Marketing automation is the process of automating certain marketing workflows, allowing adaptive software to strategically use customer data to reach out to new and existing customers. Corporate marketing teams use marketing automation tools for many tasks. These include:

1. Email marketing campaigns: Marketing automation software can generate certain email campaigns as part of an outbound marketing strategy.
2. Lead nurturing: Marketing software can execute strategies like lead scoring, segmentation, and drip marketing campaigns where users receive steady outreach through marketing channels to build up trust and familiarity with the company. This can turn qualified leads into paying customers.
3. Lead management: A common marketing automation workflow involves tracking potential customers who leave items in their shopping carts. Through email marketing automation, these likely customers receive gentle notifications about their shopping carts and a suggestion that they complete the purchase.
4. Search engine optimization: SEO contributes heavily to inbound marketing and lead generation in today’s digital economy. All companies, but small businesses in particular, need website landing pages that show up in search engine results. Automated marketing tools can help adjust landing page content by studying real-time search engine metrics.
5. Social media management: Marketing automation software can handle some of the more tedious marketing tasks associated with social media campaigns. These marketing tools can automatically schedule social media posts, streamline social media messaging, and conduct “social listening” campaigns to see who’s talking about your brand on social media.
6. Analytics: Last but not least, marketing automation platforms provide real-time data about your marketing campaigns and customer interactions. They help with attribution (tracing a customer journey back to a referring website), dynamic pricing, A/B testing of particular ads, and sales data.

In most cases, marketing automation software works in tandem with customer relationship management software, commonly abbreviated as CRM. All aspects of a customer lifecycle get tracked within a CRM. This includes initial attribution, email campaign outreach, sales cycles, customer support, and various other touchpoints related to the customer experience.

CRM integration enhances the functionality of marketing automation software. The CRM software contains past transactional data and possible notes about a customer added by sales team members. By sharing this data with marketing automation software, you can generate customized campaigns that target a customer’s core interests and increase the likelihood of a sale.

Marketing automation software provides many benefits to users, including:

1. Time-saving automation features: Marketing automation software spares marketing teams the drudgery of sending emails, scheduling social media posts, and other tedious marketing tasks.
2. Generation of relevant content: By leveraging customer data from your CRM software, a marketing automation platform can send individual customers their own custom-tailored messages. This might mean follow-up messages about an abandoned eCommerce shopping cart, or it might mean providing useful information to email list subscribers.
3. An abundance of data and analytics: Automated marketing platforms provide their clients with an abundance of data about customer behavior, spanning from email open rates to ad clicks to time spent on a website to sales history. If you need data on your customers, marketing automation software is a great way to glean it.
4. Comparatively affordable when contrasted with a team of human marketers: Marketing automation software can come with high upfront costs, particularly for business-to-business companies (B2B companies) that need B2B marketing automation. Yet over the long run, companies can save a lot of money by turning certain marketing processes over to computer software and strategically hiring human marketers for higher-order tasks.

As you embark on a marketing automation strategy for your own business, keep the following tips in mind.

1. Shop around for software. The digital market currently brims with marketing automation software. Depending upon your needs, you might want software with application programming interface (API) capability. Or you might choose a vendor that offers many advertising and email templates to help you quickly set up a campaign. Compare offerings and don’t waste money on features you won’t use.
2. Embrace dynamic content. Many marketing automation systems can adjust advertising content and landing page content to align with real-time web activity. Oftentimes, dynamic content systems show entirely different material to people in different demographics. This dynamic approach can help marketing departments win quality leads by showing customers the right content at the right time. It may cost a bit more to acquire automated marketing software that provides dynamic content. But over time, this extra expense could increase your marketing ROI (return on investment).
3. Try drip campaigns. A drip campaign is one in which a company steadily sends a potential customer automated emails that highlight product offerings or perhaps just provide useful content. The goal of such marketing activities is to build a trusting relationship with the customer. As they become more familiar with the brand and learn more about service and product offerings, they may be more likely to follow through on a purchase.

The difference between marketing automation and sales automation aligns with the overall difference between marketing and sales.

Marketing involves building brand awareness. Through outbound marketing (like ads and email campaigns) and inbound marketing (like SEO and content creation), marketing teams educate potential customers about a brand and its offerings. Marketing automation runs through marketing automation software. Sales involves actual purchases. In a sales relationship, a business asks a customer to engage in a financial transaction to purchase goods or services. In most customer journeys, a sale comes after a marketing campaign; people do not make purchases until they become generally acquainted with the vendor. Sales automation runs through customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Agile marketing teams play out multiple iterations of marketing campaigns to constantly analyze metrics and make continuous improvements that satisfy customer needs.