What is marketing automation?

Senior Managing Editor, Intercom

Marketing automation uses software and technology to manage marketing processes and campaigns automatically across multiple channels.

The primary goal of marketing automation is to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so that marketing teams can increase their operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. Plus, marketing automation software also makes it easier to provide more personalized experiences to prospects and customers.

What is marketing automation software?

Marketing automation software is the technology that’s used to automate repeatable and data-driven marketing tasks. Today, there are almost 10,000 marketing technologies, and many of them focus on automation.

This software exists to accomplish various marketing tasks, including but not limited to:

Email distribution
Social media posting
Campaign performance measurement
Lead generation
Lead nurturing and scoring
Account-based marketing
Customer segmentation
Retention efforts

Marketing automation platforms allow marketing professionals to focus more on building creative campaigns and help their brand stand out among their peers. They have also prompted the development of a new marketing role: marketing operations. This is a professional space that’s growing quickly and becoming more indispensable to businesses of all sizes.

Does marketing automation work?

Today’s brands tend to have various digital touchpoints with their leads and customers, and these touchpoints are all collecting data about their employment situation, behavior, preferences, and more. Marketing automation tools are designed to analyze this data and use it to streamline marketing workflows so that they are as targeted and effective as possible.

Once a marketing ops team has had a chance to understand some of the trends demonstrated by their target audience, they can use marketing automation tools to set “rules” that are then automatically acted on by the software.

As a result, rather than having every lead run through the same sales funnel, a martech stack built with marketing automation tools helps provide more customized experiences that are more likely to lead to a sale.

What is email marketing automation?

One of the most common uses of marketing automation is in email. Email marketing automation is the process of automating an email flow, without having to press “send” on each and every email that goes out from a brand. This has become a particularly useful tool for brands that have large email databases as it helps them send the right email, to the right person, with the right message, at the right time.

Modern email marketing automation software – such as Marketo, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Intercom – will measure the results of each email against performance metrics such as open rates, click through rate, click-to-open rate, and more. Email marketing automation tools will also have functionalities for A/B testing, allowing marketing teams to have a better understanding of what messaging works best, whether that’s in subject lines, preview text, body copy, or CTAs. Teams can then use that data to inform future campaigns.

Whether it’s in email or lead generation or audience segmentation, using marketing automation tools has become a must for most businesses as it significantly increases the return on investment on most marketing efforts.