If you sell online, you know how upsetting it is when someone visits your site, adds goods to their cart and then disappears. But it doesn’t mean you lost a customer. You still can persuade them to buy. How? With the help of smart tools. A minute later, that potential buyer gets an email showing those exact goods, plus a positive customer review. Later that day, they see a sponsored post for the same item when scrolling through Instagram. That’s not a coincidence. That’s how marketing automation works. It quietly drives your sales.
Today, nearly half of all companies use marketing automation. If you are not among them, here are nine processes you can automate right now. And you don’t need a big budget to start.
Social Media Marketing
About 94% of all internet users use social media today. Why not use the power of these platforms? But social media never sleeps, and you must keep up. Manual post sharing will quickly exhaust you. But you can use tools to plan posts in advance and share them when your readers are most active. You can manage different platforms from one dashboard, even when you are not online.
Bulkly, Hootsuite or Buffer tools automatically post across platforms – you can make a plan for a week or even a month ahead. But don’t set up and disappear. Always reply to all comments and messages.
Customer Service and Support
Customers expect instant, non-stop support. But you know how often their queries repeat. Chatbots and automated response systems can deal with these routine things 24/7. They answer common questions, track orders, process returns, and pass complex issues to human agents. Your response time will drop from hours to seconds, and customer satisfaction will grow.
Test Zendesk’s Answer Bot or Intercom’s Fin chatbot. These bots can learn from your knowledge base to answer frequently asked questions and reduce the volume of simple tickets.
Email Marketing
Email remains one of the most powerful marketing channels. It can deliver an ROI of up to 42:1 when done right. You can send emails to greet new subscribers, reminders to those who did not complete the purchase and follow-up emails to customers who stopped buying from you. But it’s a real nightmare to craft, segment, and time each email manually.
Mailchimp or Klaviyo will do everything for you. They will send planned emails, test various versions, and personalize emails based on what users do on your site. It’s already a marketing win when your messages are read by the right people, so running an email deliverability test helps ensure your emails actually reach them.
Content Marketing
Content creation is time-consuming. Tools make publishing much easier. You will learn what content is trending, when to publish a post, what title will catch more attention, and so on. You can program these tools to share your posts on the preferred channels. Each post will be polished for a particular platform. You can even auto-check SEO checks and track performance metrics.
ChatGPT and similar services will provide you with content ideas or do the research for you. SocialBee will then automate all your publications on the chosen channels and reshare your most successful content.
E-commerce marketing
A customer’s online journey can also be automated. You can use tools to make product suggestions, send reminders, adjust prices, and show targeted ads. After a purchase, these tools can also collect reviews, recommend similar items, or send promotions.
Klaviyo, Omnisend, and Shopify Flow tools will help you segment your customers. You will see who is most loyal and can reward them, who is inactive and needs to be re-engaged. Based on this, you can personalize your offers and pair them with AI lead generation to target customers more accurately. Tools make this process easy.
Influencer Marketing
You will need a lot of time to find the right influencers and set up contact with them. Small businesses usually cannot afford it. But you can act wiser. Upfluence, AspireIQ, Kolsquare or Heepsy will help you find influencers in your niche for high-quality user-generated content. Automate first messages, but take time to actually check the influencer’s content.
Later, you can use tools to handle contracts and payments, content briefs, post publication and more. You can even track brand mentions and audience reactions across influencer channels. This approach will save you a lot of resources and allow you to effectively collaborate with the right people.
Marketing Analytics and Reporting
You no longer need to manually collect data from all your marketing channels. It’s easy to automate. Just one tool will analyze your performance across all touchpoints and provide a detailed report with all ups and downs. You’ll get the whole picture on one dashboard.
For this purpose, you can use Google Data Studio or a CRM with built-in analytics. All you need to do is connect it to your systems and set up a weekly or monthly report.
Automation for Banks and Other Financial Services
Banks collect huge amounts of personal data. They fail to manually find patterns. So, they use the tools to study customer behavior, and then adjust their campaigns and tactics. They also use analytics to segment audiences and target the right people.
The goal is personalized marketing. Financial institutions use tools to make tailored offers to each customer. Over time, this approach can expand beyond marketing to create fully customized products and services. Moreover, many banks and financial services also implement approval workflows to streamline the approval process for marketing offers, financial products, and customer interactions, ensuring compliance and efficiency.
Capacity management for restaurants
Restaurants always struggle with bookings, waitlists, and promotions. Automation optimizes this flow and lets them enjoy more profits. Tools track how long guests usually stay and adjust booking times to fit more diners. They also send notifications when tables are available and reminders to reduce no-shows.
Automation also improves restaurant marketing. Tools can send customers special deals on slow nights or loyalty rewards. It helps restaurants fill more tables and improve sales.
Wrapping up
Marketing automation doesn’t replace humans. It only frees their creativity. When you don’t have to spend so much time on routine things, you can experiment with customer attraction. But don’t try to automate everything at once. Pick the area where you struggle the most and let the tools offload you. Step by step, integrate more tools into your system, and you will see the results very soon.
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