Marketing Automation: A Beginner’s Guide (2023) (2024)

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Marketers know that personalization is effective. 

“The research supports that adding somebody’s first name into the subject line of an email significantly improves the likelihood that they will open that email [and] will engage with that email, and decreases the likelihood they will unsubscribe,” Neil Hoyne, chief strategist for data and measurement at Google, says in an episode of Shopify Masters. 

Of course, manually customizing your email subject lines for every single subscriber would be a full-time job. This is why many marketers use automation—it allows you to try marketing tactics you wouldn’t otherwise have time for, like personalizing your email subject lines. In this article, you’ll read real-life examples of how Shopify merchants use marketing automation software to grow their businesses and provide some best practices for incorporating automation into your marketing toolkit.

What is marketing automation? 

Marketing automation is the use of software to promote goods or services without manual intervention. Automation allows marketers to streamline repetitive tasks associated with executing a digital marketing strategy. (For example, personalized messaging that’s automatically sent to customers when they take certain actions, like signing up for a newsletter or putting something in their shopping cart.)

These messages are sent based on workflows, or sets of instructions, allowing businesses to deliver specific messages to customers when they do specific things. Workflows can be templated or built from scratch, and you can change them mid-campaign to optimize your results.

For example, say a prospective customer visits your website and signs up to receive a promo code to their email. That action might trigger a series of emails that starts with a welcome note and a discount code but continues for several weeks with content that educates them about your product. 

Types of marketing automation

With the right software or coding abilities, you can automate virtually any part of your digital marketing strategy. Here are a few of the most popular ways to use marketing automation tools:

Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most popular uses of automation. It’s simple to implement and allows businesses to send personalized, timely messages rather than mass email blasts likely to end up in a junk folder.

Olive oil company Graza uses Klaviyo to automate its marketing emails and send tailored emails to small groups of customers who meet specific criteria. “I think we benefit from really direct communication,” Graza cofounder and CEO Andrew Benin says in a case study. “We have flows going out to just 200 or 300 customers.” Segmenting customers into groups this small (those numbers may not seem tiny, but the company is on track for gross sales of more than $48 million in 2024) would be incredibly time-consuming if done manually. 

For example, you might decide to run different email marketing campaigns for customers who purchase from your ecommerce store at different frequencies. You might send one version of a promotional email to customers who have only purchased from you once, send a different version to customers who have purchased from you multiple times in the past three months, and so on. Your automated flow might look something like this:

In addition to automatically sending emails to specific segments of customers when certain conditions are met, most email automation software also supports A/B testing, allowing you to test different versions of the same email and then automatically distributing the winning version.

Digital advertising

Digital advertising can be incredibly expensive, so it’s important for marketers to see return on investment. One strategy for ensuring efficient ad spend is automation. This usually involves automatically serving different ads to different types of customers, or testing different versions of the same ad and then automatically running the best one.

For example, bedding company Cozy Earth uses Meta to run automated Facebook ads. According to a case study, Cozy Earth used machine learning to test more than 150 different advertising combinations, then select and display the best ones.

Customer relationship management 

Customer relationship management (CRM) software collects and stores customers’ data to improve customer interactions. Most CRMs offer several types of automation, from automatic lead scoring (predicting how likely a contact is to make a purchase) to customer segmentation (grouping contacts based on shared characteristics). CRMs can also automate tasks like sending emails and dialing phone numbers. 

CRM software is most popular with B2B marketers, but it can be useful for any business with a large customer database.

For example, Roland Corporation, which makes synthesizers, used ActiveCampaign’s CRM software to automate customer behavior tracking and personalized messaging, according to a case study. “For any potential customer who comes into a store and chats with our product specialists, they can get entered, with permission of course, into sales’ pipelines, so they can have a more one-to-one experience with our specialists to guide them through the buying or learning journey,” Roland global CRM manager Paul Smith says in the case study. “Then we also have some automations based on what stage each customer is in within the sales journey. It automates tasks like callbacks and follow-up emails so they go directly to the customers.”

Checkout upsells

When protein-bar company Aloha decided to venture back into direct-to-consumer sales after a break, during which it focused on its retail partners, profitability was key. So the Aloha marketing team used automation to increase average order value. “We started doing things like upselling people at the very end as they got to the checkout,” Aloha CEO Brad Charron says on an episode of Shopify Masters.

There are a variety of apps that can integrate with your Shopify store to automatically upsell or cross-sell at checkout, including ReConvert, which includes options to personalize offers based on customer characteristics, as well as time-sensitive upsells that appear after checkout, on the thank you page. 

Customer experience

Traditionally, marketing and customer service were seen as two separate entities. Marketing automation meant scheduling emails and blog posts, while customer service automation involved chatbots that provided canned answers to frequently asked questions. 

Today, businesses want to give their customers a more seamless customer experience (CX), and on-site chat is becoming an important marketing channel. “The connection between CX and marketing is often the farthest apart in any ecommerce company, and that’s such a disservice to both sides—we are both working towards the same goals, and have so much to learn and share,” Grace Choi, former CX manager at DTC bidet company TUSHY, says in a case study for Gorgias, its customer chat software.

Grace used Gorgias to serve marketing campaigns within TUSHY’s customer chat interface rather than a standard pop-up window. For example, TUSHY’s welcome campaign automatically provides an in-chat discount code for new visitors who seem like they’re about to leave the site. But the campaign only runs during business hours, so that the chatbot can seamlessly transfer the conversation to a CX agent should any questions arise.

Best practices for marketing automation

The best way to implement marketing automation is by being clear on your business goals and then finding the right marketing automation solution to implement your strategy. 

Doing so allows your business to create highly relevant content, nurture prospects, and create brand loyalty. Here are some best practices to consider implementing in your small business:

Set specific and measurable goals

Automation should support your marketing strategy—not the other way around. Before you invest in automation, you should decide which channels and tactics you want to focus on. Then, you can figure out how automation can best support your goals.

One of the benefits of automation software is that it creates reports: It doesn’t just send out an email, it lets you know how many people opened it. But all that data is useless without a clear plan. In a 2023 Salesforce report, business leaders cited overwhelming data volumes as one of the biggest barriers to using data effectively, second only to security threats.

“Oftentimes when we’re capturing data, when we’re trying to understand customers, we don’t do it with an intention of what we’re going to do with that data,” Neil Hoyne, chief strategist for data and measurement at Google, says in an episode of Shopify Masters. For example, email open rate means almost nothing in a vacuum. 

But if customers who open your emails tend to have a high average order value, it might be worth looking into whether increasing your open rate can bump up sales. Now, you have a reason to use email automation: You want to test a variety of email marketing tactics to see if you can increase your open rate, and automation will make this process smoother and faster, as well as provide the open rate data you need to validate your hypothesis. 

“Don’t collect information just for the sake of collecting it,” Neil says. “Think about how you might use it to personalize your emails [or] their experiences, or deliver better value to them.”

Map the customer journey

Every automation workflow starts with a trigger—for example, signing up for a mailing list, abandoning a cart, or viewing a product description page a certain number of times. The customer action triggers the software to automatically serve a specific marketing campaign, maybe an email with a discount code or a particular cross-selling suggestion at checkout.

If your trigger selection is off, it doesn’t matter how great your marketing campaign is, because it won’t be relevant to your customer. Mapping your customer journey—visualizing how real customers interact with your business—will give you a much better sense of what customers need based on the actions they take. Then, you can pair the right triggers with the right campaigns.

Monitor your results and adjust your strategy

After you’ve implemented your marketing automation strategy, it’s important to monitor your results. This will help you determine whether your strategy is effective and whether you need to make any adjustments.

There are a few key metrics you can track, including:

• Lead conversion rate. The percentage of leads who convert into customers.

• Cost per lead. The amount of money you spend to generate each lead.

• Lead quality. The number of leads who convert into customers divided by the total number of leads.

Monitoring these metrics will give you a good idea of how effective your marketing automation strategy is. If you’re not seeing the results you want, make adjustments to your strategy until you find a combination that works.

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Credit: Original article published here.