What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation is the automation of repetitive tasks involved in targeting and attracting new leads, capturing their information in your small business CRM, and automatically following up so they move forward in your sales process.

It primarily involves setting up campaigns that automatically send specific content to leads based on behavior and data, with the goal of increasing conversions.

Marketing Automation falls under the umbrella of Small Business Automation, which is using automation software to eliminate manual, repetitive tasks across your entire business by setting up automated processes that run in the background so you and your team can focus on more important things.

Small Business Automation includes:

• Marketing Automation (you are here!) — Collect leads, follow up automatically, and nurture them until they’re converted to prospects
• Sales Automation — Convert leads by following up regularly, setting up appointments, and making offers and upsells
• Service Automation – Create fans by delivering all you promised and more, asking for reviews and referrals, and following up for repeat sales
• Operations Automation — Streamline internal processes so your team operates more efficiently and your prospects and customers have a better experience

From drip campaigns to welcome campaigns to long-term nurture campaigns and more, email marketing automation utilizes innovation to help target specific customers with behavior-based triggers and smartly scheduled sends.

Trigger emails are a unique form of marketing emails that hit the inbox of customers at prime times, like right after they sign up for something, exit the cart or finish a free trial. When paired with offers and upsells, they act as an effective nudge to take the next step in your sales process.

Here’s an example:

1. Broadcast email. You send an email inviting new leads to attend a webinar about your area of expertise.
2. Landing page with form. A link in the email sends them to an online form they fill out to register for the webinar.
3. Segmentation and reminders. Everyone who signs up for the webinar is automatically segmented into a unique email list and sent reminder emails leading up to the webinar.
4. Post-webinar nurture. After the webinar, everyone on that list automatically receives an email nurture campaign. It starts off by sending a thank you email to everyone who attended the webinar and summarizing the key points from the webinar. Then, a few days later, they receive a link to download a case study on a similar topic.
5. Targeted outreach. When leads download that case study, they are automatically routed to your sales team for individual outreach, since these leads have taken enough action to make them a more qualified prospect.
6. Downsell offer. If the lead doesn’t respond to the sales person, they can be presented with an offer for a smaller product or service via email. This lets them try out your business with a smaller up-front investment.
7. Long-term nurture. If they still don’t make a purchase, they are automatically put into a long-term nurture campaign that continues to send valuable information over time until the prospect is ready to buy.

Let’s break down some of those components in more detail:

Broadcast campaigns

A broadcast campaign is when you send the same email to a group of contacts all at the same time.

You would use this to send messages to people who are already on your email list — this could be new leads who recently opted in to receive communications from you, prospects still in the sales process, current customers and past customers.

Broadcast emails (and text messages) can be used for sales offers, customer newsletters, thought leadership and trust building messages, customer notifications, etc.

Lead capture landing pages

When you drive traffic to your website, you need at least one landing page with a compelling lead magnet and a form that leads can fill out to get the lead magnet. This could be a free ebook, checklist, report, guide, short course, etc.

Although you can ask for as much information as you want in your form, it’s usually best to only ask for a first name and email from new leads. Asking for too big a commitment from the start might turn people away.

When the form is submitted, a new record is automatically created in your CRM. This can trigger automation to start the relationship off right and move them forward in the sales process.

Segmentation and personalization

How do you make automation feel personal and relevant? Segmentation and custom fields.

Segmentation is when you split up your email list into smaller lists so you can send more targeted messages to each group. In Keap’s small business CRM, this is accomplished using tags.

All CRM systems have standard fields such as name, email, business name, phone number, etc. Custom fields are fields that you create based on your business type and audience. For example, if you run a pet grooming business, you might have a custom field for animal type (dog vs. cat).

If you’re managing a compounding pharmacy, you might segment your list based on disease type so you can send targeted education information, and have a custom field for what their favorite type of flavoring is.

With some thoughtfulness and creativity, you can create extremely personalized automated campaigns for your leads and customers.

Welcome campaign

When a lead first opts into your list is when they’re most interested in your company, so make sure the first email they receive from you provides value, builds trust and authority, communicates the essence of your brand, and prompts them to take the next step with you.

Here are a couple ways you can personalize your welcome campaign:

• Ask for some differentiating info when they first sign up (ex: Are they a cat or dog owner?)
• Offer a choice of lead magnets on your landing page (ex: Dog Grooming Tips vs. Cat Grooming Tips) with each lead magnet having its own unique welcome message for that audience

Value bank

It’s critical to build trust and value with leads from the start so they’ll be more open to considering your sales offers. You can do this by:

• Delivering what you promised when they signed up… and maybe a surprise bonus as well
• Demonstrating your expertise by answering a common question that new customers have
• Showing real-life examples of how to overcome their most pressing challenges

Trigger-based automated campaigns

Unlike a broadcast campaign, which is sent out to a group of people at once, trigger-based messages are automatically sent out in response to some type of user behavior.

Here are some examples of trigger-based automated campaigns:

• If a customer adds something to their shopping cart but doesn’t check out, this can trigger an email reminding them they still have items in their cart.
• A text message might go out automatically after a product has shipped to let them know their package is en route.
• An email can be triggered a certain number of days/weeks/months after service completion to offer another product or service

The first step to implementing marketing automation in your business is to map out your customer lifecycle and identify the places where people drop out of your funnel. These are ideal places to start implementing automation because you’re likely to see an increase in conversions right away.

Check out our Perfect Customer Lifecycle Workshop to learn in just 90 minutes how a customer lifecycle works and map out your own. Or, request a free consultation with one of our automation experts to get 1:1 help with mapping and automating your customer journey.

Once you know what you want to automate, you need automation software that meets your business’s needs. For example, Keap includes the most powerful business automation software for small and mid-sized businesses, along with a CRM, email and text marketing, sales pipeline, payment solution, and more.

And marketing automation is just the beginning… you can automate your entire business to save money and time while increasing profits and growth!