What if you can increase your conversion rate without working hard but smart? You can increase your conversion rates by making the most of some winning marketing automation ideas.
Marketing automation has become vital to digital marketing to avoid wasting time.
In 2023, the estimated size of the worldwide market for marketing automation software stood at approximately $5.4 billion. 2024 will have more active users as marketers leverage the power of marketing automation. So, what kind of automation can you make to hit your business success?
In this blog post, we’ll share marketing automation ideas that you can easily implement in your business. Ready to dive in? Let’s jump right into the subject!
Table of Contents
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a method to automate monotonous tasks in a workflow with the help of software. It can:
- Streamline your marketing efforts
- Save you and your marketing team time and money
- Increase the overall productivity
How?
With marketing automation workflows, you can automate tasks by setting “triggers” caused by events, actions, or inaction of your leads or customers. These “triggers” initiate specific actions without any human intervention. To do this, you must opt for a reliable automation builder to create a custom workflow.
Let us use an example to understand it better.
Say someone signs up on your website. Leveraging email automation with sign-ups as triggers, you can automate sending welcome emails.
Automated marketing workflows can also help businesses:
- Personalize their marketing campaigns and provide more tailored content to customers
- Strengthen your relationship-building efforts and, consequently
- Bring and nurture customer leads at a lesser cost and time
EngageBay has helped clients with several automated workflows to:
- Cut marketing costs by 82% – without compromising on revenue
- Get over 30,000 customers each month
- Send around 100,000 emails every month
Curious to know how we made it happen? Check out our case study.
Getting Started With Marketing Automation
Before we get to the part where we give you marketing automation ideas, let’s review three fundamental steps of automating any marketing workflow.
Step 1. Choose a marketing automation software
A marketing automation platform lets you:
- Plan and design your automated workflow
- Test and execute them
- Monitor and gauge its success
When selecting marketing automation software, you want to think about:
- The size of your company and team
- The extent of its marketing efforts and goals
- The budget of your company
EngageBay provides an affordable one-stop solution for marketing automation for SMEs. Want to know more about what we have to offer? You can sign up for free and book a demo with our experts.
Step 2. Create a strategy for marketing automation
You must strategize before you implement marketing automation. Think:
- How does marketing automation fit into your marketing strategy?
- How does automation contribute to the success of strategy?
Figure out which marketing tasks to automate for:
- Reducing mundane and repetitive work
- Streamlining performance
- Saving time and money
Step 3. Outline buyer personas and detailed customer journeys
If you want marketing automation to help you build strong relationships with your customers, you need personalization in every workflow. How do you do that? By creating buyer personas.
To achieve success in lead generation and income, 93% of organizations, as reported by Marketing Insider Group, segment their databases by buyer persona. Create buyer personas based on your target audience and define their customer journey. Based on this journey, you can pinpoint actions your customers are “likely” to take to trigger the automation.
Now that you know the implementation steps of marketing automation, let’s get into some tried-and-tested marketing automation ideas.
Read also: Understanding Customer Journeys In Marketing Automation: A Guide
Marketing Automation Ideas for Lead Generation
Lead generation automation consists of several tasks that help a business identify and attract people who can become potential customers. Companies can aim at a higher conversion rate by automating workflows to handle the larger volume of leads.
Here are the top five lead-generating processes to automate.
Idea 1: Automate your email lists
Emails are a great way to build relationships with customers. But, when new subscribers sign up, they won’t be at the same point in the customer journey as your existing clients. For this reason, segmentation is a must. So, first, create an email list and segment leads.
You can segment customers based on what they showed interest in. That way, you can send them tailored content via email.
For example, say you’re a skincare brand. A potential lead signed up for a newsletter and has been viewing your Vitamin C serum. They’re more likely to appreciate content about more Vitamin C products over the types of body washes you’ve got to offer.
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With EngageBay’s Smart Lists, you can automate newsletter signup segmentation. Our Smart Lists are constantly updated with new contacts as they are added or removed from the list depending on predetermined criteria.
Read also: Making Sense Of The Types Of Marketing Automation
Idea 2: Set up a welcome sequence
Once you’ve sorted email lists and segmentation, you want the welcome emails automated. What does this mean? Every time someone signs up for emails, they receive a welcome message via email.
A good welcome email makes a great first impression and consists of the following:
- A catchy subject line
- Content recommendations based on their interests
- Custom offers to make them feel special
Here’s a great example of a welcome email automated by Zillow.
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Need some assistance in launching your welcome email campaign? Here are some ready-to-use welcome email templates to help speed up the content creation portion. You can use these templates as a guide to easily draft a welcome email that speaks directly to your potential customer’s requirement.
Idea 3: Automate the content downloads
Have you ever wanted to download a whitepaper or a report from a website and ask for your email address? Well, that’s one of the most efficient ways to reach someone interested in a specific type of content you’ve got to offer.
With content downloads, you can easily segment the lead into the right type of email lists and keep in touch with them by sending targeted content.
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Create content for your target audience and offer content downloads. You can automate emails with EngageBay to follow up on the subjects of content downloads. Help them understand how you cater to their niche.
Idea 4: Automate webinar lead gen
Webinars are the most effective method for generating high-quality leads, stated 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders. This is an amazing marketing automation idea, as webinars allow marketers to interact with their target audience while imparting useful information. Hence, it is a powerful tool for lead generation and sales.
So, why shouldn’t you make use of it? Especially when EngageBay provides highly customizable webinar email templates.
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You can schedule webinars more efficiently and speed up the registration process by automating it. The combination of EngageBay’s calendar syncing and Scheduler with Zoom’s seamless integration makes setting up webinars a breeze.
With EngageBay+Zoom, you can even invite existing email subscribers from your CRM. You can automate:
- Informing attendees of the webinar agenda,
- Distributing discussion topics, and
- Sending other relevant data.
Sign up with a free account and get started today.
Idea 5: Automate your quotes and proposals
Wouldn’t it be easy if you could automate quotes and proposals?
Say you’ve got an insurance business, and a potential customer is browsing your website, seeking a quote. They click the “Get Quote” CTA button, and it routes them to a responsive form page. They add the necessary details and click “Submit” and BOOM! The information is processed in real-time to give an automated quote and proposal. You can even collect digital signatures.
How easy would it be? With this marketing automation idea, you’ll get more customers, and your team will be rid of redundant paperwork, too.
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EngageBay makes creating proposals easy with predefined templates. With EngageBay, you can:
- Create,
- Send,
- Sign, and
- Track sales proposals.
Want to try it out? Free sign-up for 15 users, and no, we won’t ask for your credit card details.
Read also: Marketing Automation For Startups, The Simple Way
Marketing Automation Ideas for Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing automation ideas guide your leads through the sales funnel, from creating interest to consolidating the purchase intent. They include informing and educating leads about what you offer.
You’ll run different types of lead nurturing campaigns based on where they are in their customer journey.
Here are the top four lead-nurturing marketing automation ideas to set up so that you don’t miss out on any chance to convert a lead into a paying customer.
Idea 1: Automate your lead qualification
Not all leads you get will turn into paying customers. Some may show interest for many other reasons than making a purchase. Wouldn’t it be helpful if you could predict which lead has the potential to become a paying customer?
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Lead qualification lets you ensure potential customers fit your criteria, including location, business role, business size, and budget. You can create a form and gain this information to automatically filter out the unqualified leads and assign the rest to appropriate lead nurturing processes.
Idea 2: Automate the lead segmentation
Once you’ve figured out which lead is more likely to purchase, you want to segment them so that they get the right content. For example, if you’re an insurance business, you don’t want to send a lead content to close them when they don’t even know your policies.
Sending your leads relevant content will make or break their purchase intent. For this reason, you want to ensure you divide your leads into proper segments or groups based on shared characteristics. You may use these groups to send targeted communications based on where they are in their purchase process.
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Use EngageBay’s cutting-edge segmentation tool to try out this marketing automation idea. Create content and campaigns that reach your specific audience. EngageBay allows you to segment your leads by:
- Age,
- Gender,
- Demographics,
- Interests, and
- Other user-defined parameters.
In addition, you may divide your clientele into timezone-based segments.
Read also: Success Stories: 10 B2B Marketing Automation Examples
Idea 3: Automate your lead scoring
Lead scoring assigns a score to each lead using the data you collect. Then, you can determine the most promising leads and send them tailored communications designed to move them down the sales funnel.
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Build an automated lead-scoring setup that adjusts these ratings as soon as consumers complete lead forms, indicating a probability of making a transaction.
Wondering how to implement this marketing automation idea? Improve your conversion rates with the help of EngageBay’s free lead scoring tool. We also offer a paid plan that provides web monitoring and marketing automation tools, where you can customize lead scoring criteria to let you score for different online activities.
Idea 4: Auto-respond to each segment
You’ve created segmented lists of leads and have figured out target content. It’s time to automate delivering the tailored content via email with appropriate messaging for each segment.
How?
You can set up an automated email to respond to the trigger whenever a user performs a certain activity on your site.
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Use the EngageBay email autoresponder to establish the conditions under which your business will send the emails.
Your work is done once you’ve written the emails, saved them, and set the trigger actions. The system will do it without your supervision reliably and repeatedly each time.
Read also: Marketing Automation 101 For The Beginner [With Examples]
Marketing Automation Ideas for User Engagement
Keeping leads and customers engaged even after they’ve made a purchase is important. It helps you build a loyal customer base and encourage them to make another purchase.
Automating engagement workflow helps you keep your customers in touch with your brand. Here are the top five customer engagement marketing automation ideas for your business.
Idea 1: Onboarding drip campaigns
Starting when a user subscribes to your newsletter or purchases something on your website, you can automate sending them a series of emails at predetermined intervals with a drip campaign.
Drip campaigns may continue for months, sending emails at important points of a customer’s journey to keep them engaged. These emails may be for:
- Welcoming a new customer,
- Confirming an order,
- Sending tracking details,
- Letting them know you received their query,
- Updating them on new arrivals, etc.
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To get the email automation for a drip campaign started, you only have to figure out two things.
- What kinds of messages to send, and
- When to send the message.
Idea 2: Automate the personalization of your newsletters
The most successful newsletters encourage readers to check their inboxes, visit your websites, and interact with your content. This must be why 81% of B2B marketers report that email newsletters are their primary content marketing tool.
Earlier in this post, we discussed how lead segmentation may help you take your marketing automation to the next level. Create processes that distribute targeted email content based on individual subscribers’ segmentation lists and tags instead of blasting out generic newsletters to everyone.
Taking this a step further, you can design processes that modify your communications in response to the level of interest your prospects show in the material you send them through email.
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If you want to get the most using this marketing automation idea with your newsletters, you need to send appropriate, relevant, and well-designed messages. If the design part sounds intimidating, you can use customizable templates.
Idea 3: Automate re-engagement emails
We all know those customers who purchase once, and then there’s no activity from them. These dormant customers can be a missed opportunity in business if you don’t take measures to re-engage them and guide them to make a purchase again.
Retargeting emails can be a great way to remind them that you have something to offer they’ve shown interest in.
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To deploy automated emails for re-engagement, you’ll need to create a segment of dormant users, leverage existing data, and send personalized emails that can initiate some activity on their end.
Read also: 11 Examples of Marketing Automation to Implement Today
Idea 4: Automate the emails for birthdays and special events
Wishing birthdays or special events can build your relationship with your customers. It makes them feel special that you reached out to them on a special day. Plus, if they get a discount, it makes the interaction all the more valuable.
On the other hand, birthdays and other events can be a great automation idea to engage clients for businesses. It can also help you close more sales. By automating birthday and special event campaigns, you don’t need to worry about remembering all your customers’ special days.
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To automate birthday and special events campaigns, use your customer data and create triggers to send these emails on specific days.
Idea 5: Automate seasonal offer campaigns
Holidays are a great opportunity to boost your sales as more and more people are willing to purchase gifts and decorations. This is a winning marketing automation idea, as in 2022, American shoppers planned to spend an average of $870 on holiday presents, and automation proved to be the perfect set-up to leverage the most.
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Like birthday and special events campaigns, you can also automate emails for seasonal greetings and special discounts. Ensure to create some eye-catching emails to send out these days and provide attractive deals that are hard to deny.
Read more: How To Write The Perfect Christmas Email [+ Fresh Subject Lines]
Marketing Automation Ideas for The Sales Funnel
When you’ve got potential customers hovering on your website, you can turn them into paying customers even when they leave without purchasing. Automating some steps in the sales funnel does just that, even when your sales team is off the clock.
Here are our top four customer acquisition marketing automation ideas that you can automate.
Idea 1: Sharing leads with the right reps
It would be no fun to lose a client because they didn’t get assigned to the right sales rep, right? Worse, what if no one tended to a very interested client’s query? Sadly, this is a reality for many businesses.
Often, customers (who are ready to buy a product) abandon a business because no sales or customer service rep answered their query. With marketing automation, you can avoid being one of those businesses.
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You can divide your service or sales representatives into predetermined support groups. EngageBay’s CRM automation platform will categorize incoming client queries and notify the right support staff.
Get started with this marketing automation idea quickly and easily by forming groups of any size based on shared interests, expertise, or needs. Use our sales enablement software to provide your sales team with the tools to increase productivity, close more deals, and increase revenue.
Idea 2: Automate cart abandonment follow-up emails
You probably have website visitors who compiled all their favorites and left the cart without making a purchase. Baymard Institute shows about 70% of customers never complete their purchases and abandon carts. You can reduce the number of visitors who abandon their carts on your website by automating the cart abandonment emails.
A cart abandonment process encourages prospects who have left the shopping cart to finish their transaction. Using this process flow, you may send them tailored messages and offers to get them to come back and complete their transaction.
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Create intriguing and urgency-creating cart-abandonment emails and automate them. Ensure your email is automated to show exactly the items they left behind in the cart.
Here’s a great example of a cart abandonment email by Casper with a super catchy headline:
Idea 3: Automate a free trial funnel
One way to get potential customers to buy is to give them a taste of your product via a free trial program. This procedure aids in:
- Establishing credibility,
- Creating worth, and
- Removing purchase barriers.
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Create and automate a free trial funnel to your prospect list by offering a free trial for a specific range of days. You can use the end date as a trigger to either:
- Bill the customer, or
- Send an email to purchase the full version.
Idea 4: Automate your product demo process
A demo process gives potential customers a customized presentation of your product or service. It will highlight many attributes and advantages of what you offer. This procedure assists in the following:
- Establishing trust,
- Delivering value, and
- Responding to any queries leads may have.
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Put your unique automated product demonstrations on display with the help of demo automation software, which also helps with distribution and reporting.
Pre-sales, sales, and marketing teams use demo automation software to demonstrate the benefits of their product to potential customers and provide them with a hands-on experience.
Read also: How To Nail Retail Marketing Automation [Tools, Examples]
Marketing Automation Ideas for Customer Retention
Once you get a customer and they make a purchase, the customer’s journey doesn’t end. They can bring repeat business, but more importantly, they even bring you more customers with the word-of-mouth technique.
Marketing automation for customer retention helps your business stay in touch with your converted leads and help build relationships. Trigger emails are a great example of where you reach out to your customers every time they take a specific action or during a particular event (that you’ve set as a trigger).
Here are our top five customer retention marketing automation ideas.
Idea 1: Automate your upsell and cross-sell campaigns
It’s important to have certain processes that seize the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell to maximize the likelihood of repeat business from first-time buyers.
You can entice clients to make more purchases over weeks, months, or even years after their first purchase with the help of drip campaigns.
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Automate sending emails to a customer who purchased after a specific time (say a week). You can offer complementary products/services to upsell your customers. For example, if your customer bought a t-shirt, you can curate a mail about accessories with the subject line “These will look good on your with your last purchase.”
Idea 2: Roll out renewal messages
Have you ever gotten messages from your ongoing subscriptions that you need to renew your membership? From your music streaming software or a newspaper subscription? It’s to remind the customers that they must renew for continued services.
Often, customers leave because they forget about a membership or contract ending. Don’t let customers go without a chance to remind them to stay with you.
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Use EngageBay’s Smart Workflows to automate sending renewal messages to your customers when their subscription for your service or products ends.
Idea 3: Automate the win-back emails
When clients quit buying from you or cancel their memberships to your business, a win-back automation setup can woo them back. A win-back program can be an automated email campaign triggered by the customer’s action of canceling their membership or subscription.
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To get customers to come back and buy, use tailored messages and offers that help them see value in your brand again. You can provide special offers, ask for feedback, or even create a sense of urgency with the right message.
Idea 4: Ask for feedback
Feedback requests are an important part of a successful customer service program. It lets you know what your customers feel about your customer service team and their efforts in solving their problems.
Feedback requests also let customers know that you care about their opinions, which keeps them happy in the long run when you prioritize addressing their issues.
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You may completely automate feedback requests. Trigger them after consumers contact you with problems; your customer care staff marks them “resolved.” Based on the responses you get, you may also set up automated messages to send as a follow-up.
Idea 5: Automate the referral process
What did we say about the customer journey of a loyal customer? They bring repeat business, and they bring more customers! But you can make this work by sending emails to everyone.
This marketing automation idea is about building a process that keeps track of customer satisfaction ratings throughout the whole customer journey and automatically triggers the delivery of timely, relevant communications. Promote word-of-mouth without resorting to expensive incentives like commissions or free products by ensuring your clients are completely happy with your business.
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At EngageBay, we offer a 30% recurring commission every month to our affiliates as part of our refer and earn program. This encourages our loyal users to step ahead and join our affiliate community.
Read also: Data-Driven Marketing Automation For Maximum Impact
Conclusion
That’s it! There you have it: five different marketing automation ideas that you can automate to multiply revenue. With these automation ideas, we focus on each marketing stage – lead generation, lead nurturing, engagement, acquisition, and retention!
Put these into action individually and see them supporting one another, making marketing campaigns more efficient, and taking a huge chunk of work off of your marketing team.
FAQs
What are marketing automation workflows?
Marketing automation workflows are automated sequences of tasks in response to an action or inaction by a lead or client. These workflows direct customers through their buying journey and nudge them toward a desired outcome, such as a purchase or subscription.
What kind of marketing workflows can you automate?
To reap the most benefits from marketing automation, you should automate tasks that fall into lead generation workflows, lead nurturing workflows, customer engagement workflows, customer acquisition workflows, and customer retention workflows.
Inspiring insights! Appreciate the creativity in these marketing automation ideas. A valuable resource for boosting efficiency in campaigns.
Inspiring ideas! EngageBay’s blog offers creative marketing automation strategies. Practical insights to streamline marketing efforts effectively. Great resource!