10 Marketing Workflow Automation Best Practices

Marketing a product or service can be overwhelming. There are so many tasks to juggle simultaneously. Before you know it, the leads go cold or drop off before they even reach your attention. One of the best ways to combat marketing stress is to organise your processes and automate repetitive tasks. Marketing workflow automation helps you do just that. It lets you create a roadmap for your marketing processes to streamline your efforts, reduce human error, and improve efficiency. 

Using AI workflow management to organise and automate your marketing tasks will not only make the process less daunting, but it will also improve your performance. In this guide, we'll discuss how marketing workflow automation works, its benefits, how to get started, and how to use AI tools to improve your marketing performance. 

A valuable tool to help you achieve your objectives is Otio's AI research and writing partner. This solution can help you write and research efficiently using an AI tool to improve your marketing workflow automation processes and get started on your marketing tasks. 

Table Of Contents

• What Marketing Workflows Can You Automate

• 10 Best Marketing Workflow Automation Tools

• Benefits of Automating Marketing Workflows

• 10 Marketing Workflow Automation Best Practices

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

What Marketing Workflows Can You Automate

1. Welcome Email: The First Impression of Email Marketing Automation 

An effective welcome email is a great way to greet new customers. They help you lay the foundations for lasting customer relationships. Welcome emails are one of the simplest automations to set up. In your marketing automation software, define the trigger (e.g., when someone signs up for your newsletter). Then, add a wait time before sending the welcome email. 

2. Onboarding Email Series: The Key to Customer Retention

Onboarding emails are key to reducing churn and encouraging customer loyalty. You can trigger onboarding emails after a customer signs up or purchases. The onboarding series should give them tips on how to get started with your products or services. That way, you can guide customers from the beginning of their journey. Onboarding emails also help you create a smoother customer experience. 

3. Birthday or Anniversary Greeting: Personalization Makes It Sweet

Birthday emails are practical examples of marketing automation. With marketing automation tools, you can automate birthday emails easily. You can send customers a discount for their birthday or join date anniversary. Birthday emails are a type of personalised email marketing campaign. They’re a great way to build customer loyalty, stand out in a crowded inbox, and keep your brand in mind. With email automation software, it’s simple to automate birthday emails. All you need is the date of birth as a contact attribute. Usually, you can ask new customers to provide their date of birth when they sign up on your website. 

4. Cross-Selling or Upselling: The Email Automation Boosts Revenue

Use marketing automation to cross- or upsell your products. One way is to share personalised recommendations. This includes similar items or products that are frequently bought together. You can recommend products based on each customer’s purchase history. This marketing automation example is practical for encouraging new customers to buy again. This can both boost revenue and enhance the customer experience. 

5. Abandoned Cart Emails: Recover Lost Revenue

Cart abandonment can be a big problem for ecommerce companies. You can avoid this by sending automatic notifications such as abandoned cart emails. Abandoned cart emails remind customers about products left in their online shopping carts. In the email, you might offer an extra discount to encourage them to finish their purchase. Adding an item to an online shopping cart will trigger the automation. Customers not buying within the wait time will receive an abandoned cart email. 

6. Post-Purchase Emails: Increase Customer Lifetime Value 

Post-purchase emails are highly effective at customer retention. With marketing automation tools, it’s easy to send follow-up emails. You can trigger these messages after a customer makes a purchase. Use this opportunity to give tips on product use or maintenance. Or ask customers to leave a review. 

7. Surveys or Feedback Requests: Get Customer Insights

Marketing automation software makes it easier to gather feedback from your customers. Instead of manually sending survey emails, trigger them at key touchpoints. You can automate feedback requests when a customer purchases or speaks with a customer service rep. This can help you improve your services moving forward. 

8. VIP Offers: Reward Your Best Customers

VIP offers are a great way to encourage customer loyalty. And marketing automation helps you identify your most valuable customers for VIP rewards. From there, you can target them with relevant content. This might include early access sales or exclusive discounts. 

9. Re-Engagement Campaigns: Win Back Lost Customers

Re-engagement or reactivation emails can help you renew interest in your brand. This can mean Asking email subscribers with poor engagement if they still want to hear from you and lending back a customer who hasn’t bought in a while with a discount. 

Reaching out to users who haven’t logged in or used your product in a while, Marketing automation example re-engagement campaign from Clear To set this up in your marketing automation tool; you first need to define what an inactive subscriber is. This then triggers a campaign or series of win-back emails.

Bonus tip

You can also use re-engagement emails to clean the automated email list. Contacts who don’t engage are removed from your email list. 

10. Product Updates or Launches: Keep Customers in the Loop

Use marketing automation to share news about product releases, launches, or other updates. For instance, you can use automation to segment existing customers. That way, you’ll identify those most interested in your new products. This will help you drive sales and get more out of your marketing efforts. 

11. Gated Content: Nurture Leads with Automated Workflows

Gated content is an effective lead-generation tactic. That’s because it attracts those who are most interested in your company. Offer something like an ebook or a webinar. Then, ask customers to provide their name, email address, and other contact details. Subscribers usually sign up via a website pop-up or landing page. From there, share the content they signed up for automatically. You can then nurture leads by following up with more content tailored to their interests.

10 Best Marketing Workflow Automation Tools

1. Otio: The Ultimate AI Workspace for Researchers

The AI-native workspace helps researchers manage the overwhelming flow of AI-generated information. Here’s how it works: 

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. 

Our tool has web scraping capabilities that allow you to access a wide range of data sources beyond traditional academic papers and search engines. This feature enables researchers to collect diverse information from sources like bookmarks, tweets, books, and YouTube videos, streamlining the process of curating and analyzing data for research purposes. Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner — try Otio for free today!

2. Brevo: A Marketing Automation Hybrid

Brevo is a hybrid between a CRM, a meeting scheduler, and a marketing automation tool. This app is simple, easy to use, and offers a free plan with automation features for multiple marketing channels. Brevo’s workflow builder is flexible and offers many options for creating custom automations. It’s an excellent place for small businesses to start with marketing workflow automation. 

3. Omnisend: Email Marketing Automation for Ecommerce

Omnisend is an email and marketing automation solution for ecommerce businesses. The platform excels at automating email and SMS communications with extensive features to help you get started quickly. Omnisend offers a free plan with advanced features and flexible workflow automations to help you build custom workflows or choose from pre-built templates. 

4. HubSpot: The Industry Standard for Marketing Automation

HubSpot is the industry standard for marketing automation software. Its Marketing Hub integrates seamlessly with HubSpot’s CRM, CMS, customer service, and other solutions, making it incredibly powerful and flexible. The software is extensive yet very easy to use. 

5. ActiveCampaign: AI-Powered Marketing Automation

ActiveCampaign is a robust email and marketing automation solution with advanced features for small and large enterprises. The platform has a vast library of workflow automations (many specific to different industries) and AI functionality to help you compose emails, predict sending times, and automate workflow creation. 

6. Customer.io: Customizable Marketing Workflows

Customer.io is a marketing automation platform focused on email communications. It excels at automating personalized messages to help you engage customers throughout their journey. The highly customizable app lets you personalize messages and workflows with built-in features and custom code. 

7. Klaviyo: Best for Ecommerce Email Marketing

Klaviyo is an email marketing and automation platform built specifically for ecommerce businesses. It will help you collect and analyze customer data to create targeted workflows that improve customer engagement and boost sales. 

8. Orrto: Marketing Automation Made Simple

Orrto is an easy-to-use marketing automation platform with extensive reporting features. The app tracks user behavior to help you build automations that enhance the user experience and boost conversions. Orrto also offers generative AI features to help you improve your marketing content. 

9. Mailchimp: Email Marketing with Automation Features

Mailchimp started as an email marketing platform, and it’s still one of the most popular solutions for businesses to create, send, and track email newsletters. Today, Mailchimp has robust marketing automation features to help users create complex workflows for various customer communication formats. 

10. Buffer: Social Media Marketing Automation

Buffer is a social media management app that drives engagement and results on social media. Its features will help you plan and schedule social media content. You can handle multiple accounts if you need them. It is also available on Android and iOS to access your social media accounts from anywhere. 

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Benefits of Automating Marketing Workflows

1. Accelerate Lead Qualification and Nurturing

In our experience with over 4,000 companies using Encharge, organizations primarily adopt marketing automation to nurture leads. Marketing automation tools like Encharge allow businesses to segment and qualify cold and warm leads. This process usually involves lead scoring, assigning “scores” to leads based on their actions on and off your website, and data attributes like demographics and survey responses. 

For example, someone who clicked a link in an email or filled out a form on your landing page will receive a higher score than a lead who has never opened your emails or, even worse, unsubscribed from your email messages. The objective is to narrow your audience down to leads with higher potential and give less priority to those that don’t fit your target market.

2. Unify Marketing and Sales in a Single Platform

Digital marketing functions in a way that the line separating marketing and sales is gradually fading. Integrated marketing automation and CRM solutions align the marketing and sales departments better. Once leads are in the CRM, salespeople can take them to the end of the sales process and into customer onboarding. Marketing automation aligns sales and marketing because it creates processes across the departments and gets them together to decide what strategies they will use and what marketing KPIs they need to track. 

Ultimately, this cross-team work creates a more seamless and integrated approach to enhancing the customer journey. This kind of marketing and sales integration is most apparent in businesses that allow customers to get goods or services immediately without involving any people. For instance, when you go online to order food, your journey will sometimes begin by clicking a banner advertisement, which will take you to the ordering system and then the checkout. 

That kind of automation handles everything, covering everything from the first marketing touchpoint to closing the sale. UTM tags and attribution platforms allow you to track that process to get a clear picture of what happened through the customer journey and understand where your conversions are coming from. For instance, Encharge automatically generates UTM campaigns so you can track how your email campaigns perform in Google Analytics. 

3. Boost Conversions

Automating your marketing efforts isn’t just a way to make your life easier. It also improves your bottom line. It’s no wonder why businesses recognize the effectiveness of automated marketing and continue to bump their spending in this area. What automation brings to the table is far more valuable than any investment if you use the tools that fit your purpose. 

An average of 51% of companies currently use marketing automation, and 58% of B2B companies plan to adopt marketing automation software in the foreseeable future. It all boils down to conversions. Something is wrong if your marketing and sales cycle doesn’t turn leads into paying customers. With automation, messages to boost engagement and sales can be sent more quickly and to more people than having someone do it manually. 

That alone increases the likelihood of conversions. That efficiency then creates a snowball effect. It enables more immediate responses to customers, helping them solve problems, especially for complicated industries like blockchain NFT platforms, stock options trading, etc. Furthermore, it increases the odds of people opening messages and purchasing because you have the data to create a more personalized approach. 

4. Gain Access to Accurate and Up-to-Date Data 

Not only does marketing automation simplify a marketing task, but it also makes the reporting part a breeze. With everything digitized, you can easily track performance metrics with a click. Right off the bat, there are things you can never measure without email marketing or a marketing automation platform, such as open rates and bounce rates. But aside from that, automation can also give you insight into things like customer behavior while they’re on your website or what kind of promotional material they’re more likely to elicit their response. 

Although these metrics are readily available without additional tools, manual calculations take time and are more susceptible to human error. Marketing automation platforms allow you to be more confident about the accuracy of your analytics and actionable reporting. These tools can also give you real-time data, historical data, and sometimes even future projections. You can view numbers by day, week, month, or year and look at trends and patterns. You can generate reports using fancy charts and as many data points as possible. That’s something you can’t easily accomplish without software. 

5. Enhance Collaboration Between Team Members

Marketing encompasses various digital marketing channels, from email, SEO, and paid advertising to social media. A typical marketing team comprises different departments that must communicate to maintain a coherent marketing campaign. If you don’t use any software to organize work and facilitate collaboration, chances are, you’re all over the place, and so are your teammates. If something as simple as communication between members is not streamlined, you can’t expect the team to achieve a specific efficiency level. In 2021, more than 80% of employees rely on automated software to help them in their day-to-day tasks. 

6. Identify Bottlenecks in Your Marketing Funnel 

Marketing automation is your best friend if you aim to streamline each stage and develop the best high-converting funnel. With all the benefits previously mentioned, automation can help you see the big picture and make the necessary adjustments to the overall flow of the customer journey. That bird’s-eye view will help you make the right decisions backed by data. For example, your automation reports may tell you that the initial phases of your marketing cycle are performing well in driving traffic to your website. 

Still, it also tells you those visitors aren’t converting to customers. You probably would have flipped the entire marketing campaign without the right tools to track this because of poor sales. The problem was only with your website's usability. Marketing automation platforms can help your business operations be more productive by revealing the bottlenecks and allowing you to address them adequately. Without looking at the whole story, you may end up with a solution that doesn’t help solve anything or, worse, will only add more problems.

7. Boost Customer Experience

Customer experience is not just a business catchphrase. It’s a fundamental goal revolves around putting your customers’ needs at the center of everything you do as a business. Marketing automation is increasingly used to achieve that goal by delivering targeted and meaningful interactions across channels and stages. When your product or service is marketed personally, customers feel that your business is not indifferent to their needs. 

8. Keep Your Pipeline Active While You Sleep

The best and worst thing about marketing is that it should never stop. Fundamentally, marketing automation solves that problem from the get-go. Whether or not you’re in front of your computer, you know that emails are being sent to nurture more leads into new customers because you’ve automated your email communication. You also know social media content is being published because you’ve already scheduled them weeks or months in advance. 

While all that is happening, text messages are being sent, forms are being filled out, and buyers are being introduced to your hottest offerings. That’s the very essence of automation. Of course, when you’ve got a massive chunk of your responsibilities fully automated, you have more room to focus on macro-level initiatives such as high-level marketing strategy and brand-building. You’ve heard the saying, “work on the business, not in the business.”

9. Improve Testing 

Marketing automation systems show you precisely and instantly what works and doesn’t in your campaigns. Having that information makes it easier to modify your operations accordingly. This is where A/B testing comes in. Take the initial data, build some hypotheses, test them, and then collect more. You can identify and double down on what is performing best when you test several elements. For example, suppose you’re contacting artists to organize an online event. In that case, you may perform A/B testing to see which email subject lines result in higher open rates or which email copy elicits more positive responses. 

This flexibility in testing creative content and messages encourages businesses to use automation tools that offer A/B testing capabilities. You can automatically determine the better version of each test based on which version has more opens or clicks within a specific period. Ultimately, A/B testing increases conversion rates and allows you to segment groups and deliver targeted messages based on their needs and interests. The more testing you perform, the more likely you will get better results, making your marketing campaign more profitable.

10. Reduce Costs by Saving Time and Resources 

Imagine if your business team had to handle all those marketing tasks on their own… manually. Indeed, it will take time and a big team of specialists to carry out your campaigns, mainly if your business relies heavily on marketing and lead generation. They’d have to comb through emails, look at data, and send individual messages day in and day out. In addition, as your customer base expands and grows, you need more staff to keep up with the multitude of tasks and ensure that you avoid inaccurate customer data. 

With automation, however, you might not need that many people in your team. You only need to have enough people to leverage the tools fully. Marketing automation also helps clean your pipeline so you don’t waste time on leads with zero chance of converting. When your database is at its optimum level, you increase your chances of boosting your ROI because you get more by doing (or spending) less. If you already have a big team and are only starting to use automation, you don’t necessarily have to let people go. Instead, you can find other ways to leverage their skills. Better yet, why not train them to carry out the tasks that automation can’t do?

11. Build Brand Loyalty

There are several ways to use the power of automation to build your brand and keep current customers committed and engaged. The first way is by looking for brand ambassadors. Use the lead scoring capabilities of your marketing automation tool to identify those who regularly download, share, and comment on your marketing content. These repeat customers are already willing to praise you, so why not involve them even more? You can also engage your fans to join rewards programs. For example, the eCommerce brand Key West Aloe uses automation to track customer behavior and reward them with redeemable points based on specific actions. Another way is to gather feedback. 

Marketing automation is the best tool to keep your finger on the pulse of your customer loyalty. Surveys are a great way to tell your customers you care about their thoughts. Automation tools can scrape online review websites and analyze what people say about your brand. You can use social media or send a personalized email and have them fill out a form. That will give you insight on where to improve and how to reduce unpleasant experiences. 

12. Deliver Personalized Messages with Segmentation 

Last but not least, automation tools also allow you to segment your audience more efficiently and send more personalized cross-channel messages. You already have data on groups of people based on different criteria. You can use that data to send automated messages specific to that group no need to manually plow through a giant spreadsheet of fields and filters. 

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

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10 Marketing Workflow Automation Best Practices

1. Map Your Customer’s Journey  

A customer journey map visually represents a 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. Whether lead generation, customer retention, or improving CX, clear objectives can guide an automation strategy and customer journey.  

2. Develop Compelling 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.  

3. 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.  

4. 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 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.  

5. 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.  

6. 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 can have one-to-many interactions with various audience groups.  

7. 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.  

8. 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.  

9. 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 seamless 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.  

10. Monitor and Analyze Metrics 

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.

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

Today, knowledge workers, researchers, and students suffer from content overload and are left to deal with it using fragmented, complex, and manual tooling. Too many settle for stitching together complicated bookmarking, read-it-later, and note-taking apps to get through their workflows. Now that anyone can create content with a button, this problem will only worsen. Otio solves this problem by providing researchers with one AI-native workspace. It helps them: 

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

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

• 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 helps you 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!

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