Marketing Automation: What It Is and How It Works

It’s Monday morning. You sit down, turn on your computer, open your inbox.

The first thing you see? A sea of emails: coupons, promotions, that guy who’s been trying to sell you his personal growth course for a month now.

It’s the usual stuff. You trash it all.

If this has ever happened to you, you should know those emails aren’t the result of Marketing Automation done right — Marketing Automation is something else entirely.

What Marketing Automation Is Not

Let’s bust a few myths born from people who don’t understand marketing automation:

• “An easy way to spam your database”: the biggest mistake you can make is thinking marketing automation is a method for flooding your contacts with automated emails.
• “A marketing strategy”: not quite. Marketing automation is only the automation of the processes that make up a marketing strategy (one that’s already been thought through and structured).
• “A piece of software”: Wikipedia tells us that “the term marketing automation refers to software that lets you automate certain repetitive marketing activities.” Does that mean all you need to do is buy a piece of software to do Marketing Automation? Don’t be fooled — the software matters, but it’s just a tool.

What Marketing Automation Is

My favorite definition of marketing automation is: “The automation of recurring marketing activities, triggered by one or more conditions.”

What does that mean?

Marketing Automation lets you automate communications with your audience in a way that’s relevant and personalized, letting you build and nurture a solid relationship between you and your audience.

How?

By delivering the most relevant content, to the right people, at the most fitting moment.

Marketing Automation: How It Works

Marketing automation works by chaining together multiple scenarios, called automations.

An automation is made up of three simple elements:

• Event: something happens
• Condition: a specific scenario occurs
• Action: an automatic action is carried out

Let’s see an example:

• Event: a free piece of content gets downloaded
• Condition: a specific product page gets viewed
• Action: an email sequence with a specific offer gets sent

As you can tell, setting up scenarios like this is only possible if you have a clear marketing strategy, which can only be automated afterward.

That strategy can be split into three fundamental phases: monitoring, segmentation and automation.

The Phases of Marketing Automation

There are 3 phases of Marketing Automation, let’s look at them together.

• Monitoring: monitoring means understanding your audience and its behavior. What actions does your audience take? How do they interact with you and your brand?
• Segmentation: once you understand how the people you’re targeting behave, it’s useful to split them into multiple groups, based on the actions they take and the interests they show.
• Automation: automating means making repeatable communications and marketing activities automatic. In this phase you need to put all the data gathered during monitoring to good use and make your communications as relevant as possible for the segment they’re being sent to.

What Marketing Automation Can Do

So, what can we actually do with marketing automation? Let’s look at the main possibilities together:

Syncing leads into your CRM: you can sync your contacts’ information directly into your company CRM.

Lead nurturing: by sending automated communications, you can build and nurture a genuine relationship of trust with your audience.

Lead scoring: you can assign “scores” to your contacts based on the actions they take. This makes it easy to spot the contacts most interested in your products or services.

Segmentation: you can split your database into multiple groups, so you can communicate with each of them in a personalized way.

Tracking online behavior: you can understand how your contacts behave and analyze which marketing actions performed best.

Content personalization: you can decide which content users see on your site based on the actions they’ve previously taken.

Relevant Content, to the Right People, at the Most Fitting Moment

We live in an increasingly noisy world, bombarded with promotional messages, offers and unwanted newsletters. The worst thing a brand can do is address its audience in a generic, irrelevant way.

Rely on OTO Agency and turn every one of your communications into something your customers will love!