Marketing Automation

Every customer matters. But when you run a business, you might not have time to create a one-off campaign each time you need to talk to them. Marketing automation helps you keep the conversation going, so you can grow those customer relationships—and your business.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation uses technologies that eliminate the need for you to send a one-off email every time you want to talk to your contacts or manually tag customers when they show interest in a product in your store. Basically, you can set up an automation to execute your strategy the way you want, and it will run in the background of your business. It gives you a way to be there for your customers, even when you’re on vacation or practicing self-care in some other way.

You can use automation tools to customize an experience for people based on their behaviors, preferences, purchase activity, and more. Your customers will feel like you’ve crafted every marketing message just for them, which will grow their trust in your brand. And you’ll build a loyal audience of people who love (and tell other people about) your business.

What does marketing automation do?

It helps you understand your customers.

This makes your interactions with them richer—and more profitable. Eighty percent of customers are more likely to buy from brands that offer customized and relevant experiences, according to a 2018 report.

Personalizations frequently drive customer loyalty, too. In a 2017 survey, 44% of consumers said that personalized interactions made them likely to buy from the company again. Customers appreciate it when companies treat them as individuals with personalized messages and not a sea of faceless consumers.

It lets you implement complex strategies.

Being strategic with your marketing communications isn’t just about reaching out to your contacts repeatedly—it’s about considering and mapping out when interacting with potential shoppers or customers will be most meaningful.

To do this, many companies use drip campaigns, sending out a series of pre-written emails at regular intervals. But there are also automation tools that let marketers think about and build workflows to execute more complex strategies. In Mailchimp, our Customer Journey builder not only lets you create emails that reach people at relevant moments, but it also helps you organize, clean, and manage your audience based on engagement.

Whatever your industry, the idea is to regularly deliver value to a customer over time, strengthening the relationship and their perception of your brand. Marketing automation (combined with your strategy) lets you reach better quality contacts and add complexity to your campaigns, because it makes it possible to send out custom messages to different segments of your audience based on their interests, behaviors, and even data from your CRM software. You can time those individualized messages based on the customer’s actions to improve your customer relationship management.

It lets your team focus on higher-level tasks.

Automation solutions are becoming more prevalent in digital marketing, helping marketers be more efficient. And by automating some of the manual, repetitive tasks that they normally have to do themselves, they’re able to focus on the more rewarding aspects of their work and the strategic side of lead nurturing and customer retention.

When your team automatically schedules and sends out marketing messages, for example, you can focus on enhancing the customer experience and respond to inquiries or resolve issues.

It saves you time and resources.

Marketing automation can help you save time, improve engagement, optimize your marketing and benefit your bottom line with workflow automation. It gives your customers personalized attention with thoughtful, authentic messages that sound like you’re writing to a friend, whether you have a hundred fans or millions of them. You can use merge tags in an email so that it starts with the customer’s name, for example, or you can reach out to people on big days like birthdays.

How does marketing automation work?

Automation depends on information. Each time someone subscribes to your list, buys something from your store, or clicks on your ads, they’re providing you with valuable data.

If you use Mailchimp, for example, your contact data is all in one place so you can get a holistic view of your audience as a whole. It also offers a visual breakdown of data—like where your contacts are located, how often they engage with your emails, and more insights—that you can turn into a map that will guide your customers to take the desired action at different interaction points.

You can also use browser cookies to track people’s behavior on your website and record where they go, what they do, and what they buy.

Then comes the “marketing” part of marketing automation. You give your system a few pieces of information, including:

1. What messages you want to send and what tags you want to be added or removed from a contact
2. What segments of your contacts you want to target
3. What circumstances should activate the automation

If it all goes as planned, your system then engages your contacts, right when it’s most likely to make them convert.

5 essential marketing automation tools for small business marketers

When choosing your automation tools, you’ll want to consider your business goals. Automation tools are individual workflows you can set up to perform different functions that will help you accomplish the goals you’ve identified for your marketing strategy.

In Mailchimp, our automation tools cut across our platform, so you can think holistically about how you want customers to interact with your company:

• Email automation. Automate a single email—like a welcome or abandoned cart message—to take repetitive tasks off your plate, or set up a drip campaign if there’s a series of content you want your customers to receive. Once a customer has met the criteria required to enter your automation, they’ll trigger all the emails included in the workflow.
• Customer Journey. So named because it lets you visually map how you want customers to engage with your brand and see how that relationship evolves over time, this tool helps you think more about an end-to-end experience. Email is one of the interactions you can set up to send whenever customers reach that stage in the individualized journey the system delivers, but this tool goes beyond email. With the Customer Journey builder, you’re doing just that—building journeys for your customers, with logic they have to meet in order to move to the different interactions in your map like getting an email or being removed from a group.
• Scheduling. From emails to social posts to postcards, you can get ahead on your marketing by scheduling the date and time you want your content to send.
• Retargeting. Retargeting emails and ads make it easy to remind people about the stuff they’ve viewed on your site and give them a clear path back to your store to buy. When developing your strategy, it’s good to keep in mind that people won’t always buy something the first time. They might get distracted, or they might not be ready at that time. Think of retargeting as a gentle nudge that gets people thinking about your stuff until they realize that they just can’t live without it.
• Optimization & recommendations. With product recommendations, dynamic content, send time optimization, and a/b testing, you’ve got the tools you need to make every interaction with your customers more meaningful and valuable.

What does marketing automation mean for the customer experience?

Before making a purchase, people might read the website, consider what product they want, sleep on it, and eventually go back to buy. This wandering route is called the customer journey, and it’s different for everyone.

It helps you connect with new fans...

If a person expresses interest in what you offer and enters their email on a subscriber pop-up form on your site, you can send them a welcome email to introduce yourself—and give them a reason to stick around.

...and sell more stuff.

It’s OK to sell to your customers, but with automation you can do it without sending lots of promotional emails.

Let’s think about that contact who signed up through the pop-up form on your site. When that contact starts to move toward a purchase, such as putting something in their cart without checking out, you can set it up so they receive an abandoned cart email from you.

Meanwhile, you can send occasional reminders to people who haven't interacted with you in a while. Retargeting emails, for example, remind people about the great stuff they saw on your site. Chances are, at least some of them are still interested and will make a purchase if you reach out.

It cultivates a trusting 2-way relationship.

When you deliver relevant content to your customers, you show them that you care about them. The more you target your communications, the more they will trust you to keep providing high-quality products or services. You can even use automation to send coupons or other discounts to people that meet certain criteria for loyalty or spending.

What are some marketing automation best practices?

1. Be specific about what you hope to achieve.

Collect all the data you have about your current marketing strategies and set goals for what you want to achieve with automation. Then you'll be able to measure your progress. You can also collect some examples of successful marketing automation campaigns to give you some ideas.

2. Think about how you want to segment your audience.

Marketing automation benefits you the most when it's as targeted as possible. Who you should be targeting depends on your products or services—and your customer base. Segmentation is a key element of successful automation, so take your time with it. It’s better to do it right than do it quickly.

Maybe you have products that appeal to different age groups. In that case, you'll want to segment by demographic. Maybe your services appeal to people with different levels of responsibility in their companies. If that's the case, segment by career level.

3. Create a flowchart.

Marketing automation is all about if-then. Figure out when you want people to enter your workflow—such as joining your subscriber list—and then specify when to move these people forward.

Our Customer Journey builder gives you a way to map out this type of if-then flow your customers will take. If someone interacts with your welcome email, for example, then that person gets an offer related to the action they took. If the person redeems the offer, then they are placed into a group that gets regular discounts and offers, and so on.

4. Test everything.

Keep track of how your campaigns are doing with A/B testing. Try different subject lines, images, messaging, or send times to find what resonates the most with your audience.

If some of your targeted messages aren't doing well, you can use that information and improve your next campaign. On the other hand, you can look at what your successful campaigns have in common and apply those insights to future marketing efforts.

Start building your marketing automation strategy

No matter what industry you’re in, it’s easy to set up marketing automation for any situation. Once you’ve settled on your goals, created your messaging, and have decided on the criteria that will power your workflow, you can start cultivating lasting relationships with your customers.

Check out how Mailchimp's free marketing automation tools stack up against the competition.

More about marketing automation

About Customer Journeys

In this article, you’ll learn more about Mailchimp’s Customer Journey feature, which helps you build dynamic, automated marketing paths for your contacts. Create a journey map with multiple starting points, branches, and unique actions so each of your contacts has a personalized experience.

Create a Customer Journey

Use Mailchimp’s Customer Journey builder to create unique, automated marketing workflows that add tags based on contact behavior, send relevant emails, and accomplish other important tasks for you.

All the Starting Points

Every Customer Journey begins with a starting point that will add contacts to a workflow based on the conditions you’ve set. With Mailchimp’s Standard or Premium plan, Yyou can add up to 3 starting points to target contacts based on different levels of engagement and manage more complex automated journeys within a single map.

Create Automated Customer Journey Maps

Build automated customer journey maps that deliver unique experiences to each of your contacts. With Mailchimp’s new marketing automation tool, you can find your most engaged customers, learn what they’re interested in, and be there for them when it counts.

Choose how your customer’s journey starts

From making a purchase to abandoning a shopping cart to signing up for your marketing, we have all the automation starting points you need to ensure that you’re engaging with the right people at the right moment. Every automation needs a beginning—choose what works for your business.

Our Best Tips for Designing Successful Automated Emails

When you create automated emails, you can keep customers engaged without the hassle of sending messages one by one. But how do you automate outreach without losing authenticity? It's easier than you might think. Mailchimp makes it a breeze to wish customers happy birthday or to say thank you for a purchase. By creating customized, targeted emails that send when triggered by a specific date, event, or activity, you can send thoughtful messages that match the look and feel of your brand and resonate with your customers. Check out these best practices for sending automated emails that really click.

Exploring Abandoned Cart Strategy with Topo Designs

Even when your site is chock-full of good stuff, sometimes your customers get distracted—by a cat video or a celebrity gossip blog, perhaps—and they leave your site before buying what they really wanted. Topo Designs, a Colorado-based outdoor lifestyle goods company, knew that creating the right abandoned cart campaign could easily solve this problem, so they tested variables within Mailchimp's abandoned cart marketing automation to figure out what brings customers back. The result? An abandoned cart email that consistently receives a 20% click rate. In this article, Topo Designs explains why it's important to remind interested shoppers what you've got.

Tips for Better Retargeting Campaigns

You can have the world’s savviest marketing plan in place and customers still don’t always click on something the first time they see it. Whether they encounter your ads on Facebook, Instagram, or another channel, they may not make a purchase until they've seen what you've got through multiple avenues. That's where Google remarketing ads come into play. Google remarketing ads help you reach people who have expressed interest in your products—wherever they go online—and bring them back to your store when they’re ready to buy. Using these best practices and Mailchimp's powerful reporting tools, you can run retargeting ads that pay off.

Combining Abandoned Cart Messaging and Product Recommendations

When customers leave something in their cart, reminding them to come back for it is only polite. And it's not just about manners, it also yields real results for businesses—we’ve found that our average user earns enough money from their abandoned cart marketing automation to pay for their Mailchimp account. Abandoned cart messaging lets you do more than nudge customers to return and buy the original item they were eyeing, you can also recommend similar items they might like using their purchase history and behavior on your site. Learn how to give shoppers the personalized attention they deserve and increase your bottom line.

How to Identify Your Best Email Automation Triggers

Automated emails improve engagement and benefit your bottom line. These messages are triggered by specific customer actions, like joining a mailing list, making a purchase, or filling out a quote form. They can even be prompted by inaction—like when a customer places an item in their shopping cart but doesn't actually buy it. And although they boost business, it's a good idea to evaluate what you're sending and why. In this article, we talk to an email marketing expert about how to identify and implement the right email automation triggers.

What Is Retargeting?

Sometimes customers stumble upon your online store before they're ready to make a purchase. In fact, 97% of first time site visitors leave without buying anything. This is where retargeting is key. Google remarketing ads—also known as retargeting ads—bring back website visitors who left your store. These ads reach shoppers across many other channels of the web, whether they're reading an article, listening to music, or shopping somewhere else. And when you create retargeting ads in Mailchimp, we’ll automatically generate thousands of ads that display in the right place at the right time. Find out how retargeting works.

Identifying the Most Profitable Automations for E-Commerce Businesses

For e-commerce businesses, automations can increase sales exponentially. But with a variety of marketing automation tools at your fingertips, it can be hard to know where to begin. We evaluated the data from 150,000 businesses that use Mailchimp and determined that although tools like abandoned cart, product follow-up, and category follow-up automations are the most effective for selling more stuff, there are others that work better for boosting customer loyalty or re-engaging customers. See what works for best for meeting a variety of customer needs.

Single Email or Series? Choosing the Most Effective Automation for Your Business

Mailchimp’s marketing automation gives you the ability to create a single email—or an email series—that sends automatically based on predetermined triggers. We evaluated data from 150,000 businesses that use Mailchimp to compare single and multiple-email automations and to learn which yields better results. Our findings showed that if your goal is to sell more stuff, opting for an automation series can help increase impressions and result in more sales. But there are interesting outliers. Use our findings and test a single email against a full series for each automation to learn which one resonates with your customers and works best for your business.

Turn New Customers into Regulars with These 4 Automated Campaigns

Finding new customers is exciting, but it's even better when customers return to your shop again and again. With Mailchimp's marketing automation, it's easier than ever to keep shoppers coming back for more. It all begins with your first impression, and our welcome automations help you put your best foot forward. And after a purchase is made, you can solidify their love for you with an order notification that matches the look and feel of your brand. You can even reward customer loyalty and say happy birthday. Learn how to use automations to turn new customers into old friends.

How Henry’s House of Coffee Makes Customers Feel Like Family with Marketing Automation

At Henry's House of Coffee in San Francisco, roasting great coffee is a family affair. In fact, co-owner Hrag Kalebjian learned the trade from his father Henry, who grew up making coffee to serve in his own father's bakery in Lebanon. Although the company now exists digitally with an e-commerce store, Hrag wanted to connect authentically with his customers. He discovered that Mailchimp's marketing automation made it possible not only to tell his story, but to really engage his customers. See how automation helps Henry's House of Coffee keep tradition alive.

How Blink Built Its Business with Email Automation

For home security company Blink, success began with a 2014 Kickstarter campaign. More than 7,000 backers provided them with funding, and these backers became an engaged audience. After that, Blink used Mailchimp's powerful testing and reporting tools in combination with surveys to determine what these customers liked best. They learned that design matters just as much as content and that it's as valuable to send relationship-building emails as it is to send emails that convert. In this article, Blink tells us how optimizing their email automations has helped them sell more than 400,000 of their security products.

Turn Window Shoppers into Customers with Product Retargeting Emails

Research shows that only 5% of customers who visit your site add items to their cart, so how can you reach the other 95%? Product retargeting emails can help—in fact, they generate 90x more orders per contact than regular bulk campaigns. These automated emails send to subscribers who view your items, but leave your site without adding anything to their cart. The most successful product retargeting emails test for the best time, include product recommendations, identify their audience, and speak to their goal. Still not sure how to make retargeting work for you? Check out a real-world example.

How to Make Retargeting Work for Your Business

When customers leave your site without buying anything, retargeting creates the awareness they need about your brand and a clear path back to your store. Ideally, retargeting is part of a long-term strategy for businesses that already have a solid following. They are particularly helpful in specific moments, like when you want to promote your best selling stuff, advertise a new collection, or feature surplus items. See how retargeting ads work around the clock to keep your brand top of mind and encourage potential customers to take the next step.

How One Small Business Made Retargeting Ads that Earned a 3,879% ROI

Chris Daley, founder of 1250Ships.com, wanted to spend minimal time and money on marketing, but to look like he spent a lot. Retargeting made this possible. Chris set up a Google remarketing ad in Mailchimp that brought in over $8,200 in revenue, snagged 19 first-time buyers, and led to a 3,879% ROI in its first 3 months. With this ad, he reached potential customers across the web and built his brand’s reputation. Learn how to replicate his success.

A Gallery of Successful Retargeting Ads Built in Mailchimp

You can create a Google remarketing ad in Mailchimp with just a few clicks, but it’s important to come up with a plan for your content and budget before you get started. Your copy should give shoppers a call to action, not merely a description of what you're selling. The images you choose need to match your brand and fit the ad space, too. And you'll need to set a budget that helps you maximize conversions. There's a lot to consider, so we've rounded up a few of our users’ most successful retargeting ads to serve as inspiration.

Related concepts to explore:

• Email automation
• Marketing analytics
• Digital marketing
• What is email marketing?
• Email marketing campaign tips
• CRM
• Conversion rates
• Retargeting
• Remarketing
• How to market your business