The Beginners Guide to Marketing Automation Workflows

Marketing automation is one of the most important investments for any small business, but can be overwhelming when you are just beginning to tie it in to your current marketing strategies. This post will help you understand what marketing automation workflows are, their importance to digital marketing, and how to set them up in your own business. We'll also provide you with the best marketing automation tools available to small businesses so you can start crafting an effective workflow immediately.

Marketing Automation Workflows

The key to understanding marketing automation workflows is that they tie together all of the other marketing channels so that everything "automatically" runs smoothly, a beautiful framework of hands-off marketing that still provides your customer with the valuable resources they need to make the informed decision to do business with you. This article goes over a few simple steps on how to create an effective workflow for people new to this concept and short on time.

Marketing Automation Tools

For the most part, most of the automation tools and techniques exist within the first stages of the customer acquisition process. The key automation factors you should start with are the following:

Landing Pages - contact forms geared to capture customer information

Welcome Emails - the first email to new customers

List Segmentation - segmenting your mailing list based on information

Targeted Follow Up Emails - emails sent based on specific information

These four tools act as a simplified bridge to connect your marketing channels with ways to retain and directly engage with each customer. With each marketing channel within your business use these tools to gather data on each customer.

Using your content to promote or incentivize traffic to a landing page is the first step. Welcome emails will help you segment the people who have hit that landing page into list segments that focus on their specific needs. Then, a follow up email will give valuable information that each customer needs in regards to your business leading to more conversions and an invaluable customer journey.

A Marketing Automation Workflow Example

One tool to utilize to visualize your workflow is bubbl.us, a free tool that makes creating an organized, visually appealing workflow. As an example, here is the workflow I created. This shows the process in action moving customers to initial landing pages to targeted, meaningful emails leading to more conversions.

Importance of a CRM Tool

Another important tool to institute into your automation is a way to keep track of each customer’s distinct journey to make sure you are able to keep consistently adding value. This is best encapsulated in CRMs.

Customer relationship management systems are able to connect to your basic workflow and pull a lot of the weight for you. Logging important data and conversations with each customer will make sure that you can tailor the next few steps to exactly what they need.

A lot of times, depending on the breadth of your product offering, you can set up internal workflows within the CRM that addresses those specific needs with resources, follow up emails, portfolios, invoices and whatever else that particular customer is looking for based on their conversations, interactions, email clicks, tags and segments.

At this point, if you choose to institute a CRM, you can automate everything from initial brand contact to recurring business plans and referral inquiries all while making sure that the customer is finding even more value through data capture and targeted deliverables.

Our Favorite Marketing Workflow Tools

Now that we covered the important part, actually building the workflow, here are some popular marketing tools that can further simplify this process for you. We kept the focus on budget here.

Please note, both of the links below are affiliate links that support our ability to write these resources. Thank you in advance for your support!

Simplicity Focused?

Honeybook – $9+ - A responsive CRM built for small businesses and freelancers. Providing email templates and the ability to build workflows, as well as including plenty of room to log customer data, you can’t go wrong with this tool. There’s a lot of other small business tools like finances, scheduling, customer portals, and sales process automation to help you too. If you want to get started, you can get 50% off on an annual plan here.

Efficiency Focused?

ActiveCampaign – $19+ - A CRM and email tool that focuses on customer engagement. This tool is super powerful and has a lot of important marketing automation tools under its umbrella including everything we mentioned in this article. Emails, segmentation, visualization, and over 500 automation recipes to implement means this toolkit is enough to take care of your entire workflow. If you want to get started with ActiveCampaign, you can sign up for a 14 day free trial here.

Three Most Important Guidelines for your Workflow

If you take anything away from this guide, let it be these three rules you should always adhere to when the time comes to set up your marketing workflow automation.

1. With every piece of your workflow you put in place, have your end goal in mind.

2. Everything you put in front of the customer needs to learn and log some new information about them and their needs.

3. Always key your customer into what is happening next, so they know where to look.

Marketing Automation Checklist

The last thing we wanted to include is our own personal touch. These tools are proven to save you time and money while at the same time making your existing marketing more effective. To check out some more tools and how to use them, check out our favorite workflow templates. Or if you need some monthly tips and inspiration, we can help with that too.

We hope you’ll give them a shot.