Sending an email one-to-one has one obvious limitation: the sender’s time. The marketing automation It breaks down that barrier: it enables communication with each customer or prospect to take place at the right time, with the right message, and without the need for manual intervention for every single message. What was, ten years ago, infrastructure exclusive to large companies is now within the reach of teams of just one or two people, thanks to tools such as HubSpot, ActiveCampaign and Brevo, which offer affordable plans and have reasonable learning curves.
What is marketing automation and why is it no longer just for large companies?
Marketing automation is the automation of marketing communications and actions based on a contact’s behaviour, profile or stage in the customer lifecycle. It is not simply scheduling a weekly newsletter: it is the system detecting that a user has downloaded a resource, waiting 24 hours, and then automatically sending a personalised follow-up email. The democratisation of tools It has been a radical change: what in 2015 required a technical team and a five-figure investment can now be set up by a marketing manager in an afternoon using a platform costing 50 euros a month.
The most cost-effective workflows: onboarding, nurturing, abandoned basket and reactivation
Before setting up any other workflows, there are five workflows that every business should have in place. These are the ones that have the greatest impact on customer relations and generate the best return on the time spent setting them up.
How to segment effectively so that automation doesn’t come across as spam
Without segmentation, automation creates noise. Sending the same message to the entire database at the same time constitutes technical spam, regardless of how much it cost to set up. There are three most effective segmentation criteria: behaviour (what the contact has done: which pages they have visited, which emails they have opened, which resources they have downloaded), lifecycle (cold lead, qualified lead, customer, customer at risk of churn) and demographic or company data (sector, size, job title). Well-designed segmentation allows the same workflow to adapt to each contact’s profile simply by changing dynamic variables within the email content. The result is a significantly higher open rate and a sense of personalisation that builds trust.
Well-structured segmentation enables communication to be personalised at scale, following the same logic as the one-to-one marketing but without the time involved in doing it manually.
Integrating CRM with automation: the step that changes everything
Automation without a CRM has limited potential: it can send emails based on digital behaviour, but it doesn’t know what has actually happened in the business relationship. The integration between the CRM and the marketing automation platform It enables both systems to share data in real time: when a lead downloads a resource, the CRM records it; when a sales representative wraps up a call, the automation platform updates the sequence. Tools such as HubSpot have both functionalities built in; Salesforce connects with most automation platforms via native integrations. The most valuable outcome of this integration is the lead scoring: The system automatically scores each contact based on their behaviour and passes qualified leads on to the sales team at exactly the right moment, ensuring that no hot lead is lost due to a lack of follow-up.
Before setting up any workflow, it is important to have a clear understanding of the customer’s actual journey. A user experience map When properly designed, it enables us to identify exactly when automation can add value and when human intervention is required.
How to gauge whether your marketing automation is working: key metrics
There are four metrics that enable you to assess the actual performance of any automation workflow. The open rate (open rate) measures initial interest: if it falls below 20% in a nurturing workflow, there is a problem with the subject line or the segmentation. The click-through rate measures the relevance of the content: if the email is opened but nobody clicks, the message is not addressing the contact’s needs. The conversion rate per workflow measure the actual impact: what percentage of the leads that enter the funnel go on to complete the objective (purchase, registration, phone call). And the cost per lead Measure efficiency: dividing the cost of the tool and the set-up time by the number of leads generated gives a figure that can be compared with other channels. When a workflow isn’t performing well, the diagnosis starts with the first email with a low open rate: if the first message isn’t opened, the rest of the flow is pointless.
Marketing automation training: what the marketing team needs to learn
Marketing automation requires a set of skills that are rarely found in a single role: content strategy to know what to say at each stage of the life cycle, segmentation and data analysis so that the funds reach the right people, and tool handling to configure, test and optimise workflows. A marketing team that is proficient in only one of these three areas is leaving potential performance gains on the table. From the Educa.Pro’s Marketing and Communications catalogue It is possible to access specific training in marketing automation, with programmes eligible for funding through FUNDAE and delivered in formats compatible with the working hours of a team currently in post.
Marketing automation does not replace strategy: it executes it at scale. Companies that understand this, and that train their teams to make the most of it, stop missing out on opportunities due to a lack of follow-up and start building relationships with their customers that do not depend on someone remembering to send an email.
