The 7 Most Important Marketing Automation Workflows for Your Business!

1. How do Marketing Automation Workflows help me?
2. What can Marketing Automation Workflow Tools do?
3. How can I use Marketing Automation Workflows?
4. The 7 most important Marketing Automation Workflows
5. The agony of choice – The selection of the right Marketing Automation Tool

A Marketing Automation Workflow refers to automating marketing processes using software or tools. With a Marketing Automation Workflow, you can automate complex processes without any programming skills. As the name "Workflow" suggests, you can simply imagine the whole thing as an automated sequence of various work steps.

The prerequisite for using a Marketing Automation Workflow is a corresponding tool with which you can create workflows that is connected to your customer data. Usually, you can assemble a Marketing Automation Workflow quite easily according to the modular principle, often even via drag-and-drop.

In this article, our guest author Johanna Wobbe will go into more detail on the functions and advantages of Marketing Automation Workflows and introduce a few tools at the end.

A Marketing Automation Workflow initiates an automated action that is based on specific triggers that you define precisely. Before creating such a Marketing Automation Workflow, all you need to consider is which target group you want to address with which message via which channel. Then you can set further conditions, e.g. how often a customer can go through the workflow and what the exit conditions are.

How do Marketing Automation Workflows help me?

Marketing Automation Workflows help you automate repetitive tasks or frequently occurring events. An example: You want every new customer to receive a personalized email with further product recommendations after purchase? Logically, you won't assign a person to send these emails manually as soon as someone has bought your product, but you can simply create a Marketing Automation Workflow that sends this email to the respective recipients at the right time.

Depending on the company's objectives, there are different goals of Marketing Automation Workflows. From lead generation to lead nurturing to customer retention or of course cross- and upselling measures - with the right tool you can now automate almost anything.

What can Marketing Automation Workflow Tools do?

Today, not only the large CRM enterprise software solutions have Marketing Automation Workflow Builders, but also many email marketing tools aimed at start-ups and small businesses, offer solid workflow builders. This is a big advantage, because this way you can choose the solution that suits you best.

Most tools that you can use to create Marketing Automation Workflows operate according to a similar principle. If you have a specific marketing action in mind that you want to automate with a Marketing Automation Workflow, you start by constructing the Marketing Automation Workflow according to the modular principle. Most tools have a drag-and-drop editor in which you can select the required building blocks.

First, you should define exactly which trigger triggers the marketing action - this starts your Marketing Automation Workflow. Such a trigger can be membership in a certain segment, the triggering of a certain action on your website / your online shop or even the occurrence of a date defined by you.

Once you have defined your trigger, you can simply determine what happens next. Here you have a wide choice and can send an email or SMS, send a push notification to the smartphone or even have customers added to a new segment. Other options that you can incorporate into your Marketing Automation Workflow include:

• Wait blocks (e.g. wait 5 days until the next action),
• checking conditions (e.g. has the customer opened the last email in the meantime?),
• or enriching information (e.g. add a certain attribute to all customers who go through the workflow).

In the end, you can also define the conditions under which someone leaves your Marketing Automation Workflow, for example when a certain email was opened. The possibilities that a workflow builder offers differ between the various tools, but the principle always remains the same. A good tool should always give you the option to evaluate each Marketing Automation Workflow.

How can I use Marketing Automation Workflows?

As already mentioned, Marketing Automation Workflows significantly simplify your daily work. They can be used for a variety of purposes and also reduce the potential for error, which often results from too many manual processes. But this is not the only advantage of Marketing Automation Workflows, but they are also extremely valuable from the perspective of customer satisfaction. By using Marketing Automation Workflows, you can accompany your customers throughout the entire customer journey and play out relevant and personalized content at the right time.

Depending on the company objective you are pursuing, different workflows make sense. There are some workflows that you should definitely be familiar with and that can be used in many cases.

Today we would like to introduce you to seven important Marketing Automation Workflows:

The 7 most important Marketing Automation Workflows

1. Welcome Workflow

One of the most important Marketing Automation Workflows is the Welcome Workflow. As the name suggests, this is about welcoming new customers. Ideally, this should be the first contact after registration (e.g. for the newsletter) that you have with new customers. Email is ideally suited as a communication channel for this, because an email leaves you with many design options - both in terms of content and visually - and is not time-critical.

In addition, often you don't have a lot of contact data from new customers other than the email address. Welcome emails have the highest engagement rates, because new customers have high expectations for your brand at this point. That's why it's important to give a lot of thought to the welcome email. Depending on the business goal you are pursuing, you should design the welcome email.

This way you can particularly explain to your new customers what they can expect from your offer. You can directly draw attention to your products and/or services and inspire customers to buy, or, especially with a long customer journey or a complex product, you can explain the next steps to them.

2. Onboarding Workflow

An Onboarding Workflow is particularly suitable for app users or users of a subscription model. After these users have registered for your app or your product or service, it makes sense to explain the next steps. Because often these users are still a few steps away from actually using your product or service.

With a simply designed, clear onboarding email, you can significantly improve engagement and keep the retention rate high by explaining the most important features to your users. At the same time, you can already segment users who are not engaged or have not fully completed their profile in order to remind them specifically of this again.

3. Gated Content Workflow

A Gated Content Workflow is excellent for collecting important contact data from your leads, e.g. the email address. In exchange for giving you their email address, they get high-quality content from you for free, e.g. an e-book. It is important here not to ask for too many personal data in order to not scare off the leads.

You need the email address in any case to send the content afterwards, but beyond that you should a maximum of ask for the first name (in the B2B environment possibly also the last name and the company). The Gated Content Workflow is also an excellent starting point for lead nurturing campaigns, so you can e.g. check whether the content has been opened and/or clicked and then send further emails to the leads with relevant content.

After requesting the content, the leads expect a response from your side, you should definitely take advantage of this. A Gated Content Workflow can also be used excellently in B2C, e.g. by offering an e-book with a how-to on using your products.

4. Lead Nurturing Workflow

This is one of the classic and best-known workflows, because it is about qualifying collected leads and determining and following their position within the customer journey. This workflow always starts with a first contact with the lead and can then of course be set up as desired depending on the business model and customer journey.

The lead should be served with relevant content at the beginning of the workflow and then continue through the workflow depending on his behavior. For example, you can pass a lead directly on to sales if a certain action has been carried out that suggests that the lead is interested in a purchase. So the lead is qualified for sales. If there are indications that the lead is no longer interested in your products or services because he has not reacted several times, you can either set the lead into a resting phase for now or disqualify him directly.

Lead nurturing workflows are excellent for recognizing the intentions of leads and doing important preparatory work for the sales department. It is important here that the workflow is not too complicated and that the leads are not overwhelmed with a lot of emails or push notifications. 

5. Special occasion workflow

In most industries, a lot of customer data is now collected. Of course, you can use this for your Marketing Automation and thus address your customers on special occasions. A classic example is an email or push notification with a discount that a customer receives on his or her birthday.

This discount can be valid for a certain period of time, for example, so that you again remind the customer of it after half of the time has passed. Depending on the business model, different occasions make sense here, which is why you should always pay attention to whether such a workflow fits your business.

In B2B, a birthday might be rather inappropriate, but here you can build a great loyalty program and send your customers emails depending on the length of their business relationship and let them benefit from advantages such as a personal contact person or early access to your new product.

6. Abandoned Cart Workflow

This workflow is particularly suitable for e-commerce companies, because it addresses shopping cart abandoners. As soon as a filled shopping cart is left by your users and not checked out or adjusted for a defined period of time, you can trigger this workflow.

By email, you can then address these users and kindly remind them that their shopping cart is still waiting for them in your online shop. You can imagine this workflow like the nice sales advisor in the shop around the corner, who points out to you that she has taken your shopping to the checkout and is waiting there for you.

To incentivize the users again, you can offer a discount on the products, or one of the products in the shopping cart, or point out that not many of these products are available. An Abandoned Cart Workflow can also be used in SaaS companies.

7. Post Purchase Workflow

Another Marketing Automation Workflow, particularly suitable for e-commerce and SaaS companies, is the Post Purchase Workflow. As the name suggests, this is about engaging customers after a successful purchase.

This workflow is particularly powerful because you can not only thank your customers for the purchase and their trust in your company, but also take advantage of the moment after the purchase. Because at this moment, your customers are particularly closely associated with your company and therefore also often ready to leave a positive evaluation on an evaluation platform or even to recommend your company, your products, or services.

In addition, you can suggest similar products at this point and stimulate customers to make the next purchase. Depending on the product you sell or the services you offer, you can send a how-to for product use or care or an FAQ to your customers after the purchase. This not only shows that you care about your customers, but also takes the burden off your customer service.

The agony of choice – The selection of the right Marketing Automation Tool

There are now numerous Marketing Automation Tools, with which you can implement such workflows. It is important here that you choose a tool that fits your business model and your requirements. When selecting tools, you should primarily ask yourself the following questions: What do I want to achieve with the tool, what must it absolutely be able to do?

Not every classic email marketing or CRM tool can support Marketing Automation and many Marketing Automation Tools, for example, show great weaknesses in the granular evaluation of campaigns and especially in the user-friendliness of the email editor.

Also take into account topics like analysis options, segmentation options and personalization. Another important topic is the connection to your CRM System, if you use one. To enable easy synchronization of customer data, your Marketing Automation Tool should definitely have a good connection to your CRM system that can be synchronized without high technical effort.

It also doesn't hurt to take a look at the documentation and the availability of support in advance. Of course, you should also think about whether you would rather use an established tool with a large community and high number of users or a relatively young, new tool, which is still in the development phase.

Another important point is the topic of GDPR: Consider carefully whether you want to use a European tool, for example, which is more likely to be GDPR-compliant than most American tools - keyword hosting of customer data. As is so often the case, there is no right or wrong with all of the points mentioned, the important thing is that you deal with them. Because once you use a tool and have enriched it with customer data, a change is often associated with high costs and especially with a high technical effort.

To make the tool selection a little easier for you, today we would like to introduce some tools to you: 

1. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

You may still know Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue) under the name "Newsletter2Go", because that's what the Berlin company was called before it was bought by the French digital software Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue). This tool is aimed at small to medium-sized e-commerce companies and impresses with its original core business, email marketing. You get a very intuitive email editor which is very user-friendly and even includes a mobile version and its own template language.

Another advantage of Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue) are the versatile options for A/B testing, as well as the SMS and chat functions, in addition, with this tool in the premium version, you can directly place Facebook ads and create landing pages. Another plus point: Since it is a European company, the data is hosted in the EU.

2. Hubspot Marketing Hub

The HubSpot Marketing Hub belongs to the Marketing Automation Tools with the largest market share and primarily addresses medium to large companies. The tool offers a wide range of functions for Marketing Automation. The focus is especially on Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing as well as on Inbound Marketing campaigns. With the strong combination of Email Marketing and Online Marketing, you can pick up your leads via landing pages and forms and then inspire them along the entire customer journey through automated Marketing Automation Workflows.

From the Professional package, you also get improved options for evaluating campaigns and reports. A big plus: The Hubspot Academy offers you as a user numerous (mostly) free tutorials and training sessions on the tool.

3. Mailchimp

The tool that probably everyone has worked with at some point who had anything to do with email marketing in any form! And rightly so, because Mailchimp has now developed from a pure newsletter dispatch tool to a great Marketing Automation Tool for small businesses. Mailchimp is especially suitable if you want to connect the tool with your website, your shop or other third-party tools to send personalized emails.

The email editor is very intuitive and you can choose from a large number of modern, mobile-optimized email templates if you can't or don't want to develop anything yourself. If you use one of the paid versions, you also get further segmentation options as well as more options for creating and evaluating campaigns including A/B testing options.

4. Mailingwork

Mailingwork sees itself as a solution for companies and agencies from medium-sized businesses to corporations and focuses on email marketing and newsletter dispatch, but has especially caught up on automated workflows in recent years. Complex automations can now be implemented as well as classic newsletters.

In addition to campaign management, the success tracking of emails is also one of the strongest functions of the tool. Particularly worth highlighting here is the excellent customer service, which responds quickly and can always help. In addition, as a German provider, Mailingwork is the most data protection compliant solution of the tools mentioned here.

5. Klavyio

As a very popular solution for e-commerce companies, Klaviyo has established itself in recent years. This is mainly because it's very easy to connect with store systems like Shopify, Magento Open Source or WooCommerce. A major strength of the tool is especially the simple usability, the drag-and-drop editor and the dashboard function, which is also mainly aimed at e-commerce companies.

It’s also interesting to note the connection with social media channels like Facebook, so you can easily import lookalike audiences from Facebook and in turn use Klayvio and Facebook in conjunction for calculating important e-commerce data like AOVs and CLVs. Based on this, you can then build corresponding flows for your customers.