These are the Best Marketing Automation Examples
We show you which examples work particularly well for marketing automation and which tools can help you with this.
- What does marketing automation mean and what is it used for?
- 7 Examples of Marketing Automation in Practice
- These Tools Will Help You With Marketing Automation
Automation is becoming more prevalent these days. Many businesses are taking advantage of the fact that AI has advanced to the point where a lot of smaller tasks can be automated. In this article, we'll give you insights into why automation may also be worthwhile for your business. However, we will focus specifically on marketing automation. You will first learn what marketing automation means and what it can best be used for. We will then provide you with an overview of 8 working examples of marketing automation in practice.
Lastly, we will give you a few tools to help with your marketing automation efforts and to take some work off your hands. Because even if you can automate a lot, there may still be times when you need to take manual action. At least, it is necessary to set up and possibly adjust the automation processes to make automation as straightforward as possible. So let's dive right in: What is marketing automation and how can it be used?
Recommended Marketing Automation Software
On our comparison platform OMR Reviews you can find more recommended marketing automation tools. We present more than 210 solutions that are specifically designed to meet the needs of marketing automation experts, companies and brands. These tools offer comprehensive support in all facets of marketing automation. Take this opportunity to compare different software solutions, relying on authentic and verified user reviews:
What does marketing automation mean and what is it used for?
Marketing is more subject to the passage of time than almost anything else. Customers are satiated by the various kinds of advertising and sales-representative gifts. Marketing is much more than just TV commercials and catchy billboards in the city centre. If you want to attract customers, you have to come up with something – the competition never sleeps.
Marketing automation essentially helps you design some parts of your marketing strategy so that you don't have to be the executing part anymore. This does not mean that there is nothing left for you to do, but the effort is comparatively much less. You are no longer obliged to exchange time for customers – at a time when customers are very volatile, this of course has a lot of value.
Marketing automation can be used in many ways: From lead generation to classic email newsletters, you can outsource a lot of effort. User-oriented content and existing customer care can be simplified by marketing automation. You already notice, here lies the rabbit in the pepper: For successful, diverse marketing automation some preparatory work is necessary. You need to know your target group, define your customers and develop a strategy for which tool should take over which work for you. Also, you need to be clear about where you want to set the focus in marketing.
7 Examples of Marketing Automation in Practice
Now let's look at an application case. What are examples of a possible implementation? We will show you 8 practical examples in the following section.
Emails
Whether you sign up for a newsletter, leave goods in the shopping cart or have a birthday coming up – emails are needed almost everywhere. Many customers are easily impressed when they get greeting mails that seem to be generated especially for them. But constantly keeping an eye on the calendar to not miss any customer birthdays… is difficult. Here you can use marketing automation sensibly to send a nice greeting to existing customers or to remind them of their shopping cart.
In addition to classics like greeting or reminder emails, you can also provide premium content for your customers via automated emails. This can be access to free features, an eBook, templates. Depending on your field of work and industry, you can save a lot of time and effort in the area of personal email communication alone, without your customers feeling neglected or 'processed'.
Customer Service
We have all experienced this: You visit a website because you have a question or need help from customer service. Often you are then greeted by a chatbot that checks the situation in advance before you as a customer are forwarded to a 'real' employee. Often customer inquiries are manageable FAQ concerns that consist of certain keywords.
A chatbot can be programmed to these keywords and can resolve first small concerns on its own. Only when it turns out that the chatbot can no longer help, the customer is forwarded to an employee and it comes to a personal conversation. We probably don't need to tell you how much time you can save by having simple customer queries answered automatically.
Content Marketing
A very important factor depending on your target group: regular content marketing. Especially the younger users want to be entertained and informed regularly on social media – and preferably this should not always be the same and boring. Marketing automation can also help you here: You can pre-schedule your content, automatically send out postings or – again – send newsletters with the latest info about your content.
But even with content marketing, no automation works without preparatory work. Posts need to be prepared, the planning needs to be worked out and created. On the other hand, you can easily get help from outside for today's content creation and planning. Many virtual assistants are specialized in social media and content creation by now. This way, you can save time and effort with the right budget and offer your target group customized content.
Lead Management
If you want to revive existing frozen leads, marketing automation can also be useful. Classical examples are reminder emails or further information: Your customer took part in a webinar? That's great, then you can share summarizing information a few days later. Maybe there is a download for the webinar or a handout?
Why should you automate your lead management? So that the salespeople in your team can use their time for other tasks and don't have to 'go through' every contact individually. In addition, you avoid card files resulting from time constraints: A salesperson who, due to lack of time, did not serve a contact in time and whose interest has subsequently cooled down is really unnecessary.
Marketing Analytics
Where marketing happens, results should also be analysed. You can also have this done by automating it. Various tools can help you keep an eye on your data and metrics and react accordingly. This ensures that you can respond to developments in a timely manner and adjust your content or strategy. This goes practically hand in hand with the next point:
Landing Pages
Just like your marketing, customers also react to your landing pages. It therefore makes sense here, too, to track the numbers and keep an eye on the content. This can go as far as offering different landing pages for different buyer personas, tailored to their respective needs. You can see, marketing automation offers you endless possibilities to live out your creativity and customer service.
Customer Reviews & Extras
You can contact customers who have purchased something from you. Maybe you have an interesting discount code for regular customers? Or you have, for example with books, got new works of the previously bought author? Great, then you can share exactly this information with the buyers. In addition to this extra service, you can also collect product reviews fully automatically: A customer bought something from you, then a few days later a mail follows asking if the customer was satisfied with the purchase.
This can be linked to further extras such as new customer discounts or customer recruitment. 'You were satisfied with your purchase? Then recommend us! If your friend buys from us using this code, you both get a 5% discount' - this is how one of these emails could look like. Once created, you can serve numerous buyers.
These Tools Will Help You With Marketing Automation
Now you have a rough idea of what marketing automation is and how you can use it as well. Finally, we would like to give you a small selection of tools that will help you implement your automation as desired. You can find more Tools for marketing automation as always at OMR Reviews. We also have a guide for you on how to find the right marketing automation tool for your business.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
With the HubSpot Marketing Hub software, you have various possibilities to take your marketing to the next level. You can manage the following areas with the software: marketing, CMS, CMR & sales and customer service. So you are basically completely flexible, whether you want to convert leads or monitor website traffic. The basic modules of the tool are free to use. Apart from that, the package prices start at 46 Euros/month.
Mailchimp
The newsletter tool Mailchimp is probably well known to many of you. It is the most widely used little helper for small businesses. In the meantime, the tool can do a lot more in the area of marketing: From customer analysis to social media to CRM, you have many possibilities. If you manage with 2000 contacts a month, you can use the tool for free. Otherwise, the packages start at $ 9.99 per month.
Klaviyo
This tool is mainly aimed at e-commerce companies. Klaviyo is compatible with many common shop systems and offers various possibilities to follow up with customers, send review emails or segment customer data. You can also test this tool for free, here however only up to 250 contacts. The packages start at $ 20 per month.
So marketing automation doesn't have to cost a lot or require a lot of effort. Of course you have to set up automation in advance and prepare postings or emails, depending on the industry and request you only do this once and then have peace for a longer time. Compared to 'I do every task myself', you still save a lot of time. Many tools also offer you free entry modes, only when growth is coming, lead lists are growing or your demands are increasing, you have to spend the first money.
Klaviyo uses dashboards to give you a well-organized overview of customer actions in your stores.
If you want to get started with email automation and want to get away from the numerous other options, you can take a look at our article on email automation. It gives you an overview of the different types of automation and tools that you can use for your emails.