Marketing Automation FAQs: What It Is, How It Works, and Where to Start

What are some examples of marketing automation?

You probably encounter marketing automation regularly without realizing it.

When you buy something online and receive a follow-up email suggesting related products, that’s automation. If you leave something in your shopping cart and receive a reminder the next day, that’s marketing automation too.

The same principle applies outside ecommerce.

A nonprofit might automatically send different communications to first-time donors, recurring donors, and volunteers. An association might create separate journeys for prospective members, current members, conference attendees, and people approaching renewal. A business might nurture a website visitor who downloaded a white paper until that person demonstrates enough interest to warrant contact from the sales team.

Does marketing automation mean sending more emails?

No. In fact, good marketing automation may mean sending fewer emails.

Without automation, organizations often rely on large email lists and send essentially the same message to everyone. Automation allows you to divide audiences according to their interests, behavior, relationship with your organization, and where they are in the customer or donor journey. The more personal a communication is, the greater the connection. 

Someone who attended your webinar yesterday probably shouldn’t receive the same message as someone who hasn’t interacted with your organization in six months.

The goal is not greater volume. It is greater relevance.

How does marketing automation know what someone is interested in?

This is where data and segmentation become important.

Your website and marketing platforms can provide signals about what people are doing. They might download a resource, register for an event, purchase a product, donate, click an email, visit a particular page, or submit a form.

Those actions can be used to place people into appropriate audience segments or trigger particular workflows.

Instead of treating every person in your database the same way, marketing automation helps you respond to what people have actually told you through their actions.

What is a marketing automation workflow?

A workflow is simply a predefined series of actions that occurs when certain conditions are met.

For example, imagine someone downloads a research report from your website. That action could trigger an immediate thank-you email. Several days later, the person could receive an invitation to an upcoming webinar on the same subject. If the person registers, the original email sequence stops, and a new event-related sequence begins.

The workflow can continue adapting as the person interacts with your organization.

Mapping these journeys is an important part of marketing automation. Before building the technology, you need to understand who your audiences are, what they need, and what you would ideally like them to do next.

What is lead scoring?

Not every person who visits your website or fills out a form is equally interested in becoming a customer.

Lead scoring assigns values to particular characteristics and behaviors to help identify the people who appear most interested or qualified.

Someone might receive points for downloading a guide, visiting a service page, attending a webinar, or returning to the website several times. Once that person reaches a predetermined score, the system can automatically alert the sales team.

This can help the sales team spend more of their time talking to promising prospects rather than manually sorting through every website inquiry.

Can marketing automation help nonprofits and associations?

Absolutely. Marketing automation isn’t limited to companies selling products.

Nonprofits can use automation to welcome first-time donors, encourage additional giving, communicate with volunteers, promote events, and personalize appeals according to previous engagement.

Associations can automate member onboarding, renewals, conference promotion, continuing education, member communications and recruitment.

The underlying principle is the same regardless of the organization: understand where someone is in their relationship with you and provide the information most likely to be useful at that moment.

Can marketing automation personalize my website too?

Yes. Marketing automation doesn’t have to stop at the inbox.

When your systems are properly connected, information about a visitor can be used to provide a more relevant website experience. That might mean recommending content, displaying information based on a person’s interests, or changing calls to action according to previous behavior.

Personalization should always have a purpose. The objective isn’t to demonstrate how much data you have about someone – we don’t want to seem creepy. It is to make it easier for that person to find something useful.

Can chatbots be part of marketing automation?

Yes, chatbots can be part of marketing automation.

Social chatbots and onsite customer service bots allow visitors to interact with an organization when and how they choose. A chatbot might answer common questions, help someone find information, collect an inquiry, or direct a visitor toward the appropriate next step.

When connected with other systems, those interactions can become part of the larger customer, member or donor journey rather than existing as a separate website feature.

Which marketing automation platform should we use?

There isn’t one right answer.

New Target works with platforms including HubSpot, Mailchimp, Salesforce Pardot, Marketo, Constant Contact, Monday, Klaviyo and Informz, among others.

The best choice depends on what you are trying to accomplish, the size and sophistication of your marketing program, the systems you already use, the amount of complexity your team can realistically manage, and your budget.

Buying a powerful marketing automation platform doesn’t automatically create an effective marketing automation program. In many cases, organizations already own more technology than they are actually using. The better first question is often not “Which platform should we buy?” but “What are we trying to automate?”

Does marketing automation integrate with our website and CRM?

It should.

Marketing automation becomes much more useful when your website, CRM, and marketing platforms exchange information instead of operating independently.

A form submission shouldn’t simply generate an email. It might also update a CRM record, identify an audience segment, begin a nurturing sequence, and provide information for campaign reporting.

Connecting these systems also helps create a clearer picture of the entire journey—from the first website visit to a donation, membership, registration, purchase, or sales conversation.

How do we know whether our automation is working?

Automation should be measurable.

Depending on the campaign, you might evaluate email engagement, form completions, registrations, purchases, donations, qualified leads, abandoned-cart recovery, or the percentage of prospects who ultimately convert.

Testing is also important. New Target uses multivariate testing to examine variables such as messaging, design, timing, and audience segments. Instead of assuming a workflow is finished once it launches, testing provides information that can be used to continually improve it.

Where should we start with marketing automation?

Don’t start by trying to automate everything.

Start with one important audience and one journey that currently requires too much manual work or isn’t producing the results you want.

What happens after someone submits your most important website form? What happens after someone makes a first donation? What happens when a member is approaching renewal? What happens when a shopper abandons a cart? What happens after someone downloads your best piece of content?

Map what happens today, decide what should happen, and identify the systems and data needed to make that journey work.

Once one useful workflow is performing well, you can build from there.

Marketing automation should make marketing more human, not less

Instead of asking your staff to manually track thousands of individual interactions—or sending everyone the same generic message—you can use automation to respond to people according to their interests, needs, and behavior.

New Target helps nonprofits, associations, businesses, and government organizations map customer journeys, integrate marketing technology, build automated workflows, personalize digital experiences, and measure the results.

The technology handles the repetitive work. Your team gets more time to concentrate on the work that actually requires people.

Contact us. We can help.