Marketing automation

How it works

Every automation has the same three parts:

• A trigger: something a person does or a date that arrives. A sign-up, an abandoned cart, a downloaded price list, an order delivered, a contract ending in sixty days.
• A condition: who it applies to. New customers only, orders over €100, people who have not opened the last three emails.
• An action: what happens. An email or a text, a task for a salesperson in the CRM, a tag on the contact, a change of lifecycle stage.

Tools range from the automations in an email platform such as Mailchimp or Brevo to full systems such as HubSpot, or software written around a company’s own process.

Example

A firm that sells accounting services handles every enquiry by hand: someone sends the price list, then forgets to follow up. About one enquiry in eight becomes a client.

The firm writes down what a good salesperson does and automates it. The enquiry gets the price list and a short video within a minute. Two days later, if there is no reply, an email answers the three most common questions. On day five a task asks a salesperson to call. Conversion rises to one in five, and the team spends its time on calls instead of on sending attachments.

Why it matters for a business

Automation saves the hours spent on sending, and it makes sure the right message goes out every time, including the evening and the weekend, when nobody is at the office. Its biggest gains are usually in a few places: welcoming new subscribers, recovering abandoned carts, following up enquiries, and asking for repeat orders.

It does not replace thinking. A bad sequence, automated, reaches more people faster. So the process is written down and tested by hand first, and only then given to the software. Every automation also needs an owner who checks, every few months, that it still says the right thing.

What to ask

• Which repeated tasks in our marketing and sales are done by hand today, and how long do they take?
• Do we follow up every enquiry, and how soon?
• Who checks what our automated messages say, and when did someone last read them?
• Does the automation work with our CRM and shop, or does it keep its own copy of the customers?

Marketing automation saves time when the process is clear before the software. In the web software we build, we describe the process first and automate it second.