What is marketing automation? A simple explanation

At its most basic level, marketing automation refers to technology that manages, schedules, and executes marketing processes and campaigns, automatically, by applying if/then logic to prospect and customer behaviour.

Technology like Klaviyo, the platform that powers smarter digital relationships, leverages your audience’s historical and real-time data from multiple integrated sources to streamline workflows and maximise your team’s efficiency. It also helps you use customer segmentation to understand what’s meaningful to your target audiences—and, in turn, empowers you to surface more relevant content for them, precisely when they’re most likely to act on it.

Marketing automation, to me, is speaking to the right customer, at the right time, with the right content.

Chris Gordon

Head of client success, Noticed

Chris Gordon, head of client success at leading ecommerce and marketing agency Noticed, puts it simply: “Marketing automation, to me, is speaking to the right customer, at the right time, with the right content.”

4 benefits of marketing automation

Let’s take a look at 4 of the biggest problems marketing automation can solve for your brand:

1. Consumers expect marketing that feels 1:1, and automation delivers that

According to McKinsey & Company, 71% of consumers expect personalisation from the brands they interact with—and even more (76%) get frustrated when they don’t get it.

That means in order to build credibility with consumers, your marketing can’t just be the smartest or the sexiest or the most engaging. With so many marketing messages out there that check all those boxes, what your marketing efforts should aim to be, above any other adjective, is relevant—a word whose meaning may change drastically from individual to individual.

What your marketing efforts should aim to be, above any other adjective, is relevant.

Enter: marketing automation.

Because automated emails and texts are based on unique, behavioural customer data, “it’s great from a customer perspective—the experience is inherently tailored specifically to every customer,” explains Sean Donahue, director of email marketing at nationally recognised digital marketing agency Power Digital.

The explicit goal of marketing automation, Gordon says, “is to make the marketing experience more personalised. You want to make it feel as much as possible like a customer picked up a product in your store and a sales associate came over to talk to them about it.”

It works, too: McKinsey also reports that companies that excel at personalisation in marketing generate 40% more revenue from related activities than average players.

If you’re not sending messages on a 1:1 level, you’re doing it wrong.

Sean Donahue

Director of email marketing, Power Digital

“It’s the new gold standard to have personalisation,” Donahue says. “If you’re not sending messages on a 1:1 level, you’re doing it wrong.”

2. Marketing automation enables personalisation at scale

Of course, for most marketers, that advice is preaching to the choir — but it’s often easier said than done.

Marketing automation is one way to smoothen the process.

The magic of marketing automation is that even though your marketing automation solution, if it’s doing its job, is carrying the bulk of the lift, the end customer experiences your 1:many content as relevant and interesting—and like it’s been specially crafted just for them.

You would need an incredibly large marketing team to be able to provide the level of customisation and personalisation at the same number of touchpoints if it wasn’t automated.

Lindsey Murray

VP of performance marketing, Blue Acorn iCi

Importantly, marketing that’s automated and personalised at scale achieves that 1:1, “I’m a priority” feeling—without costing you the effort of maintaining a personal relationship with each and every customer.

As Murray points out, “especially for brands with a large client base, you would need an incredibly large marketing team to be able to provide the level of customisation and personalisation at the same number of touchpoints if it wasn’t automated.”

3. Marketing automation allows your people to do more with less

On that note, Donahue says marketing automation is a way for marketers to create “meaningful personalised experiences” without needing to have “hands on keyboard all day long, building emails and getting them out.”

We can initially build it, set it, and forget it.

Sean Donahue

Director of email marketing, Power Digital

Instead, “we can initially build it, set it, and forget it,” he explains. “We can find these core different areas in the customer journey, set up the automations so they’re sending at all different times around the clock, and then make it so that we don’t need to be manually punching all this in on a constant basis.”

Of course, following the initial set-up, Power Digital continues to track automations and perform A/B testing to “determine areas of opportunity and optimisation,” Donahue adds. “It’s an iterative process that we continue to update through the lifetime of the automation.”

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But compared to manual marketing efforts, “marketing automation for us is just efficiency,” says Heather Browne, director of performance marketing at Blue Acorn iCi. “Especially when we’re working with these larger brands with large portfolios and large subscriber lists, we want to make sure we hit those touchpoints with as little human error involved as possible.”

And because it frees up your marketing department from investing time and effort into time-consuming, repetitive tasks, marketing automation also contributes to employee productivity and retention.

You get to actually spend your time digging into data and working on campaigns that require more human input and creativity.

Lindsey Murray

VP of performance marketing, Blue Acorn iCi

“It really allows you to have a lean team,” Murray points out. “You get to actually spend your time digging into data and working on campaigns that require more human input and creativity.”

4. Marketing automation benefits your bottom line

The numbers here speak for themselves:

• For every dollar spent, marketing automation returns $5.44 over the first 3 years with a payback period in under 6 months, according to Nucleus Research.
• Marketing automation results in a 451% increase in qualified leads, according to a study by the Annuitas Group.
• More than 75% of businesses increase conversions after implementing marketing automation, according to a study by Aioma and the Institute of Marketing Management.

“We know these are proven tactics,” Murray says. “It’s ongoing revenue. You put in the effort up front, and then outside of some updates here and there, it really works on its own.”

You put in the effort up front, and then outside of some updates here and there, it really works on its own.

Lindsey Murray

VP of performance marketing, Blue Acorn iCi

Want to go beyond marketing automation basics? Learn more about building and executing a smart, effective marketing automation strategy:

• Marketing automation examples that go beyond the basics
• Marketing automation KPIs for measuring and optimising your marketing efforts