Automated marketing strategies that help you grow

The automated marketing strategies that pay off first are the ones that react to what people do: a welcome sequence when someone signs up, emails that change with their behaviour, a lead score that tells sales when to call, and reminders when someone leaves a cart, a sign-up or a trial unfinished. Add scheduled social posts and shared customer data, and your team spends its time on ideas instead of repeat tasks.

Marketing automation is software that marketing teams use to automate repetitive tasks and run campaigns across channels such as email, SMS and social media. Below are seven strategies worth setting up, roughly in the order most teams should tackle them.

1. Run drip campaigns that guide people to the next step

A drip campaign is a series of emails sent automatically on a schedule or after a trigger. It walks a contact from their first interaction to a clear next step, such as booking a demo or completing a first purchase.

Good drip campaigns:

• start from one goal per sequence, for example "activate a new trial user"
• send each email because of what the person did or did not do, not only because a day has passed
• stop or switch track as soon as the person reaches the goal

Our guide to drip marketing covers the planning in detail.

2. Welcome every new subscriber and sign-up automatically

The first emails after someone subscribes, downloads a guide or creates an account set the tone. Build a short sequence for each entry point:

• Newsletter subscribers get what they signed up for, plus your best existing content.
• Lead magnet downloads get the file, then one or two follow-ups on the same topic.
• Trial or freemium sign-ups get onboarding help focused on the first action that shows value.

Because people sign up in different places for different reasons, the sequence should depend on how and where they joined.

3. Segment your lists by behaviour

Sending every email to every contact is the quickest way to lose subscribers. List segmentation splits contacts into groups that get different messages. Useful segments include:

• engagement, such as recent clickers versus contacts who have not clicked in months
• company traits for B2B, such as industry, size and region (see geo-targeting)
• lifecycle stage: subscriber, lead, trial user, customer
• behaviour on your site, such as pages viewed or features used
• past purchases and order size for e-commerce

Many automation tools update segments automatically as contacts change, so the right people move into the right sequences without manual list work. More on this in how to create a customer segmentation strategy.

4. Score leads and hand them to sales automatically

Lead scoring ranks prospects by how valuable they are likely to be, so sales knows whom to contact first. Scores usually combine two kinds of data:

• Fit: information about the person and company, such as job title, industry, company size and location.
• Behaviour: actions such as website visits, content downloads and email clicks.

Set a threshold. When a contact crosses it, the system can assign an owner in the CRM, notify the rep and pause marketing emails so sales can take over. This is where automation helps the old problem of marketing and sales working from different information: both teams see the same contact record, history and score. Read how to align sales and marketing and our lead nurturing strategy guide.

5. Schedule social media posts

Posting by hand every day takes time and tends to slip when the team is busy. Social media management tools let you plan posts for the week or month, schedule them per network and see the results in one place. Scheduling gives you consistency. It does not replace replying to comments and messages, which still needs a person.

Compare options in the best social media tools for marketers and Instagram tools for automation.

6. Send reminders for abandoned carts, sign-ups and trials

Many people start and do not finish. Baymard Institute puts the documented average online cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, based on 50 studies. In its survey of US shoppers, leaving aside people who were just browsing, the most common reason was extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees, named by 40%.

A short, helpful reminder can bring some of them back:

• Show what they left behind and link straight back to it.
• Answer the likely objection, such as delivery cost, returns or security.
• Keep it to one or two emails, and stop as soon as they complete.

For B2B and SaaS, the same idea applies to a demo form started but not sent, a trial that went quiet after day one, or a quote that was opened but not signed. See how to design a shopping cart recovery campaign.

7. Re-engage or remove inactive contacts

Your list should hold people who want your email. Set up a re-engagement sequence that asks whether they still want to hear from you, and automatically suppress those who do not respond. It keeps your list focused on people who still read what you send.

How do you measure marketing automation?

Pick one outcome per automation, such as trials activated, meetings booked or orders recovered, and track it against a control group where you can.

Be careful with open rates. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection prevents senders from seeing whether a message was opened, so for many readers opens are unreliable. Clicks, replies, conversions and revenue tell you more.

Follow the inbox providers' rules too. Gmail requires bulk senders to authenticate their mail with SPF, DKIM and DMARC and to offer one-click unsubscribe in marketing messages, and it asks senders to keep spam complaint rates low. Automated sequences send a lot of mail, so they fall under these rules quickly.

Where to start

Start with one welcome sequence and one simple lead score. Measure them for a month, fix what does not work, then add the next automation. To weigh the trade-offs before you buy software, read the advantages and disadvantages of marketing automation and browse marketing automation tools.