Implementing an effective marketing automation strategy can save you time and improve customer relationships and conversions at enormous scale.
It is easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of marketing automation technology. The software is capable of automating many important, albeit mundane, marketing tasks with relative ease.
Although the capabilities are great, it can be hard to know exactly where to start.
As a matter of fact, Ascend2 notes that the main barriers to success with marketing automation software are a lack of strategy and the complex nature of the technology itself.
As marketing automation adoption continues to grow, these problems become magnified. Thankfully, our team here at SendinBlue is experienced at making marketing automation accessible and easy-to-use for businesses of all sizes!
Read on to learn:
- Our top 8 proven marketing automation workflow examples
- The marketing strategy behind each workflow
- How to start using these workflows, today
Let’s take a look!
1. Welcome email to new subscribers
Welcome emails are a good way to connect with your subscribers once they decide to sign up for your content.
Why this automation workflow is awesome:
Although it may seem obvious, a good welcome email is a MUST for any online newsletter or content syndication. It is useful for:
- Re-stating (or elaborating on) your value proposition. What makes you special?
- Set expectations for your subscribers. What can they expect to learn from consuming your content, and how often should they expect to receive it?
- Welcome new subscribers to your community and give them a taste of your charming personality!
- Surprise subscribers with a bonus. This could either be a coupon if you have a store or a bonus piece of content that they can download immediately.
Setting up the workflow:
Initiating this type of workflow is pretty straightforward.
After a person submits a form on your website to subscribe to your newsletter, they will automatically be added to your email contacts list. You can use this event (contact added to email list) to initiate the workflow and send them a nice welcome email.
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2. Onboarding series
When a user creates an account on a website, there are usually several steps they must take in order to complete their profile. There are also things they must learn so that they can get the most out of their experience with their account. Although it’s a common scenario, getting it right is no walk in the park!
Why this automation workflow is awesome:
Creating a good onboarding experience allows you to:
- Give users a better experience by guiding them through the account setup process.
- Increase user engagement and retention by educating them on all of best features of your website, as well as how they can get the most out of their account.
- Identify low-engagement users and users who have not properly set up their account for further outreach campaigns.
Setting up the workflow:
When a user signs up, they submit a form that adds their details to your database. This action sets the rest of the workflow into motion.
Once the user receives the first email, you can have the workflow wait a certain period of time (i.e. one week) and check to see if they have completed the steps you included in the message. Depending on where they are in the process, you can either resend the email or send the next message.
Optimizing your email timing and monitoring whether recipients completed the last key action are essential. This ensures your recipients receive value from your onboarding emails and reinforces that your brand is there to help.
3. Abandoned cart workflow
Abandoned carts on e-commerce sites are very common. However, these are not entirely lost opportunities! Sending a follow-up email to people who abandoned e-commerce carts is a very effective way to win back some conversions.
Why this automation workflow is awesome:
Abandoned cart emails are one of the best ways to use marketing automation if you run an e-commerce store. Why you ask?
- Abandoned cart emails have twice the average open rate of regular email campaigns.
- Improve conversion rate by providing timely information to customers that draws them back. You don’t want to just leave money on the table, right?
Source: shopify.com/blog
Setting up the workflow:
This workflow is triggered when someone visits the checkout page on your site.
After they enter the workflow, have it wait a certain period of time (24 hours is usually sufficient). Once the waiting period is over, the workflow should check to see if the purchase was completed. If the transaction wasn’t finished, you can send an email reminding them of the items left in their cart.
Remember, you have to be clear and helpful to maximize ROI on your abandoned cart follow-up messages. This means you should do more than simply remind shoppers of what they left behind. You can also make product suggestions, or even provide a coupon. These additions will help your customers, even if they didn’t quite find everything they wanted the first time around.
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4. Create a downloadable piece of gated content
Lead generation is never a one-way street. If you want information from your prospective customers, you need to give them a reason to provide it! Gated content is one of the best ways to achieve this. It allows you to provide something valuable to your subscriber in exchange for more details about who they are.
Why this automation workflow is awesome:
Offering gated or downloadable content is an effective strategy because it:
- Makes your content work for you. Getting people to engage with your long-form content can be challenging. Many people read a portion and then leave. By making your content downloadable, it becomes a tool for capturing lead contact information that you can use!
- Helps grow your email list by attracting people who are genuinely interested in your message and product.
Setting up the workflow:
This is another workflow that is pretty straightforward.
You start by creating a popup or landing page for your downloadable content that is tied to your email marketing database. When someone fills out the form to receive the gated content, they are added to an email list. This initiates the workflow.
Once they are added to that list, the workflow should automatically send them an email with the content they signed up to receive.
5. Follow up with your most engaged contacts
Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew who your most loyal customers are?
With marketing automation, you can identify loyal customers through their interactions with your business. That means you won’t have to send out elementary school love letters to find out!
Why this automation workflow is awesome:
Highly engaged contacts are an invaluable resource for your business. They can be leveraged to:
- Gather feedback through surveys.
- Promote your content. Your most engaged contacts can also work as an extension of your marketing team to spread the word about your business. If you create an awesome piece of content, send it to this list and incentivize them to share it on social media. This can increase the reach of your promotional efforts exponentially.
Setting up the workflow:
First, you have to determine your criteria for defining you most engaged contacts. Some examples would be:
- Email campaign engagement over the last 6 months
- Number of purchases made in the last 6 months (create your own threshold)
- Gated content downloads
Once you have your conditions, you can set up your workflow. Use a filter to initiate the workflow, then have it automatically add contacts to a “most engaged” email list according to the criteria that you set up.
6. Clean your list (re-opt-in)
Keeping a clean email list is important if you want to achieve sustainable growth and high engagement with your email marketing campaigns. Automation can help you clean your list through a re-op-in process.
Why this automation workflow is awesome:
Although it may seem counter-intuitive, removing people from your email list in this way is good for a number of reasons:
- Improves engagement rates with your email campaigns. By weeding out uninterested contacts, you can be sure that you’re only communicating with qualified leads.
- Lowers your spam complaint and unsubscribe rates. If you only have people who are interested in your content on your email list, you are much less likely to have spam complaints and unsubscribes.
- Both of the reasons above add up to a better sender score with email providers like GMail and Yahoo. This means your emails are more likely to be delivered in the future, and you will always be on the up and up with your email marketing provider.
Setting up the workflow:
Create a filter to initiate the automation workflow. A good benchmark for this might be any contact that has not opened one of your emails in over a year.
Then, you can send these people an email telling them they will be removed from your email list unless they opt back in to receive your correspondence. Include a button in the email that says “Yes I want to continue receiving emails.” Have the workflow wait one week, and if the person doesn’t click on the re-opt-in button, remove them from your email list.
7. Lead Scoring
Qualifying leads is a lot like interviewing candidates for a job position. You want to make sure that they have the right qualities, and they are interested in the offering.
Unfortunately, you don’t have the time or manpower to interview every single person who visits your website. But, you can get pretty close by using lead scoring with marketing automation.
Why this automation workflow is awesome:
Lead scoring is one of the most effective and useful ways to track prospective customers for many reasons:
- Better target your marketing to the leads who are most likely to convert.
- Lead scoring can be added into many of the above examples of workflows instead of just being a standalone workflow.
- Lead score can also be used to segment lists for email marketing campaigns as well.
Setting up the workflow:
Lead scoring is exactly what it sounds like — assigning points to prospective customers based on their behavior.
This can be implemented in a several ways. But, before you can start scoring anyone, you have to create a column in your customer database for “score.” This will allow you to change the value later on when your customers perform the scorable actions.
After creating your score column, you can create a workflow that checks for certain behavior that you know leads to conversions. You can assign certain point values to these actions, and when contacts perform these actions, they get points added to their lead score.
8. Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is another important piece of the marketing automation puzzle. Incorporating automation into this part of your sales and marketing process can save you time and help grow your customer base at scale.
Why this automation workflow is awesome:
Lead nurturing is a must for your marketing strategy because it:
- Keeps customers engaged throughout their research and shopping process.
- Provides prospects with all of the relevant information they need to make a purchase.
- Automatically qualifies leads and moves them towards the bottom of the funnel.
Setting up the workflow:
This workflow should start at the earliest possible point in the sales funnel. This usually means that someone subscribes to your email list or newsletter. Once they do that, you can track their behavior using lead scoring.
Depending on what pages they visit on your site, you can follow up with them via email with special offerings that are highly relevant to what their expressed interests.This could mean sending them coupons, downloadable content, or even inviting them to a live event or webinar.
After each message of the nurturing workflow, wait a few days and see if they engaged. Depending on their interaction with your messages, send different follow-up emails that continue to nudge them (gently of course) in the direction of a conversion.
This does not have to be all in one workflow. As a matter of fact, you may find that your nurturing messages are more effective spread out through all of your other workflows.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these marketing automation workflow examples have sparked your imagination about how this technology can be used to grow your business.
Remember that these examples should always be part of a wider marketing strategy and they shouldn’t operate in isolation. As your brand’s marketing automation strategy evolves, interconnect your workflows and ensure they support the same overarching goals. This will allow them to work together and be much more targeted and effective.