9 Digital Marketing Automation Strategies for 2x Efficiency

At a certain point, almost all digital marketing teams turn their focus inward. They know what they’re doing and how to do it, but they want to do it better and faster. This is when marketing automation strategies come in.

However, the technology that empowers marketing teams is growing in leaps and bounds. There are now around 10,000 marketing automation solutions, a 24 percent increase over the past two years, University of Hamburg (UH) research shows. Companies are investing more than a quarter of their marketing budgets on automation, and 69 percent of industries are increasing adoption.

Yet many initiatives stall out due to lack of planning, trouble getting the right people in place to implement, or not having the right resources. This guide walks through the basics and the strategies and tools that help you avoid those stalls and get results right away.

What is Digital Marketing Automation?

Digital marketing automation is the process of leveraging software to handle routine or repetitive tasks. It’s often associated with artificial intelligence (AI). However, automation software only works with the data you give it. It doesn’t necessarily try to emulate human behavior or “understand” the data like AI does, though some AI also automates processes.

Many tools on the market today can help automate marketing processes. Some, like HubSpot and Salesforce, house many different tools in one platform, including CRM, forms, landing pages, and email marketing, and let you automate processes within each. Others, like MailChimp and Constant Contact, are primarily focused on email automation, and you’ll also find specialty software for social media, SMS marketing, ads, forms, and more.

The Benefits of Effective Digital Marketing Automation

You may already be excited by all the possibilities made available through marketing automation, but it’s not just bells and whistles. There’s a massive business case for it too.

Improved Efficiency

Marketing efficiency is a big draw for most brands. A typical marketer saves 25 hours per week through automation, Zapier reports. As a result, 45 percent report less burnout.

The amount of time saved varies depending on your automation strategy’s volume and maturity. A company using automation purely to add leads to its CRM could save minutes per day or hours per day, depending on lead volume. A company automating hundreds of processes and emails will save much more time than one merely using automation to add leads to the CRM.

Enhanced Lead Qualification

Sometimes a human touch is vital to closing a deal. A strong automation strategy will monitor leads across all your channels and score them, so reps can focus on those most likely to convert.

Streamlined Nurturing and Conversion

Leads often grow cold without some kind of nurturing program. After all, human reps can only make so many calls and send so many emails in a day. Instead, businesses automate these follow-ups to keep leads moving through the sales funnel to conversion. By the same token, automation can be used to segment leads and create personalized journeys to improve conversions.

Simplified Tracking and Improved Results

With the right tools and processes in place, businesses can get a high-level overview of what’s happening with their leads to spot leaks in their funnels and make improvements. A/B testing can also be used with automation to improve results over time.

Moreover, this data can be used to prove the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and demonstrate the value the marketing team is bringing to the organization.

Data Management

Performance increases with automation, too. For instance, data management performance increases by 57 percent on average, per UH. Two in five say automating tasks in this area benefits their business more than any other area.

Furthermore, effective marketers are 46 percent more likely to use automation in their roles, according to HubSpot.

Stronger Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

By empowering businesses through data-driven marketing and boosting efficiency, return on marketing investment (ROMI) naturally improves too. Businesses leveraging marketing automation see a 14.5 percent increase in sales productivity and a 12.2 percent reduction in marketing overhead, according to Salesforce data. Their research also shows it can increase sales opportunities by 20 percent and boost qualified leads by 451 percent!

9 Digital Marketing Automation Strategies to Improve Efficiency

At least 30 percent of tasks in 60 percent of jobs can be automated, McKinsey reports. Digital marketing is no exception. Just about anything marketers do repetitively can be automated. Below are nine strategies that provide the most significant efficiency gains when automated.

Strategy 1: Using a CRM to Improve Marketing and Sales Alignment

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is more than just a place to store your customer data. It’s a shared space and single source of truth that can bring your marketing and sales team into alignment, which means you’ll close more sales and work more efficiently.

A few things your team may want to discuss automating include:

• Automatically adding lead data to your CRM when a lead completes an online form, then routing the lead to the right sales rep.
• Pulling in data from external sources to show sales teams when and how customers are engaging with the brand, so reps can tailor their discussions and save time.
• Having the marketing team develop email templates and assets that sales reps can send quickly with minimal editing.
• Sending email surveys to customers and prospects after an interaction to gain insights into satisfaction and identify opportunities for improvement.

Strategy 2: Scoring Leads to Improve Focus

Lead scoring is the process of assigning values to leads to help gauge their interest and viability so you can easily see which leads deserve more of your time and how to prioritize them.

For instance, your marketing automation tool might assign points based on actions, such as giving a lead 20 points for completing an online form, ten points for clicking an email, or one point for opening it. You can also add points based on details added to CRM, such as account size or geographic area, and lead scoring tools may allow you to deduct points automatically, such as when someone unsubscribes from your emails.

You can include a lead’s score in your CRM so sales reps can leverage it to prioritize their calls. It can also be used to turn up the volume on marketing for specific leads or turn it down as needed.

Strategy 3: Automating the Lead Follow-Up Process

It’s crucial to respond to leads quickly because it increases the odds that you’ll connect with the lead and close a sale. This is why automating lead assignment in your CRM is essential, as covered in Strategy 1. You can also automate many other aspects of the lead follow-up process, such as emails after a call is logged, when a lead doesn’t answer, or a series of emails for common situations like asking the lead to book a demo or confirm receipt of a proposal.

Follow-up automation can also help ensure older leads get a second look before they go cold. For example, you can use time delays with your marketing automation software by setting an email to go out 30 days after a lead has failed to take action or having your CRM fire off a task for a sales rep to check in if a deal has stayed at the same stage for a predetermined period.

Strategy 4: Recovering Revenue with Abandoned Cart Emails and eCommerce Automation

You probably have personal experience with eCommerce automation if you’ve ever shopped online with a major retailer. One of the most common examples is dynamic content: look at a pair of boots online, and you may see those boots everywhere you go online for weeks or receive emails that showcase the boots and similar products afterward.

Abandoned cart emails work similarly. Start by reminding the customer that they’ve left something behind, or pair the reminder with a special offer such as a percent discount or free shipping.

Around half of all abandoned cart emails are opened, according to Moosend research. Half of those opened are clicked on, and half of those clicks become purchases. You’re leaving money on the table if you aren’t already leveraging abandoned cart emails.

Strategy 5: Segmenting Email Lists

A strong email marketing automation strategy will make your campaigns exponentially more effective. This begins with quality segmentation to ensure your audience receives emails that are relevant to them. Consider segmenting by the groups outlined below.

Engagement

If your email program permits, you can automatically have people placed on a specific list when they take a particular action. You can also use lead scoring to send different messages to people depending on their level of interest.

Status

If your company is subscription-based, it’s always a good idea to split out your active clients from previous or inactive ones. You might also segment based on purchase volume, subscription tier, or similar.

Persona or Role

B2B companies should be especially mindful about segmenting by role. Oftentimes, you’ll be “selling” to someone who is not a decision-maker who needs a different message than someone who can give the final ok. Your audience will have different concerns, pain points, and needs, so segmenting by persona can be helpful across the board too.

Industry

Segmenting by industry allows you to send more tailored content from time to time instead of general interest pieces, which will keep your audience more engaged.

Interest

If you offer more than one product or service, segment based on interest to provide information that’s specific to what they want to know about.

Location

Many businesses overlook the importance of segmenting by location, particularly if their offerings are similar across a wide geographic area. However, segmenting by location allows you to capitalize on what’s happening locally for them, be it new legislation, competitors entering the market, or other events.

Strategy 6: Automating Chat on Your Website

Seven in ten customers want to resolve most customer service issues on their own, and roughly the same say they interact with an intelligent assistant or chatbot at least once a month, according to Customer Think research. Chatbots are effective at reducing customer journey friction and moving people through your funnel, all while lightening the load for your sales and support teams.

Strategy 7: Setting Up Workflows to Respond to Customer Actions

People often think of automation as an instantaneous thing: you tell the software to do something, and it does it. In reality, automation can carry out a series of tasks, which is referred to as a workflow. Your marketing automation workflow needs a trigger to set it in motion, so it’s sometimes called “trigger marketing.” You define which tasks or actions you want to occur after the trigger is recognized, and you can use CRM data to further segment workflows—think of workflow triggers and segmentation as “if, then” statements.

Common Digital Marketing Workflow Triggers

• Visits to specific website pages or number of pages viewed
• Chatbot engagement
• Clicks on specific links or form completions
• Lead score thresholds
• Email opens or failure to open emails
• Shopping cart abandonment

Common Digital Marketing Workflow Actions

• Send an email or a sequence of emails
• Add to a list, tag the contact, or assign to a sales rep
• Update CRM data or start an internal ticket
• Do nothing for a set period

Examples of Digital Marketing Workflows

• If a guide or report is requested via a website form, then send the asset via email.
• If a product page is viewed by someone in your CRM, then send them the latest offer via email.
• If a lead views pricing information, then notify the assigned sales rep via email and create a task in CRM for follow-up.

Two common workflow types are worth telling apart: drip campaigns are time-based, sending a contact a specific chain of emails over a set period regardless of their actions (a contact only leaves the drip by unsubscribing). Nurture campaigns are behavior-based, sending emails based on actions such as link clicks, form fills, page views, or webinar signups, and a contact can leave the moment they complete a specific action. It’s best practice to pair the two: use a drip to onboard new clients or introduce a new product, then layer nurture logic on top so two contacts can have different experiences depending on what they do next.

Strategy 8: Personalizing Content

More than two-thirds of businesses viewed as performance leaders leverage high personalization tactics involving person-specific deep data on all or most channels, Adobe reports.

The case for personalization holds up in the data: eight in ten consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences, according to Search Engine Journal, whose research shows that 52 percent of customers expect personalized offers and that emails with personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened.

However, personalizing content becomes much more difficult once your business reaches a certain size. Developing a marketing automation content strategy makes it easier to scale.

Many businesses start with automated personalization in email. This is relatively simple. You can use placeholders or tags so that data such as the customer’s name and company appear in the message. You can also leverage dynamic content to showcase products your customer might be interested in based on their purchase history.

Similar strategies can be leveraged on your website. For instance, you can tailor pages in real-time based on a buyer persona, location, and other details. If you’ve ever shopped on some of the larger websites, you’ve probably been greeted with products you’ve recently viewed and a message that says, “Hi, (Name)! Pick up where you left off.” This approach can be tailored for many brands and industries.

Strategy 9: Simplifying Analytics and Reporting

Overall, 95 percent of brands say automating their marketing reporting is important to them, Adobe surveys show, and it’s worth a 42 percent performance boost, per UH.

Marketing Attribution Automation

As you optimize your digital marketing initiatives, you let go of what isn’t working and ramp up efforts that are. Knowing where your customers come from and which traits people who convert share is a major component of this.

It’s comparatively easy to identify and log the “first touch” or the first time someone engages with a brand online. For instance, you can use UTM codes to pinpoint the source of a lead down to the exact campaign and link clicked. You can also view aggregate data in a program like Google Analytics.

But we know that people in the real world don’t usually convert on the first touch. There’s usually a customer journey with lots of stops. Your real-world customer may land on your website after running a Google search for general information, come back later to look at products, request more information from a chatbot or agent, and eventually purchase online or at your brick-and-mortar location.

Automation is the only way to reasonably perform multi-channel attribution, aggregate the data, and examine it in different ways to see what’s working.

Social Media Reporting Automation

Whether your brand leverages social media for content marketing, paid advertising, or both, it’s crucial to be able to assess whether your investments are paying off and ensure your budget is being allocated appropriately. Each platform automatically generates reports related to these things for you. However, you can use an aggregator tool to pull the data from each network and view it in one place, too.

SEO Reporting Automation

Search engine optimization (SEO) reports are invaluable tools to help you strategize, identify opportunities, and measure success. However, it’s unrealistic to manually go through every page on your website, let alone analyze all competitor sites, to create all the reports you need.

There are many SEO automation tools, and each shines in its own way. Depending on the program you use, you can quickly assess:

• How many high-quality backlinks your site has, and which sites are linking.
• How many keywords your site lands on the first page of Google for, and which ones.
• Your domain authority.
• Factors that impact your SEO, such as broken links, and where they are on your site.

Email Marketing Reporting Automation

Most email marketing platforms include some degree of reporting automation. For instance, you can typically send a campaign and then view your bounce, open, and click rates. You can also usually view revenue generated and subscriber counts over time.

However, once you begin automating a lot of emails via workflows, it’s easy to forget to check the performance of individual campaigns. If you’re at this stage, it’s beneficial to set up a custom dashboard or have your email tool aggregate the data and email it to you on a recurring basis.

Sales Reporting Automation

Sales may be distinct from marketing, but marketing departments must know what’s happening with sales to allocate resources effectively. Your marketing team may already have access to sales data from your CRM or other tools. If not, see if it’s available through your current martech stack and whether you can automatically generate and send reports to decision-makers.

If your business has sales data from multiple sources, explore aggregator tools that will provide all sales data in one place.

Pitfalls to Avoid When Using Marketing Automation

Marketing automation software offers significant benefits, but it can fall short when not implemented with a clear strategy. One of the most common pitfalls is over-relying on automation tools without refining your marketing message or understanding the full customer journey—automation helps streamline marketing tasks, but it won’t fix a weak strategy or poor targeting.

Another issue is using marketing automation software without proper segmentation. Sending the same email campaigns or SMS messages to everyone in your CRM risks damaging engagement rather than nurturing it. Successful marketing automation depends on delivering relevant content that aligns with each lead’s position in the sales funnel.

Additionally, investing in tools you don’t fully utilize is a frequent mistake. Many platforms offer robust features like workflow automation, lead generation tracking, and dynamic email personalization, but marketers often use only a small percentage of what the software can do. Make sure your team is trained and your platform is configured to match your marketing strategies and business goals.

Lastly, be cautious of automation tools that don’t integrate well with your existing stack. Disconnected systems can lead to data silos, inconsistent reporting, and a fragmented customer experience that undermines your efforts.

Get Help Improving Your Marketing Automation Strategies

While you can strengthen your marketing results and boost efficiency by automating one process at a time, it’s better to take a holistic approach and consider all the things you might automate, then develop a roadmap. This ensures you choose the right tools and that all your automated processes leverage the same logic, and it gives you time to onboard the team on best practices with data.

As a digital marketing consultant, I thoroughly enjoy showing my clients all the different ways they can save time, boost results, and eliminate errors through marketing automation. If you’d like help automating your marketing processes or want to improve your existing setup, please contact me for a complimentary consultation.