7 Marketing Workflows You Can’t Ignore Automating

 

If you can automate a marketing workflow, you should. Why? Automation becomes a pivotal factor in improving productivity, eliminating the costs of human error, and streamlining your overall marketing efforts. 

This guide will explain which marketing processes need automation and which tools can help you get the best out of them.

 

 

The Importance of Marketing Automation

In 2024, marketing automation is an indispensable part of any successful business strategy supported by a number of reasons: 

• Minimizing manual tasks
• Optimizing marketing workflows
• Integrating data 
• Improving lead quality
• Enhancing customer engagement and experience
• Strengthening marketing and sales efforts

In this way, marketing automation is crucial for modern businesses. It is key to efficiently set up many marketing processes and save costs and time.

 

The benefits of marketing workflow automation 

Digital marketing automation is particularly beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses as their sales and marketing teams aren’t big. So, they must juggle everything simultaneously to remain competitive while customers’ expectations increase. 

Leveraging automation is necessary to stay afloat, fulfilling customers’ need for a personalized journey and better experience.

By automating marketing workflows, you’ll be able to minimize risks and challenges related to marketing efforts:

• Reduce risks of manual errors
• Eliminate micromanagement – more time for enhanced strategic planning
• Streamline communication and collaboration within the marketing team
• Decreased operational costs 

The advantages of marketing workflow automation are clear. So let’s view the workflows themselves not to hesitate to automate.

 

 

7 marketing workflows to automate in 2024

We have gathered top marketing workflows that need automation in 2024 to help you with essential marketing activities at your organization.

 

Marketing team collaboration 

The first marketing workflow worth mentioning is team collaboration. No matter the size of your team or the industry your brand is in, you may face common challenges, like communication issues, scheduling pain, data sharing, and lack of transparency among teams. 

A marketing team needs a streamlined approach to avoid getting lost in tedious approval processes or constant misunderstandings. 

Automating marketing workflows for improved team collaboration may start with the basics, like keeping everyone in the loop. With project management platforms, you can easily assign tasks, monitor progress, share files, notes, and insights with other teams, and receive instant notifications regarding some changes.

A few tools to help with marketing team collaboration:

Monday.com – an easy-to-use tool with 200+ templates to visualize project stages in the form of a map, calendar, timeline, etc. You can communicate in groups, enjoy tag-based messages, create and share documents.

Asana – a great solution for cross-functional teams. Primarily based on Kanban lists, this tool can help your marketing and sales teams monitor overlapping tasks and coordinate work in one place.

Alternatives to consider are Google Sheets, Flock, Trello.

 

Newsletters and marketing emails 

Newsletters are among the most effective marketing workflows if you want to foster a strong connection with your audience. However, more than creating valuable content is needed to do the trick. 

For one thing, it takes effort to reach every customer manually. For another, you can only do with automated segmentation if you aim at meeting customers’ expectations based on their interests and previous activity with your brand. 

With automated email sending, your customers will receive the most relevant info from you, be it blog content or company updates. Moreover, the segmentation that we’ve already mentioned will make your email marketing campaigns more effective. Automated segmentation helps to nurture leads easier since it targets prospects with more personalized content.

That’s why you should try DirectIQ for email automation.

DirectIQ – perfect for small and medium-sized businesses. One can choose among pre-built journeys, customize them to their audience’s needs and behaviors, and set up an email marketing campaign with a few clicks.

 

 

 

A few alternatives are Mailchimp, MailerLite, Omnisend.

 

Marketing analytics 

Automating marketing analytics is a way to understand your performance from different angles. Smart insights play a crucial role in your brand promotion, experiments with marketing channels, and attracting more customers. So collecting and analyzing marketing data needs automation to do it accurately and frequently.

Say a young SaaS needs to improve its marketing campaign. To segment their audience and create better-personalized messages, they will first need to automate the collection of various points like age, gender, location, etc. But data itself has no magic. A company needs to visualize it with live dashboards looking at charts and graphs. Automated tools make this marketing workflow a walk-in-the-park and get a 360-degree view of a customer.

Consider checking one of the solutions to help automate marketing analytics:

Coupler.io is an all-in-one data analytics and automation service, making tracking metrics and getting detailed reports easy. It allows you to automatically gather data from multiple sources and then integrate it into one place for more advanced insights. For example, with HubSpot Google Sheet integration, you can go beyond Hubspot features and automatically get all the insights from your CRM.

 

 

 

As alternatives, you may test Microsoft Excel, Adverity, Domo.

 

Customer onboarding 

Customer onboarding is another vital marketing workflow setting the tone for customer relationship quality.

A brand should live up to its promises and give customers the promised value. You should provide guidance, assistance, and understanding of the client’s needs. Customer onboarding automation is designed to make new users feel welcome and comfortable. 

By doing so, a brand can win the hearts of newcomers more easily, reduce churn rate, and increase customer lifetime value.

Customers usually engage with onboarding emails well. So it’s essential to create an automated onboarding sequence sharing step-by-step guides, FAQs, how-to videos, and customer support info to build up trust from the very beginning. The same goes for automated in-app messages guiding a new user through basic product features.

Regarding tools to automate customer onboarding, you may find these helpful:

Customer.io is a solid solution for user onboarding emails. Onboarding emails can be used as a part of the omnichannel onboarding process or as a separate campaign. Thanks to agile segmentation, messages reach customers at the right time with the right info.

Also, Userpilot is a powerful tool for in-app onboarding. No code is needed to craft targeted and contextually relevant in-app messages to walk through new users.

Alternatives are AppCues, Close, Chameleon.

 

Content marketing 

This is probably one of the most time-consuming marketing workflows. Creating content is hard work that goes through many stages, including scheduling, assigning tasks, proofreading, editing, and distributing. This is when marketing workflow automation steps in. It helps to streamline content marketing processes and save time and effort.

AI-driven proofreading and SEO tools are life savers to optimize your content faster and better. You can use robust tools to leverage content marketing, from content research to content metrics analytics. In addition, it’s easier to distribute content regularly when you have a blog calendar with convenient notifications and the ability to track writing progress.

One such tool is GatherContent. It is a powerful tool for organizing content creation processes in one place. You can set and monitor deadlines, track status updates, visualize schedules in a content calendar, and even integrate with Slack to get notifications about updates.

To help with crafting and optimizing your content, you may check Clearscope or Frase.

 

Social media management 

Maintaining a social media presence is one of the crucial marketing workflows. Users have long started to use platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to search for solutions and interact with companies. 

Social media automation is a must to keep up with this demand. Not only will it help to eliminate monotonous tasks, but it will also streamline marketing strategy with better targeting and insightful analytics.

For starters, you can leverage post-scheduling for later. This way, you can remain persistent no matter what. Brands employing a multi-channel marketing strategy can benefit from social media automation tools integrating all the feeds, messages, and notifications into one dashboard. With ad automation and automated social media reports, you can use algorithms to respond better to customers’ needs.

Statusbrew is one of the tools to help with social media management. You can automate posting, craft posts, engage with followers, and control social media advertising.

Hootsuite is another solution for running multiple social media channels and monitoring any social media activity you launch.

Alternatives: Social Bee, Buffer, CoSchedule.

 

Customer relationship 

The last workflow marketing automation you should try is optimizing customer relationships. Seventy-three percent of customers say that a good customer experience is a decisive factor in brand loyalty. These days you can only do with automation if you want to deliver the expected customer-centric service.

More and more companies are employing canned or pre-written responses, IVR systems, and AI chatbots. It’s all about perfect timing, and customers expect to get their problems solved 24/7. 

With automated tools, you can solve half the struggles as many customers prefer autonomy, and if not, promise to get to them as soon as possible. Remember to automate feedback collection. Regular feedback is a powerful tool for improving customer engagement and retention

Handy tools:

Helpscout – a platform that allows you to streamline and automate customer relationships through workflows, chat, knowledge base, shared inbox, etc.

SurveyKing is a solution if you want to dive deeper into customer relationships and do it effortlessly. This tool offers customer feedback collection options, NPS score surveys, questionnaires, and more.

Some alternatives for these tools are Intercom, GetFeedback, HelpDesk.

 

 

Conclusion

No matter how professional and focused we are, we can get tired, have a big scope of work, and make mistakes. This is normal. Also, it is normal to use workflow marketing automation.

Automation is a must if you want to stand out among your competitors, save time, reduce errors, and work with your customers in a personalized way. From basics like email marketing automation to advanced analytics with automated marketing reports, we can’t ignore the need for machine-driven solutions to improve efficiency.

 

About the author:

Dmytro Zaichenko is a Marketing Specialist at Coupler.io, an all-in-one data analytics and automation platform. He has over 3 years of experience in digital marketing, particularly in SaaS. Apart from experimenting with marketing tactics, he’s a huge NBA fan.