The full guide to marketing automation (Platforms & examples)

While marketing automation has been around for decades, new technologies (especially ones powered by AI) have amplified its power to help teams work more efficiently and drive better business results.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the topic of marketing automation in detail using real-life examples across different industries and use cases. You’ll also learn best practices for implementing automation strategies and explore five of the best marketing automation platforms.

What is marketing automation? (With examples)

Marketing automation refers to the platforms and processes marketers use to automate various activities. 

The goal of automation is to streamline time-consuming and repetitive tasks, like lead generation, campaign creation, channel selection, personalization, and more. This helps marketing teams save time, minimize human error, work more efficiently, and generate a better return on their investments.

Since marketing automation can include so many different tools and activities, there’s no simple way to encapsulate all its use cases. That’s why, we’ll start by exploring four real-life marketing automation examples, so you can better understand how teams use automation to achieve key business goals.

The first company we’ll look at used a three-step marketing automation flow to engage leads on the most well-known digital marketing channel — email.

Example #1: Nurturing leads and increasing first purchases via simple email marketing automation

Remix is one of the leading online stores for second-hand and outlet fashion in Europe. Like many eCommerce brands, Remix faced an issue with users who registered to their website without purchasing anything afterward.

Their team turned to Insider’s email marketing automation capabilities to overcome this issue. With the help of our growth experts, Remix built a three-step automated onboarding plan for new leads:

• First, Remix segmented users who signed up but didn’t make a purchase within a week. From here, they built an email that prompted each user to save their preferred search filters.
• They also created a second automated email that triggered a few days after the first one. Its goal was to educate potential customers on the variety of brands available on the site and how to mark ones as favorites.
• Lastly, Remix created the last automated email in this flow to show users how to combine orders and save money on shipping.

The result of this automation strategy was a 104% increase in first purchases compared to the previous quarter.

Example #2: Validating leads and reducing sales cycle length with automated scoring and segmentation

This next example comes from one of the largest insurance and asset management brands in the world — Generali.

The company had already used Insider to power their lead generation with Exit Intent Overlays. However, they still faced an issue with lead validation as their sales team would often waste time contacting leads with little to no interest in Generali’s products.

The solution was a new automated lead scoring and engagement process. With the help of our team, Generali started automatically evaluating each lead based on their behaviors, like web page interactions. 

Generali then started using Architect to segment leads based on their score and send them relevant promotions and offers across SMS, email, and web push. This data was also sent back to Generali’s customer relationship management (CRM) system via an API, so their sales team can see and prioritize the hottest leads and boost sales. The result is a 20% reduction in sales cycle length.

Example #3: Recovering revenue and engaging customers with email, SMS, and web push automation

Slazenger is an established sportswear brand covering cricket, tennis, swimming, hockey, golf, and many other sports. They started working with Insider to achieve two key goals:

1. Engage customers with automated, personalized, and contextual messaging across channels.
2. Improve the return on investment (ROI) from their martech stack.

Strategic automation, combined with personalization, enabled Slazenger to achieve both goals. 

For example, one of their key use cases involved recovering lost revenue by bringing back cart abandoners to the site. To do that, they used our customer journey builder to create automated flows that delivered the right message to each customer at the right time and on the right channel (web push, email, or SMS).

Using this approach, the brand saw a 49x ROI in just eight weeks and recovered 40% of lost revenue with just one campaign.

Example #4: Increasing CLTV and marketing ROI via omnichannel automation

This final example is the most complex as it shows how an eCommerce brand — NA-KD — overhauled its marketing approach using the power of AI, data, and automation.First, NA-KD unified its customer data into our customer data platform (CDP). This gave their marketing team a solid foundation of reliable data to use for future automated campaigns.

After launching its first hyper-personalized SMS campaign, the company successfully expanded its channel breadth to include web push, app push, and email. This enabled NA-KD to create seamless, automated journeys across all key touchpoints their customers were using.

Whether their customers were browsing their website, chatting on WhatsApp, or checking their emails, NA-KD could now reach them with automated messages on the right channels and at the right times. This was made possible by AI-powered capabilities that use behavioral data and predictive intelligence, including:

• Next-Best Channel, which triggers each message on the channel users are most likely to use.
• Send-Time Optimization, which sends each message at the time it’s most likely to engage the recipient.
• A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection, which analyzes the results of your A/B tests and automatically guides users to the winning variant, based on a winning metric and test duration you set beforehand.

NA-KD’s new approach to automation and personalization led to a 25% increase in customer lifetime value (CLTV) and a 72x ROI in 12 months.

How marketing automation works: Best practices and benefits

Successful marketing automation is all about leveraging data to streamline processes and achieve key business results.

For example, say you’re looking to improve the results of your cross-channel marketing campaigns. An omnichannel automation platform (like Insider) can help you do that in a few ways:

• First, it can unify your customer data in one convenient database and automatically update it as customers interact with your brand.
• Second, it can analyze that data to determine customers’ needs, interests, and preferences in terms of channels, products, and more.
• Finally, it lets you build automated campaigns using a simple customer journey builder.

Different platforms might offer different automation capabilities, depending on their use cases. However, pretty much all of them revolve around using data to automate processes in a logical and reliable way.

In the next sections, we’ll explore a few best practices for implementing your automation strategies to ensure their success.

3 Best practices for implementing a marketing automation strategy

Regardless of your business size and maturity, you likely have some processes already automated. 

For example, pretty much every online business sends out an automated email confirmation when you become a newsletter subscriber, just like all eCommerce brands send an automated purchase confirmation after you buy a product.

But if you want to move beyond standard email automations, you’ll need a solid marketing automation strategy. Most businesses should start the process by organizing their customer data.

#1 Organize your data

Like many other marketing efforts, automation requires reliable data about your processes, challenges, and customers. 

For example, if you’re trying to automate a process, like lead scoring and qualification, you’ll need data about the time the process takes right now, the tools you’re using to handle it, and where the bottlenecks are.

Or, if you want to automate certain aspects of your campaigns — like delivering relevant messages at the right times to the right audiences — you’ll need to organize your customer data. That way, your automation efforts will be based on a solid understanding of your customers’ journeys, without missing any key data points.

You can do that with a customer data platform (CDP) — a type of software built specifically for aggregating customer data from multiple sources into a single convenient database. CDPs give you complete 360-degree views of all customers filled with invaluable insights like:

• Channel reachability and preferred touchpoints.
• Last visited, purchased, and abandoned products.
• Previous and real-time interactions with your brand.
• Loyalty status and predictive characteristics such as likelihood to purchase.

From here, a good marketing automation platform can leverage that data to automatically deliver personalized messages on the channels and at the times customers are most likely to engage with. We’ll discuss some solutions that can do that later in this guide.

#2 Choose the right automation solution 

Most marketing solutions today can build automated workflows to help streamline certain processes. 

For example, CRM-based platforms offer many ways to automate lead nurturing and customer management, while omnichannel marketing platforms provide automation capabilities for various customer journey phases and channels.

As with all other software, the right choice will depend on your specific automation needs. Here are four important factors to consider when comparing platforms that apply to pretty much any business:

1. Supported channels: Getting a robust solution that lets you automate flows and campaigns across all your channels can drastically simplify your operations and reduce context switching. Conversely, if you’re a small business that’s mostly focused on one or two customer touchpoints, using traditional point solutions might be the way to go.
2. Ease of setup and use: While most automation tools offer simple drag-and-drop editors for building campaigns, the setup process of each one can be very different. Investing in a platform with a good customer support team and a proven record of being easy to manage is the only way to reduce your time-to-value and speed up the return on your investment. 
3. Auxiliary capabilities: This depends on your automation use cases but features like A/B testing and analytics are usually a must for marketing teams. AI-based functionalities like Send-Time Optimization and Next-Best Channel Selection are also popular with teams looking to build optimized campaigns as efficiently as possible.
4. Integrations: Your automation solution will need to share data with other parts of your martech stack (e.g., analytics software, customer service tools, customer data platforms, and so on). In the best case scenario, you want to choose a platform with ready-made integrations with your stack to ensure ease of setup and a consistent data flow.

Again, we’ll discuss five different automation platforms later in this guide, so you can understand how these factors can play a role when comparing specific solutions.

#3 Analyze your results and optimize accordingly

Once your automation strategies are live, it’s time to keep track of their results and optimize accordingly. For that, you’ll need a good customer journey analytics software that can show you:

• Which channels are performing well and which ones aren’t.
• Which steps in your campaigns are leading to most drop-offs.
• How many conversions and how much revenue your automations are generating.
• And other similar insights.

For example, with Insider, you can see this data right in the same canvas where you build your campaigns. That way, you don’t have to switch between screens or analytics solutions to see what’s working.

You also have the option to build custom dashboards with various metrics about your automation strategies. 

For instance, a digital marketing team might need a dashboard with detailed metrics like delivery rates, open rates, conversion rates, and journey completions for each automation strategy. At the same time, leadership and other stakeholders might need a higher-level overview with metrics like revenue, AOV, and customer retention from specific automation campaigns.

Benefits of marketing automation for your business

When done right, marketing automation helps you:

1. Save time and resources: The more tasks you can automate, the less time your teams need to spend on repetitive work. This helps them work more efficiently and frees up their time to do creative, high-impact work.
2. Reduce human errors: Doing monotone tasks for hours on end naturally leads to mistakes due to boredom, a lack of concentration, or both. Automation helps solve that problem and minimize the impact of human error on important marketing processes.
3. Improve marketing ROI: This is a direct consequence of the previous two benefits. As your team starts working faster and more efficiently, the ROI you see from various marketing activities will improve. 
4. Increase customer satisfaction, revenue, and retention: Automation can help you deliver the right messages to the right customers at the right times. Naturally, this makes customers much more likely to engage with you and form long-term relationships with your brand, as they’re sure you won’t trouble them with irrelevant messages.
5. Achieve personalization at scale: Delivering tailored messages on different channels — e.g., email, SMS, online ads, chatbots, and so on — to thousands of leads and customers is only possible via strategic automations. This process comes with plenty of challenges but overcoming them is more than worth it as it can drastically improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, and retention.

The 5 best marketing automation platforms

As with all other tools, there’s no single best marketing automation software for every business.

For example, enterprise teams require more robust solutions that support many channels and use cases, while startups and other small businesses usually need something simple that covers one or two channels (e.g., email and SMS) and can be set up quickly.

That’s why we’ll round up this guide by covering five different marketing automation solutions, including:

1. Insider — an enterprise-grade automation and personalization solution for 12+ channels.
2. HubSpot — a CRM-based automation solution.
3. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement — an automation platform focused on B2B brands.
4. Klaviyo — eCommerce automation solution primarily specialized in email and SMS.
5. Mailchimp — a simple email marketing solution for businesses of all sizes.

If you want a deeper dive into this topic with additional solutions, check out our guide to the 13 best marketing automation tools and platforms.

Insider: AI-native automation and personalization platform for 12+ channels

Insider is our AI-native platform for building individualized, cross-channel customer experiences. It’s used by 1200+ leading brands, including Toyota, Samsung, Phillips, Adidas, Allianz, CNN, and many others.

As a leading marketing automation solution for enterprise companies, Insider offers:Access to 12+ channels from one place, including web, mobile app, email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. This makes it an ideal unified marketing platform for teams that want to simplify their martech stack, streamline operations, and achieve a better marketing ROI.

• AI-native customer journey builder, which lets you create, automate, and analyze campaigns across all channels from one place. Plus, it comes with AI-powered features like Send-Time Optimization, Next-Best Channel Selection, and A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection that save you tons of time and effort by automatically optimizing different aspects of your campaigns.

• Advanced personalization. For example, Insider can automatically tailor all website elements — like banners, categories, and product recommendations — to each visitor. Our platform can also extend the same level of personalization across channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. This helps you create completely personalized experiences that drive engagement, revenue, and customer loyalty.

• Best-in-class customer support team. We have over 1000 team members spread across 26 offices and six continents. This enables us to provide the best possible customer support experience to each client. As a result, teams constantly rank Insider as the top solution when it comes to ease of use, ease of setup, quality of support, and time-to-value.

• Data unification with a true enterprise CDP. Our CDP can aggregate data from any online or office source, allowing you to overcome data silos and gain a clear understanding of your customers’ journeys. As we said, this is essential for setting a solid foundation for your marketing strategy.

• Unique combination of Generative, Predictive, and Conversational AI. You can use our platform to maximize AI’s marketing potential and work more efficiently, predict customer behaviors, have two-way communications across messaging channels at scale, and much more. For example, Renault used our AI virtual assistant to decrease customer wait times on WhatsApp by 93%.

To learn more about Insider and how it can help you build automated and highly personalized marketing campaigns, book a free demo with our team.

HubSpot: CRM-based automation platform

HubSpot is a versatile platform that offers products across various teams and use cases. The most well-known of these products is the HubSpot CRM that is often used in combination with HubSpot’s marketing automation software (Marketing Hub). The Hub contains tools for different channels like email, online ads, social media, SEO, and more. It also offers automation functionalities for marketing tasks like lead management, campaign optimization, landing page building, and more.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: B2B marketing automation built on Salesforce

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) is Salesforce’s marketing automation solution for B2B brands built on their well-known CRM. The solution offers end-to-end automation capabilities for the entire customer lifecycle — from lead nurturing to cross-channel journey orchestration and account-based engagement. It’s also a part of the broader Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so it can be integrated with other tools like Salesforce’s CDP, email marketing tool, analytics platform, and so on.

Learn more: 5 Best Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors and alternatives.Klaviyo: eCommerce marketing automation for email, SMS, and mobile push notifications

Klaviyo is a leading email and SMS solution that’s recently added mobile push notifications, reviews, and web forms to its toolkit. Its Automated Flows help businesses of all sizes deliverd tailored messages (across email campaigns, SMS, and push notifications) based on customer data using a drag-and-drop flow builder. 

While it offers flexible pricing and supports three channels, Klaviyo isn’t as versatile as enterprise-grade automation solutions like Insider or Salesforce. This might not be an issue for smaller businesses but it can definitely affect larger teams looking to unify their martech stacks and access more channels from one place.

Learn more: 11 Best Klaviyo competitors & alternatives for all business types.

Mailchimp: Simple email marketing automation for all business sizes and industries

Mailchimp is probably the most well-known email marketing solution for small and mid-sized businesses. It has everything you need to build email marketing campaigns, from lead generation and audience management to analytics and automation capabilities. While simple to implement and use, Mailchimp is focused exclusively on email, so teams that rely on multiple channels need to either integrate it with their current martech stack or move away in favor of a more robust automation solution.

Automate, personalize, and analyze campaigns across 12+ channels with Insider

Insider lets you build, automate, and analyze simple workflows and complex campaigns across 12+ channels — including websites, mobile apps, email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp — from one place. It also ensures that every message you send is personalized based on your customers’ needs, interests, and preferences.

Put simply, our enterprise marketing platform can help you:

• Unify customer data from any online or offline source — including CRMs, CMSs, APIs, analytics platforms, customer service solutions, and more. This is essential if you want to overcome data silos and power your automation campaigns with reliable insights about your customers’ journeys.
• Make the most out of every customer interaction via personalization. From content and messaging to product recommendations, website banners, and site search results, our personalization engine can tailor everything to your customers’ needs and preferences. You can use these capabilities to improve conversion rates, drive more customer engagement, and ultimately improve revenue and retention.
• Use the full marketing and automation potential of AI and machine learning. Insider offers a mix of predictive, generative, and conversational AI capabilities that let you automate repetitive tasks, anticipate future behaviors, engage in unstructured two-way conversations at scale, and much more.

Finally, our easy channel integrations, experienced support team, and versatile templates will help you set up high-converting marketing automation campaigns as quickly as possible.Schedule a demo with our team to learn how Insider can benefit your business.