Marketing automation allows businesses to streamline marketing tasks so you and your team can focus on the overall strategy.
Megaphones symbolizing marketing automation
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What is marketing automation?
Types of marketing automation
Best practices for marketing automation
Frequently asked questions about marketing automation
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Marketers know that personalization is effective.
“Research supports that adding someone’s name canada whatsapp code to the subject line of an email significantly improves the likelihood that the recipient will open that email [and] engage with it, and decreases the likelihood that they will unsubscribe,” says Neil Hoyne, head of data strategy and measurement at Google, in an English-language episode of Shopify Masters .
Of course, manually personalizing email subject lines for each subscriber would be a full-time job. That’s why many marketers use automation: it allows them to test marketing tactics they wouldn’t otherwise have time for, such as personalizing email subject lines.
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In this article, you'll read real-life examples of how Shopify merchants are using marketing automation software to grow their businesses, and some best practices for incorporating automation into your marketing toolset.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to promote goods or services without manual intervention. Automations allow marketers to streamline repetitive tasks associated with executing a digital marketing strategy.
For example, personalized messages that are automatically sent to customers when they take certain actions, such as signing up for a newsletter or adding a product to their shopping cart.
These messages are sent based on processes, or sets of instructions, that allow businesses to deliver specific messages to customers when they perform specific actions. These processes can be built from scratch or from a template. In either case, they can be modified as campaigns progress to optimize your results.
For example, let's say a potential customer visits your website and signs up to receive a promotional code via email. That action could trigger a series of emails that start with a welcome note and a discount code, but continue over several weeks with content that educates them about your product.
Types of marketing automation
Email marketing
Digital advertising
Customer Relationship Management
Upselling during checkout
Customer Experience
With the right software or coding skills, you can automate virtually any part of your digital marketing strategy. Here are some of the most popular ways to use marketing automation tools:
Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most popular uses of automation. It's easy to implement and allows businesses to send personalized, timely messages instead of mass emails that are likely to end up in the spam folder.
American olive oil company Graza uses Klaviyo to automate its marketing emails and send personalized mailings to small groups of customers who meet specific criteria. “I think we benefit from really direct communication,” says Andrew Benin, co-founder and CEO of Graza, in a case study .
“We have emails that only go out to 200 or 300 customers.” Segmenting customers into such small groups (those numbers may not seem small, but the company is on track to hit nearly $60 million in gross sales by 2024) would be incredibly laborious if done manually.
For example, you might decide to run different email marketing campaigns for customers who purchase from your e-commerce store at different frequencies. You could send one version of a promotional email to customers who have only purchased once, send a different version to customers who have purchased multiple times in the past three months, and so on.
In addition to automatically sending emails to specific customer segments when certain conditions are met, most email automation software also supports A/B testing , allowing you to test different versions of the same email and then automatically distribute the winning version.
Digital advertising
Digital advertising can be very expensive, so it is important for marketers to be clear about the return on investment . An efficient strategy to ensure advertising spend is automation.
This usually involves automatically serving different ads to different types of customers, or testing different versions of the same ad and then automatically running the best one.
For example, bedding company Cozy Earth uses Meta to run automated Facebook ads. According to a case study conducted by Meta, the company used machine learning to test more than 150 different ad combinations, then select and display the best ones.