Paid Marketing for HelloFresh, a salad delivery service that I subscribe to myself,
“Instapage gives us the ability to tailor our landing page content and layout to tell a unique story for each geographical target. The platform also enables us to create different variations with content that performs well for each unique channel. Every marketing team needs this!”
The software connects with you’re a wide range of advertising, CRM, email, ecommerce, marketing, and sales solutions.
In broad strokes, marketing automation can be used for:
- Customer segmentation
- Analytics and reporting
- A/B testing
- E-commerce automation
- Customer retention and loyalty programs
- SMS and mobile marketing automation
Once you have determined your needs, we hope this blog and links provided help you to find the right solution to streamline operations.
Fetch Communications 
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