How to Successfully Implement Marketing Automation

1. What is Marketing Automation?
2. Why should I do Marketing Automation?
3. How can I start with Marketing Automation?
4. How is Marketing Automation Carried Out?
5. The best best practice examples for Marketing Automation
6. What else is important for Marketing Automation?
7. When is Marketing Automation not useful?
8. Conclusion

Enter leads into email lists, keep CRM systems in sync, or simply set reminders for colleagues. The larger the business becomes, the harder it is to keep up with the number of repetitive tasks. Particularly for marketers, automation can help to do better marketing, reach & serve more people, and ultimately grow faster.

With this guide from our guest author Christian Kroeber, you will be perfectly positioned to set up marketing automation on your own, using concrete examples and reaching your goals. Marketing automation is beneficial for B2B and B2C teams and even freelancers.

What is Marketing Automation?

At its core, automation refers to steps and processes that previously had to be done by humans being taken over by computer systems, without the need for human intervention. Especially in marketing, this can bring great advantages and enable scaling, by connecting marketing systems such as newsletter tools, CRM systems, or social media platforms through their API or creating workflows within a single tool.

Now that there are many No-Code / Low-Code platforms, you no longer need developer resources or significantly fewer, and can just get started. You do not necessarily need prior knowledge, but if you have some technical skills or a basic understanding of technical processes, it definitely won't hurt. Most No-Code / Low-Code tools are designed to be easily used by marketing experts.

Why should I do Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation helps you to quickly handle repetitive tasks that arise in marketing and to focus on the really essential things in marketing. All repetitive tasks are automatically processed, possibly across systems. This frees up resources so you can focus on improving campaigns or actions and your working time is not tied up by repetitive tasks that do not create much value.

Particularly small teams can scale enormously through Marketing Automation and thus reach more people. This can be a real competitive advantage.

How can I start with Marketing Automation?

To get started, make sure that the marketing tools you want to use for the workflow are automation-enabled. This is usually the case, especially if you rely on cloud tools. This will become important when you want to connect several systems together.

There are also exceptions like Jira Server, where even the self-hosted version can be accessed. But this is rather the exception with non-SaaS tools.

The ability to connect APIs has now become an important criterion for us when selecting marketing systems. The second prerequisite is that you have decided on an automation tool or have checked how you want to set up the automation.

You have the option to use workflow builders within a tool or to have a third-party tool take over the workflows. More and more tools have recently enabled their own automations. For example, with the Newsletter Tool Mailchimp, you can also build rule-based process chains.

Examples of tools with their own Workflow Builder

• Slack
• Mailchimp
• Typeform

Workflow Builder from Mailchimp.

However, my experience is that the build-in Workflow Builders are often still immature and therefore do not work well. Especially when you want to build workflows across systems, they are not particularly good and rarely fulfill the use case.

Examples of automation tools (Low-Code / No-Code)

• Zapier
• IFTTT
• Automate.io
• make (formerly Integromat)

We have been using Zapier very successfully for marketing automation for years and are very happy with it. These days, pretty much every department in the company uses the tool and it has proven itself extremely well. In my experience, Zapier is the most complete automation tool in 2022.

Overview of the available tools.

Before you start, you should be clear on exactly how the process works and what the use case is. Defining the process is important and ensures that you actually achieve your goal. No complicated process visualization is necessary for this. However, I always sketch out the process on a piece of paper or in Miro beforehand to immediately highlight any uncertainties or weaknesses. A brainstorming session with the team can also be useful. This speeds up the overall process and ensures that your marketing automation truly achieves its goal.

How is Marketing Automation Carried Out?

Automation usually involves so-called if-then functions. If this happens, then do this and that and the other. This always requires a trigger or initiator. This could be a successful click on a button or an entry into an email list. This then initiates a process chain that automatically processes further steps.

Here is an automation example

Trigger: A user signs up on a landing page he has arrived at through a lead campaign, and enters his name, email address, and phone number in an email list. This is the triggering event.

• STEP 1: Your Email Marketing System, e.g. Mailchimp, sends a confirmation mail to the lead to confirm the entry.
• STEP 2:The lead is created in the CRM system, e.g. Pipedrive.
• STEP 3: In the Project Management System, e.g. Asana, a Task is created to call the lead, it is assigned to the responsible colleagues and scheduled for 7 days time.
• STEP 4: In Slack channel, a message is sent that a new lead is there.

In theory, as many steps as possible can follow, but in practice, too complete workflows can also become very error-prone.

On Zapier you can also build rule-based pathways where different workflows are processed depending on an attribute. Again, in practice, while essentially anything is possible, the complexity can increase considerably and above all, when something does not work, it can really take a long time to figure out why. Therefore: Keep it simple.

The best best practice examples for Marketing Automation

I brought along three examples of how we use marketing automation at scale.

Example 1: Synchronization of email lists

We run many lead magnet campaigns to raise awareness of wehorse or wedog. For example, we offer a free online course on leash handling when you sign up for an email list. To neatly set up the emails necessary for this, we decided to separate the list from our "main list" in Mailchimp.

Automation tool: Zapier

Other Tools: Mailchimp

Trigger event: New email address is added to the list.

• Step 1: Wait for 10 days (We know that the campaign will not last longer than 10 days, after that it's totally fine if the users are added to our main list for the "normal" newsletter).
• Step 2: Add the email address to the main list.

View in Zapier.

Without automation, the email address would have to be manually transferred, so we can let "hands off the wheel" and let Zapier do the work.

Example 2: Shipping of training journals

To get even more people closer to our content, our marketing team came up with the idea of releasing a so-called training journal, a 60-page book, that is shipped for free with every completion of the annual membership on wehorse.com. The challenge is that we do not ask our users for their postal address during onboarding. So we thought about how we can ask for the address quickly and efficiently, using as much automation as possible.

Automation Tools: Chargebee, Intercom, Zapier

Other tools: Typeform, Google Sheets

Chain 1

Trigger event: Annual membership completed

• Step 1: Tag your users in Intercom
• Step 2: Send an email with a link to Typeform
• Step 3: User enters address

Chain 2

Trigger event: Typeform submitted

Step 1: Address is entered in Google Sheets

Overview in Typeform.

While the first chain was depicted in Zapier, the second chain was solved through a direct integration in Typeform. In Google Sheet, the shipping address was then prepared using formulas, so in the office all that needed to be done was to print the shipping label and send it out.

Example 3: Christmas vouchers with use of paths

In the run-up to the Christmas business, we wanted to overhaul our vouchers with which customers can give memberships as gifts. In particular, we wanted to offer several designs. Before, we had a manual process where actually one person equipped the PDF vouchers with a code from our system.

For marketing, it was great that now, in addition to the standard design, a Christmas design could also be offered. But the handling should happen completely automatically.

Automation Tool: Zapier

Other Tools: Shopify,Google Sheets, PDF Monkey, Gmail

Trigger Event: Voucher purchased in Shopify indicating the design

• Step 1: Voucher is purchased
• Step 2: Checks what kind of design it is and what type of voucher it is
• Step 3: Search for a coupon code in Google Sheet
• Step 4: Create the voucher PDF in PDF Monkey with a template stored there and the coupon code obtained from Google Sheets
• Step 5: Send the PDF via Gmail to the buyers
• Step 6: Mark the coupon code as used in Google Sheet

Paths can map complex use cases.

What else is important for Marketing Automation?

Be sure to set up your marketing systems cleanly and connect them with, e.g., Zapier. Zapier maintains a list of connected systems. Also always pay attention to good naming. The better things are named and set up, the easier it is to maintain them. It is best to introduce a naming convention that everyone adheres to.

To quickly approach the topic, just think about which tasks annoy you the most and try to automate them. I always tell our team, "anything that doesn't feel good, a computer has to do for us." I think that's a good rule to recognize potentials and automatically brings the team closer to marketing automation.

When is Marketing Automation not useful?

You can apply the rule of thumb - if it takes much longer to set up a marketing automation than it would be necessary to complete the task without marketing automation, you should leave it. But if you expect many users to go through an automation route, if you have a high volume on a lead campaign, for example, then automation gives a lot of security that you will be able to handle any volume at any time.

Also, there can be problems if you have not clearly defined the underlying processes. Since marketing automation involves rule-based procedures, the team should be clear in advance what the desired procedure should be. If the processes are the actual problem, this cannot be solved with marketing automation. Therefore, it should be clear to you as a team what you want to achieve and how automation can help you achieve this goal faster. Concrete use cases help to uncover potentials.

Conclusion

Marketing Automation will be one of the most important skills for marketing experts and a game changer if applied correctly. If you want to apply scalable processes even within small teams to achieve a lot, you cannot get around Marketing Automation. Therefore, I can only encourage everyone to engage with the topic. Not only is it enormous fun, it also has a concrete business value and can help to reach even more people with your marketing.