16 Important Marketing Automation Workflow Examples

MetYou probably have dozens of tasks you need to knock out to keep your marketing efforts on track. If you're like most marketers, these tasks include writing blog posts, researching your industry, and drafting email copy. 

What if you could automate these dull yet essential tasks so that you could focus on more high-level marketing strategies? This is where marketing AI workflow management come in. 

In this guide, we'll look at some marketing automation workflow examples and how they can help you increase efficiency and reduce repetitive tasks. 

Table Of Contents

• Benefits of Marketing Workflow Automation

• 11 Tips for Efficient Marketing Automation Workflows

• 16 Important Marketing Automation Workflow Examples

• How to Create Marketing Automation Workflows in 5 Simple Steps

• Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today

Benefits of Marketing Workflow Automation

Generate Better Leads

Lead generation is essential for any business to grow. Automating the various processes between marketing and sales allows your team to focus on the overall strategy. They can then concentrate on nurturing the most potential leads rather than struggling with repetitive tasks. This means more prospects and, ultimately, more customers. Marketing automation can also give you a clearer picture of potential customer behavior. Using behavioral tracking methods such as following a user’s path through your website, marketing automation software can help your marketing team understand prospects’ interests and where they are in the purchasing lifecycle. Follow-ups can then be customized around those insights. 

For instance, say a particular customer is reading about a broad category of products. This might indicate that they are at the beginning of the purchasing process, researching and comparing while preparing a shortlist. If they later download white papers on a specific product, that could indicate a narrowed focus and a readiness to talk with a salesperson. 

Bringing together information from touchpoints — including website visits and downloads, social media activity, and direct marketing — enables automatic scoring, qualifying, and prioritizing of leads. This, in turn, can drive broader marketing campaigns, including: 

• Trigger-based marketing messages 

• Infrequent “drip-feed” emails to maintain interest 

• Personalised emails 

• Facebook or Twitter messages 

Nurturing Leads

Nurturing leads can be tricky and time-consuming. Guiding a lead through the journey is worth it when it ends in a sale, but not all your leads will convert to sales. In fact, according to Gleanster Research, 50% of the leads businesses generate are qualified but not ready to buy right now. For a small business, that can create a dilemma: You know roughly half of your leads are qualified but still need nurturing. But with a small team handling both sales and marketing, you can’t exactly afford to keep constant tabs on half of your leads. Don’t stress! Computers were invented precisely for this reason: To do the work humans don’t have the time for. Marketing automation can help. 

Personalizing The Customer Journey

Personalized content is key to nurturing leads. According to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, 77% of buyers want unique, targeted content at each research stage. Marketing automation tools simplify getting the right content to the right buyer at the right time. They also capture data from that content: Which emails are customers opening and clicking on? What posts perform well on your social media channels, and how does that convert to website visits and other user actions? Are mobile messages driving engagement? Automated data capture can answer these and many other questions relevant to your content marketing strategies. 

Take the example of Dell, the well-known computer maker. After noticing heavy traffic volumes to their online store without any sales to show, Dell leveraged behavior analysis. Creating new ads based on customers’ web histories, products viewed, and products left in web shopping carts resulted in a 70% increase in click-through rates and 300% higher conversion rates. 

Data gathered by a marketing automation system is also super practical for qualifying leads on the marketing side before passing them on to sales. Lead scoring and lead grading are two ways a sound automation system captures and processes visitor data to trigger the automatic routing of qualified leads to the right sales reps. 

Better Data for Smarter Decisions

It seems like everyone is talking about “big data” these days, but few businesses grasp how to collect and utilize it. Marketing automation allows you to effortlessly embrace big data, gathering valuable intelligence at scale and putting it immediately to work. By providing a single platform for dashboarding and analytics, closed-loop reporting, and collecting and storing data, marketing automation platforms are the most comprehensive solution for measuring campaigns and predicting consumer behavior on a small business budget. One of the many benefits of a marketing automation platform is the ability to assemble a more complete profile of your prospects than ever before. A/B tests marketing assets to find the best techniques and understand how sales and marketing impact the bottom line. 

Get Sales and Marketing on the Same Page

It’s no secret that integration between sales and marketing can get rocky in many organizations. But why? As technology continues to evolve and shape the buying cycle, the work of marketing and sales only grows closer together, making efficient collaboration more important than ever. Misalignment between the two departments isn’t necessarily the fault of one or the other. The fault lies with outdated processes and structures. When marketing and sales work with different tools toward separate goals, tensions are only natural to build. Fortunately, marketing automation can help by improving lead quality, increasing revenue, and automating traditionally manual processes like lead assignment and follow-up. 

Build A 360-degree View Of Your Customers.

Are you ready to take this whole marketing automation thing to the next level? Pair it with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Integrating CRM with marketing automation helps you explore detailed behavioral tracking, like the pages your prospects are visiting, the types of content they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle. Suddenly, you’ve got incredible insight into what your leads are interested in, which lets you custom-tailor everything from content marketing to sales pitches. 

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11 Tips for Efficient Marketing Automation Workflows

1. Use Otio: The Best AI Tool for Research and Writing

Knowledge workers, researchers, and students are overwhelmed by content overload and left to deal with it using fragmented, complex, and manual tooling. Otio solves this problem by providing researchers with one AI-native workspace. It helps them: 

1. Collect many data sources, from bookmarks, tweets, and extensive books to YouTube videos. 

2. Extract key takeaways with detailed AI-generated notes and source-grounded Q&A chat. 

3. Create draft outputs using the sources you’ve collected. Otio helps you to go from the reading list to the first draft faster. 

Along with this, Otio also enables you to write research papers/essays faster. Here are our top features that researchers love: AI-generated notes on all bookmarks (Youtube videos, PDFs, articles, etc.), Otio enables you to chat with individual links or entire knowledge bases, just like you chat with ChatGPT, as well as AI-assisted writing. 

Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner -- try Otio for free today!

2. Craft a Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map visually represents the customer's interactions with a brand from the initial contact through post-purchase. Understanding this journey helps marketers identify key touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for engagement. With a customer journey map, marketers can tailor their automation workflows to address specific needs at each stage. This strategy can enhance personalization, increase customer satisfaction, and ensure automated interactions align with the customer's experience. To begin, marketing teams should outline their goals. Clear objectives can guide an automation strategy and customer journey, whether lead generation, customer retention, or improving CX.

3. Create Engaging Content

Engaging content is the heart of successful marketing. It captivates the audience, builds brand affinity, and encourages action. Automated content or messages should be compelling, timely, and resonate with the audience. Automation is more effective when high-quality content supports it. If marketers develop engaging content for automated emails, social media posts, and other channels, they can ensure the target audience remains interested and responsive throughout the customer journey.

4. Plan a Lead Management Strategy

Effective lead management helps convert prospects into customers. A well-defined strategy ensures that customer-facing employees nurture leads appropriately, preventing potential customers from slipping through the cracks. Automation can streamline these processes. With solid lead management and scoring strategy, marketers can use automation to deliver targeted content, track behavior, and automatically transition leads to the sales team when they exhibit buying signals.

5. Generate Buyer Personas

Buyer personas outline the target audience's preferences, pain points, and motivations. This insight is critical to creating personalized and relevant marketing messages, and marketing automation becomes more effective when tailored to specific buyer personas. If marketing teams can understand their target market more deeply, they can create automated workflows that resonate with different segments' unique needs and preferences. This leads to higher engagement and conversions.

6. Create Behavior-Based Triggers

Behavior-based triggers respond to user actions, enabling real-time, personalized interactions. This effort allows for timely automated messages aligning with the user's interests or needs. Overall, behavior-based triggers enhance the relevance of computerized communications. Whether they send a follow-up email after an online interaction or recommend products based on past purchases, this approach strengthens customer engagement. It drives conversions when a user is most likely to engage.

7. Use Segmentation for Personalization

Segmentation helps marketing teams divide the overall contact database into different buckets. They can base these lists on demographic information, user behaviors, preferences from past interactions or purchases, and first-party data. With segmentation, marketers can create more personalized communications, which increase the messaging's relevance and improve CX. If the team builds out automated workflows, segments could qualify for different journeys, and marketers could have one-to-many interactions with various audience groups.

8. Embrace A/B Testing

To see how they perform, marketing teams should regularly conduct A/B tests on various elements of active campaigns, such as subject lines, images, and calls to action. When they analyze the results, they can fine-tune their approach and maximize the effectiveness of their efforts. A/B testing different campaign elements often pushes engagement and conversion rates higher, as it delivers the winning test result to a large enough sample audience to ensure prospects are more likely to take action.

9. Nurture Customer Advocacy

Turning customers into advocates can significantly improve a brand's likelihood of success. Advocates are likelier to refer others and become repeat customers, contributing to long-term business growth. Marketers can use automation to nurture customer relationships beyond the purchase. For example, they can implement automated campaigns that seek reviews, encourage social sharing, or send exclusive loyalty offers, which can turn satisfied customers into enthusiastic brand advocates. In turn, those advocates contribute to a positive brand image and can attract new business.

10. Integrate Marketing and Sales Teams

When businesses implement marketing automation practices, they should integrate their marketing automation platform with their CRM system to enable collaboration between the marketing and sales teams. This alignment streamlines communication and ensures a smooth handoff of leads between departments. For sales teams specifically, visibility into past and current interactions from marketing campaigns enables reps to have more enriched conversations with prospects and either address or get ahead of customer needs and pain points. Additionally, this integration can equip the team with the necessary skills to make the most of the automation tools. Training both teams on the marketing automation platform ensures everyone understands how to use it effectively.

11. Monitor and Analyze Metrics

Lastly, marketers should regularly monitor KPIs to evaluate the success of marketing automation efforts. This analysis offers valuable insights into what works and what needs adjustments. Successful marketing teams change campaigns that don't perform well and recreate successful parts of other campaigns to drive similar results. When teams have good data evaluation practices, organizations can better measure ROI, the strategy's effect on the business, and resources needed for future growth.

16 Important Marketing Automation Workflow Examples

1. Welcome Automation: Your New Contact's First Automated Email is a "Welcome" Email

When someone subscribes to your email list or makes a purchase on your site, the first email they receive is an automated "welcome" message. This message can be individual or part of a series to introduce the new contact to your organization. Either way, welcome emails have an impressive average open rate of 30.69%—more than 202% higher than usual email campaigns. 

As for what to include in a welcome automation workflow, some popular ideas include Your company’s story, Showcase your products, A special offer or discount, Reviews from existing customers, and Invitations to follow you on social media. You can apply the same idea to your unique business needs by starting with an email survey to gather first-party data and continuing the workflow in different ways, depending on the answers. 

Creating different flows depending on the source that led new leads to your site (e.g., social media, email newsletters, and so on). Building a distinct onboarding journey for users who browsed a specific category on your site. 

2. Cart Recovery Emails: Getting Back Lost Visitors

Cart abandonment remains one of the biggest problems in the world of eCommerce. Any marketing team looking to maximize their budget and revenue should constantly seek ways to get cart abandoners to complete their purchase. Insider helps you do this by automatically creating segments of cart abandoners and letting you easily add cart items to your emails, push notifications, and messaging channel communications. Our clients use a few channels to recover lost carts: Email and SMS, the most widely-used combination of channels by retail brands worldwide. Slazenger used both channels to build cart recovery campaigns that produced a 49x ROI in eight weeks (we’ll discuss their use cases later in this guide). WhatsApp is an underutilized but potent channel for recovering potentially lost revenue. Picniq used it to achieve an 80% open rate and a 5x ROI on cart abandonment campaigns. 

3. Browse Abandonment Emails: Re-engaging Visitors Who Didn't Buy

Browse abandonment automation workflows help you re-engage visitors who look around your website but leave without taking action. The goal is to return them to your site and recapture lost conversions. If the visitor is already on your contact list, you can create a workflow that triggers when they view particular pages on your site and leave without purchasing anything. You can send them a simple reminder, such as “We noticed you left without buying,” or take the opportunity to offer them a discount or free shipping if they purchase within a specific amount of time. Browse abandonment emails are an effective way to engage visitors. If they buy your products, they’ll receive order confirmation emails, increasing their engagement and interest in your brand. 

4. Order Confirmation Emails: The Transactional Email You Must Send

Transactional flows are a must for any online business. That’s why most eCommerce platforms and content management systems (CMSs) have built-in automated email workflows that trigger immediately after a successful transaction. 

5. Product Abandonment Emails: Targeting Specific Products

A product abandonment workflow is similar to browsing abandonment emails but with one key difference: they’re sent to view only specific products. In comparison, a browse abandonment email is broader and more general. As this workflow triggers when particular pages have been viewed, you can create highly targeted messages—such as highlighting product features or sharing recent reviews. 

6. Price Drop and Inventory Alert Workflows: Keeping Interested Shoppers in the Loop

Sending alerts for price drops or when specific items are back in stock helps automate the marketing process of targeting users who have almost purchased. These workflows are powerful for targeting users on the verge of making their first purchase and those with a high discount affinity. 

7. Order Confirmation Emails: The Transactional Email You Must Send

Regarding open and click-through rates, order confirmation emails are among the most effective. That’s mainly because the person has made a purchase and is expecting the email, which typically includes details of the order and an estimated delivery date. Not only are these emails expected, but recipients often check them multiple times. These emails have valuable information, including what was ordered, the delivery address, the total price, and expected arrival, which can prompt the recipient to double-check the details. 

8. Upsell and Cross-Sell Workflows: Boosting Your Bottom Line

Upsells and cross-sells can help you drastically increase key metrics like average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and customer retention. That’s why you should find strategic places during the customer lifecycle to implement upsell and cross-sell workflows. For example, you can build marketing automation workflows that automatically Suggest frequently purchased products with the one currently in the customer’s cart. 

This can be done with a good product recommendation engine that analyzes browsing, purchase history, and real-time behaviors to deliver relevant recommendations across landing pages and channels like email. Employ this same strategy but on a channel like SMS or WhatsApp a few days or weeks after a customer has completed their first purchase. Generate upsell and cross-sell opportunities by offering discounts on customers’ registration anniversaries, birthdays, or other important events. 

In addition to those details, if you follow best practices, you can make your order confirmation email more valuable by including the order timeline and setting expectations for each step, from processing the order to shipping and delivery. Bestsellers: what items are other buyers looking at? Upsells and cross-sells: what items pair well with the order or make it even better? The order confirmation email can be expanded into a larger marketing workflow by sending additional emails aimed at helping them get the most out of the new product, such as Care Tips, How to pair it with other items, Cross-selling related products 

9. Shipping Confirmation Emails: Keeping Buyers Informed

A shipping confirmation automation workflow is usually short, consisting of a single message that informs a buyer their order has shipped. Shipping confirmation emails can, however, be expanded. Instead of an order confirmation series, you could create an automated email workflow that follows shipping confirmation. With the item on its way, it’s a great time to prepare the buyer for its arrival with tips. Apple does this well, offering help trading in or recycling their older devices, sharing FAQs and advice on getting set up, and encouraging cross-sells by sharing links to accessories. 

10. Pre- and Post-Purchase Feedback Workflows: Collecting Reviews

With the cookieless marketing era upon us, teams must rely much more heavily on zero- and first-party data gathered directly from customers. That’s why it’s crucial to have workflows for collecting that information at different stages of the customer journey. The classic way to do this is to send a post-purchase email survey asking customers to rate your product and the overall experience. 

Depending on your customers ' preferences, this can be done on messaging channels like SMS or WhatsApp. One way to take this tactic to the next level is using AMP emails. The AMP technology lets customers answer surveys directly in the email without going to your site or app. This removes a lot of friction from the process and ensures we get more answers from your customer base. 

At the same time, we can also use AMP emails to gather valuable customer data pre-purchase. For example, we can ask them what content or products they’re interested in so we can tailor our follow-up communications to their interests. 

11. Birthday Workflows: Acknowledge Your Customers' Special Day

Let your audience know you care by sending them a message on their birthday. These messages can be highly personalized—or at least, they should be if you’re following best practices. The trigger is as simple as telling your workflow to be sent whenever a date matches the birthday provided by a subscriber. You could send an email, SMS, or push message on their big day or experiment with sending a day or two earlier. The only caveat here is you must be asking subscribers for their birthday, so we recommend including this field on your sign-up forms or landing pages. If you’re only asking for their name and email address, you won’t be able to send them birthday messages. 

12. Lead Validation and Promotion Workflows: Getting Leads Ready for Sales

Generali is one of the world’s largest insurance and asset management companies. After using Insider to integrate their customer data and increase leads by 3x, they needed to build an automated lead validation workflow. This workflow aimed to give each lead a score based on their website visits. That would allow the sales team to focus on the leads with the highest purchase intent. It would also make it possible to send relevant information to each lead at the right time. 

13. Time-Off Request Approvals: Managing Employee Vacations

Vacation requests can quickly pile up in the email inbox if not managed well. Instead of having team members send requests to their managers via email, let the employee file requests in your automated system. Create a time-off request form to centralize all applications in one board. Let managers and HR officers have visibility on the board so they can quickly review and approve. Use the status change automation: “when the status changes to Approved, send a notification to the person who filed for the time-off.” 

14. Expense Reimbursement Workflows: Automating Employee Reimbursements

With workflow automation, employees simply need to fill out and submit a reimbursement request form that their manager will review and approve. The request is visible on a project board that the finance department can access, which will then be evaluated to ensure that it reflects on the employee’s next paycheck. On the project management app Asana, you may configure the automation so that when the reimbursement request moves to the finance team evaluation section, the system automatically assigns it to a team member of that department and sends a note or prompts a team chat app notification. Asana integrates smoothly with Slack and Microsoft Teams, allowing users to get updates on task creation, completion, or comments. 

15. Ticket Management Workflows: Organizing Incoming Requests

Organize incoming service requests by setting up a form and letting the system automatically convert them into IT board tasks. monday.com enables teams to collect information through customizable forms. It also allows the creation of a workflow automation rule that will notify someone whenever a new item is created. This functionality makes tracking incoming IT tickets easier and prompts team members to act appropriately. 

16. Asset Management Workflows: Tracking Company Hardware

When an employee joins or leaves the company, the IT team is actively involved in onboarding and offboarding, particularly distributing and returning hardware. By implementing online forms, you can easily monitor which employees have received or returned the required devices. With workflow automation, the system will notify key IT team members for action about an asset that needs to be deployed or received. If using the project management solution Jira, create an automation rule that automatically assigns issues to team members. “When an issue is created” is among the platform’s recommended triggers, making it easy for new users to set up this automation command. 

Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner -- try Otio for free today!

How to Create Marketing Automation Workflows in 5 Simple Steps

1. Equip the Potential of Otio for AI-Powered Marketing Automation 

Knowledge workers, researchers, and students are overwhelmed by content overload and left to deal with it using fragmented, complex, and manual tooling. Otio solves this problem by providing researchers with one AI-native workspace. It helps them: 

1. Collect many data sources, from bookmarks, tweets, and extensive books to YouTube videos. 

2. Extract key takeaways with detailed AI-generated notes and source-grounded Q&A chat. 

3. Create draft outputs using the sources you’ve collected. Otio helps you to go from the reading list to the first draft faster. 

Along with this, Otio also enables you to write research papers/essays faster. Here are our top features that researchers love: AI-generated notes on all bookmarks (Youtube videos, PDFs, articles, etc.), Otio enables you to chat with individual links or entire knowledge bases, just like you chat with ChatGPT, as well as AI-assisted writing. 

Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner -- try Otio for free today!

2. Getting Started: Set Up Triggers

A trigger tells your technology to move on to the next step. Typically, a trigger will be some kind of user action (or a period of inaction). 

3. Defining Actions in Marketing Automation Workflows

In programming terms, if the trigger is your “if,” the action is your “then.” This is the action your marketing automation platform will take in response to the trigger. For instance, if someone opens an email (the trigger), your system sends them a follow-up email (the action) 48 hours later. 

4. Build Conditions to Refine Actions in Your Automations

Conditions must be in place for the system to complete the triggered action. For example, personalized discounts and special offers are typical examples of e-commerce marketing automation. You could create a marketing automation workflow where the trigger is a customer completing a purchase, and the action is to send them a discount code for the next time, but only if the initial purchase was $50 or more. In this case, the user must perform the trigger action and meet the conditions for the follow-up action. Conditions exist to set guardrails around your automations to ensure action is only triggered under the right circumstances. They can also serve as a fork in the user’s path. If the condition is met, they receive one message; if not, they receive another. 

5. Set Time Controls to Your Marketing Automation Workflow

Time controls, sometimes called flow controls, are what you use to determine when precisely an action is taken. With custom time controls, most of your automated marketing tasks happen on a delay, from as short as a few minutes to days or weeks later. While building a marketing automation workflow for your sales funnel, remember that the trigger tells your system that an action must be taken. Conditions provide guardrails to ensure appropriate action for this contact and situation. Time controls determine when the action is taken. The action engages with the contact to deepen and continue the relationship.

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Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today

Research materials come in many different shapes and sizes. There are articles and papers, of course, but there's also a wealth of knowledge in podcasts, YouTube videos, and social media posts. For a thorough literature review, consider all these sources and more. Otio offers an intuitive way to collect research materials from across the web. With our Chrome extension, you can save any link to your Otio workspace in just one click. This includes links from Google Scholar, research databases, YouTube, Reddit, and your Twitter feed. Otio automatically generates notes on these links (more on that below!) to help you get organized as quickly as possible. When it comes to academic research, organization is key. The longer you let your materials sit, the more likely you will miss crucial information that could enhance your project. Starting with a tool like Otio can help you clear the clutter and confidently tackle your next big project. 

Extracting Key Takeaways: The Fast Track To Understanding 

Once you've collected your research materials, the next step is to read them and extract key takeaways. This process can be overwhelming, especially when dealing with large volumes of information. Otio speeds up this workflow with AI-generated notes. Instead of reading through every article, paper, or book chapter, you can review Otio's notes to get the gist of each source quickly. This will allow you to identify the most relevant materials to your research and target your reading accordingly. If you still want to read the original materials, you can do so with a clear understanding of the content. Otio also lets you chat with research materials using AI. That's right, you can ask detailed questions about individual sources or even whole collections of notes. This unique feature further expedites the research process and helps you grasp complex topics faster. 

Creating Written Outputs: The AI-Assisted Writing Revolution 

Otio is designed to help you take your research and turn it into written outputs with as little friction as possible. Our AI tools will help you smoothly transition from reading research to writing about it. You can start this process by using Otio to create detailed notes on each source before working on your following big academic paper.  Once you have a solid understanding of your research, you can begin drafting your paper with the help of AI. In Otio, you can create a new document from your collected research materials, allowing you to write your following paper or essay faster than ever.

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