When I speak to marketing professionals they usually speak to the email automation side of marketing automation although the thing that enables the email automation is the underlying data and there is a lot that can be done in the data automation. Platforms like Pardot don’t just allow us to send emails based on data points but they also allow us to manipulate the data to serve both business and audience needs.

The automation in marketing automation can be covered in to two parts.

1. Data automation

2. Email automation

And in this article I am going to cover the latter, email automation.

Automation has become a highly prioritized business goal for many organizations. This is to take some of the repetitive tasks off of team members’ plates. Businesses, big and small, take advantage of this concept and send thousands of emails using engagement studios, drip campaigns, flow actions, and customer journeys, all named differently depending on the platforms used but underlying concept is all the same.

The idea is simple enough, automate email sends depending on user activity and data points. We are all familiar with “you left items in your cart” or “come back we miss you” type of emails, and even some of those emails that you receive from sales team members after you completed a web form on a website, these are all sent via a marketing platform.

1- Marketing Qualification Automation

Sales and marketing teams work in tandem to create these automated emails and free up some of the workload on the sales team to manually follow up with each lead. The emails and automations are designed to gauge the user’s intent for the product or services the company provides. For example if a user opens and clicks the automated emails a background automation marks the lead as qualified and sends to the sales team. Until that time all those emails that you receive from the sales team member are simply sent out by a machine. And if the user doesn’t take any action then another automation can send the user down a more generic path until they decide.

The user journey can be as complex as you’d like it to be. Some organizations create more activity touch points to understand the intent and some organization keep it simple and this all depends on number of leads, products, and team members. If you have 100s of products that generate 1000s of leads a month with a 3 person sales team then you may benefit from creating more touch points before marking your leads as sales qualified.

2- Sales Qualification Automation

In this stage we see more organizations relying on the data points collected during the lead capture process. As a very rough example if your product or service is designed for race car drivers and your lead capture form doesn’t ask if the lead is a race car driver then you may be creating leads that may not be sales qualified and in turn your sales team may be spinning their wheels working with unqualified leads.

To solve for that the data you captured through should clearly identify the data points that are relevant to your customers. And once you have that then your automation system can further qualify your leads and mark them as “sales qualified”.

3- Onboarding Automation

Did you make a sale? Does your customer need to know certain things before they can use your product or services? Do you need to send your customers questionnaires or driving directions? All of this can be a part of an onboarding automation. Again using data points we can send your customers one or more emails to prepare them for the best outcomes, for their and your business’ sake.

We create highly tailor customer experience journeys including their onboarding by sending questionnaires, road directions, and even dress code requirements, and more. Each detail can help your customer’s expectations and help for a frictionless customer experience through the help of automation.

4- Offboarding Automation

Very similar to onboarding, offboarding also needs care and attention to bring a customer journey to full circle. Once your customer has purchased your product or service they can continue to receive emails related to the benefits of the product or services, or future feature announcements, or they can be added to upselling automation programs to continue their journey with your brand.

5- Lead Generation Automation

We, marketing automation professionals, set up automations depending on the source of a lead like, LinkedIn LeadGen forms, Zoom or other webinar service provide registration forms, Facebook or other social media forms, and integrate each source into our marketing automation platforms where leads start their journeys with our brands and organizations. The journeys can be as evergreen or targeted as we want including product offers, complimentary demos, gift cards for a face-to-face time, and more.

In closing…

There are many email automation types that businesses can implement and elevate their customers’ experiences, and also to help their teams reduce the number of repetitive tasks. The automations mentioned in the article are commonly utilized by businesses while there are many yet to be imagined.

Let us know about if we can automate your business processes.