From A to Z: Your Guide to Types of Marketing Automation

Digital marketing is challenging and time-consuming, and the list of marketing tasks might seem endless. Because of this, marketing automation has become a reliable ally for all marketers.

Digital marketing automation can help marketers create more personalized and targeted marketing campaigns. It is no surprise that widespread adoption created a market for marketing automation worth $25 billion in 2023.

There are different kinds of marketing automation, and each one has its advantages. We’ve explained 11 types of marketing automation in this article so that you can streamline all aspects of your marketing.

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Marketing Automation For Various Business Models

Marketing automation software varies in pricing and features tailored for different organizations. Many top-rated software tools offer a free tail version for organizations to try and pick the perfect software that aligns with their business goals.

To leverage these diverse applications, we have listed the types of marketing automation for three business models, i.e., B2B marketing automation, B2C marketing automation, and small business marketing automation.

B2B marketing automation

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing relies heavily on relationship nurturing, making product knowledge and building awareness crucial to success.

Businesses do not make purchases on the spur of the moment; rather, purchasing choices, even in small companies and startups, are deliberate and well thought through, often decided over a long period among many individuals. This is why B2B lead nurturing takes more time than its B2C counterpart.

Therefore, B2B marketing automation is mainly concerned with the types of marketing automation processes that concentrate on:

Educating and providing content to a larger audience.
Guiding your leads through the sales funnel.

Forrester reports using B2B marketing automation results in a 10% boost in sales.

B2C marketing automation

Business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, in contrast to B2B marketing, focuses on making quick decisions to win over consumers. While marketing for both businesses uses prospect activity monitoring to inform message decisions, the key distinction is the length of campaigns.

Consumer campaigns in B2C marketing need to pique customers’ attention quickly and then maintain the path to purchase short, easy, and compelling. Because of this, marketing automation processes that emphasize sending relevant, targeted communications to individual consumers come under B2C marketing automation.

Small business marketing automation

Smaller businesses sometimes lack the manpower to undertake complex activities or uncover useful insights for efficient marketing. Getting new clients is the biggest issue for 60% of small and medium-sized businesses, while 39% report that marketing to their target demographic is a major challenge, too.

Marketing automation may easily fill the gap and help businesses beat these challenges. Many affordable and free marketing automation platforms are designed specifically for smaller businesses. This is why 74% of SMEs consider using AI or automation software, and most decided on this in the first half of this year.

11 Game-Changing Types of Marketing Automation

Knowing what types of automation will help your company the most is important before adopting any new technology. We’ve compiled a list of 11 types of marketing automation so you can streamline all aspects of your marketing:

Email marketing automation
Social media automation
CRM and CDP automation
Data analysis and reporting automation
Advertisement automation
Mobile marketing automation
Omnichannel automation
Chatbot automation
Lead management automation
Sales and marketing alignment automation
Web personalization automation

#1. Email marketing automation

Email automation automates sending emails to a prospect or customer when they take specific actions, such as:

Subscribing to your email list
Creating an account on your website
Making a purchase
Abandoning their cart

Emails are one of the most efficient ways to reach your target audience and build personal relationships. Campaign Monitor reported that automated email campaigns generate 320% greater revenue than non-automated campaigns.

Benefits of email marketing automation

Delivering personalized content
Saving time from compiling contact lists and sending emails
Retaining customers by staying in touch regularly
Scaling with your growing email list
A/B testing to increase open rates

Here’s an example of an automated email campaign by Airbnb asking customers for feedback after a customer has booked and stayed at a property through them. It’s a time-triggered email sent once the customer’s period of stay passes.

#2. Social media automation

Social media automation is a process of automating marketing efforts on social media, which includes automating time-consuming tasks, such as:

Publishing content
Planning and scheduling new posts
Republishing popular material
Monitoring trending content
Tracking interaction with published content

Experts estimate that there will be 4.89 billion people using social media globally in 2023. Users spend an average of 151 minutes daily on social media, more than ever before. As a result, social media is a fantastic channel for marketers to get their messages out to a larger demographic.

Benefits of social media automation

Social media and marketing automation tools work together, liberating marketers from the tedious tasks necessary to maintain a social media presence. These are the major advantages of social media automation:

Allows consistent brand presence and customer engagement
Provides enhanced and accurate data collection, reporting, and marketing automation analytics
Keeps marketers up-to-date on social media events, trends, and hashtags
Segments target audience for targeted campaigns
Supports data distribution across various marketing channels

Millions of people drink coffee every day; it’s the foundation of memes and Instagrammable phrases, and most people will declare they can’t function in the morning without it. Starbucks saw an opportunity to get into the topic that people were actively discussing and used to distribute their material with user-generated content (UGC). They even created a limited-time offer with free content props to make it more exciting.

Despite its divisive taste, the drink’s visual appeal sparked roughly 155,000 Instagram photos and generated huge foot traffic from people eager to try it before it ran out. Try looking for “#starbucksunicornfrappuccino” on Instagram, and you’ll see UGC.

#3. CRM and CDP automation

Customer relationship management or CRM software and customer data platforms (CDP) are tools that help businesses manage customer and lead data and take a unified sales and marketing approach. Therefore, with CRM automation, companies can combine many types of marketing automation activities, such as:

Building contact list
Sending emails as a follow-up
Assigning leads to appropriate sales team members
Segmenting customers based on various filters
Sharing data between the sales and marketing departments
Analyzing trends and reports to refine customer journeys

Benefits of CRM/CDP automation

Research shows that CRM solutions may enhance the conversion rate of leads by 300% while increasing transaction value by 40%. Hence, businesses can harness the maximum potential of these data management platforms by automating CRM functions, reaping benefits like:

Streamlined management of customer relationships
Saved time and resources by automation of data collection process
Optimized and holistic view of the sales and marketing pipelines
Enhanced collaboration and data sharing between sales and marketing departments
Targeted campaigns and more personalization from data-driven segmentation
Improved lead management as a result of automatic lead assignment
Increased sales from greater bonding with your customers

Every year in December, Spotify launches its “Spotify Wrapped” social media campaign. Based on user preferences, Spotify generates individualized reports highlighting the most popular musical styles, songs, and artists. Spotify provides these details in attractive infographics that users may publish to their social media profiles.

The massive success of this campaign is due to its great degree of personalization and originality. This innovative social media marketing campaign is fueled by consumer data, and data-driven experiences boost participation since they can be adapted to each user.

#4. Data analysis and reporting automation

Data analysis and reporting automation streamline unified data collection from your campaigns on various channels. This automation is set to analyze performance and provides valuable insights with visualization.

Benefits of data analysis and reporting automation

Track important metrics
Keep an eye on the performance of each campaign
Track the performance of your website
Streamline and simplify data visualization
Know what’s working and what’s not

Let’s take a case study to examine the power of automated data analytics.

The inconsistency and repetition of 7-Eleven’s data collection and analytics procedures delayed the delivery of insights by two days. Despite the delay, the insights didn’t result in consistent choices.

7-Eleven then used automation and reaped the following benefits:

Consistency in weekly data processing with hundreds of iterations
Reduction in the time it took to get insights from 2 days to one hour and saved time considerably
Confidence in making decisions owing to the predictive power of the machine learning algorithms

#5. Advertisement automation

Advertising automation lets you automate tasks related to ad campaigns on different platforms, such as social media, mobile phones, search engines, and display networks. When you use a robust marketing automation platform, you can automate:

Creating campaigns
Launching them
Analyzing them
Managing them

Benefits of advertisement automation

An 80% boost in brand recognition is possible via digital advertising, but data is at the core of its success. Marketers that use automation will reap the benefits of accurate, data-rich campaigns and can:

Create highly targeted audiences, including lookalikes, in a short time
Develop content that will perform well
Use user behavior to initiate predetermined actions
Budget wisely by analyzing data
Find relevant keywords using data
Generate metrics-based reports for monitoring progress

Urban Company, one of India’s leading home service marketplaces, had to create hundreds of daily banners and videos for advertising on different channels. The load was even more during seasonal and holiday promotions, producing design bottlenecks due to a lack of manpower.

To fix this, Urban Company decoupled creative and managing processes. By adopting automation, it created and used various ad templates that allowed remote marketing teams and third-party agencies to develop creatives swiftly.

Results:

Urban company’s new campaign launch time was reduced by 8x via advertising automation.
It also permitted 5x more hyper-targeting.

#6. Mobile marketing automation

Mobile marketing lets you distribute marketing content over text, notifications, or in-app messaging. It’s a powerful way to reach your target audience over a personalized platform, and you can automate all these processes with mobile marketing automation.

Benefits of mobile marketing automation

Mobile marketing automation has a lot to offer, given on average, an individual spends over 3 hours on their mobile phones. This sums up to a whopping 71,000 hours on the phone every year! With mobile marketing automation, marketers can:

Communicate with their target audience via their mobile devices
Automatically generate reliable mobile marketing campaigns with little to no human input
Stay more engaged with consumers by utilizing data and triggers to give them timely, relevant communications that fit their interests, preferences, and behaviors
Maximize repeat business, earn loyalty, and reduce churn
Use analytics and data to fine-tune your mobile marketing initiatives and gauge their success, which will increase conversion rates

With mobile marketing automation, marketers may automate certain notifications when users take specific actions inside the app, such as when a customer unsubscribes or leaves your service.

For example, Asana uses exit surveys to give dissatisfied customers a chance to change their minds by presenting them with potential alternatives. It aids in lowering customer churn rates.

#7. Omnichannel automation

Do you want to market your business over various channels? It’s a great idea because, despite the rise of online shopping, 55% of customers still prefer visiting a brick-and-mortar store to get a feel of the brand’s products. Their in-store experiences have an impact, even if consumers ultimately purchase online.

If you’re considering opening various purchasing channels for your shoppers and offering more touchpoints, leverage omnichannel marketing for a unified customer experience. With an omnichannel approach, businesses can keep 89% of their customer base.

By connecting processes and offering a single and consistent consumer experience across physical stores, online storefronts, websites, and social media, omnichannel marketing automation is one of the most powerful types of marketing automation.

Benefits of omnichannel automation

Omnichannel marketing platforms may automate the creation of a unified customer experience over all channels. Your business yields three major benefits with omnichannel automation:

Easy coordination of marketing efforts across all channels,
Monitor the behavior of your customers, no matter where you interact with them,
Provide customers with a consistent experience across all channels.

Take Oasis, the UK fashion retailer, for an example. It simplified shopping by connecting its online stores, mobile app, and physical shops.

If you visit one of its locations, salespeople using iPads can provide on-the-spot product information. The iPad is also a cash register, so employees can help you check out anywhere in the shop. The best part? If anything is unavailable in the store, the staff may promptly make an online order and get your item delivered to your doorstep.

#8. Chatbot automation

Chatbot automation lets businesses answer common consumer questions automatically. Chatbots learn how to answer frequent inquiries via the content on the website, help documents, apps, and prior customer support experiences.

They may also identify advanced or sales-related queries better suited for an actual person.

Benefits of chatbot automation

Experts predict that by 2027, 25% of businesses will utilize chatbots automated by conversational AI. Formerly only on websites, chatbots increasingly engage customers via SMS marketing, email, and applications like WeChat and Messenger.

Leveraging chatbot automation can help your business in various ways:

Provides faster ticket resolution
Allows success and support team to work on major customer satisfaction issues
Scale your support offering initiative by providing 24/7 support
Offer multi-lingual support
Incorporate promotion and upselling strategies
Track interactions over various channels to help your support team provide a unified experience

Check out the symptom checker at Babylon Health. It is an AI chatbot that employs machine learning techniques and natural language processing for natural conversation with users.

The chatbot interprets the symptoms you describe and pinpoints the potential reasons behind it and solutions/next steps. Due to these chatbots, Healthcare providers and patients might save considerable time.

#9. Lead management automation

Lead management is the marketing process of recruiting, qualifying, and converting leads into paying consumers using targeted marketing techniques. With lead management automation, marketers can use tools to automate various lead management tasks, such as:

Lead generation by scraping data from multiple sources
Lead segmentation to divide them into lists based on specific categories for better targeting
Lead scoring to identify sales-ready leads
Lead outreach and nurturing with automated emails and lead assigning
Lead conversion with instant invoice generation or automated digital contracts
Lead upselling by scheduling post-purchase communication

Benefits of lead management automation

Data shows that automation increases the quality of leads a business acquires by 80%. Why? With lead management automation, marketers can:

Determine the most fruitful marketing and sales touchpoints
Automate communication with leads at various customer journey stages to nurture them
Keep the marketing department notified when a potential customer takes a particular action

For example, you might implement an internal marketing automation to alert you if a prospect views your price page more than twice or downloads an asset. This will allow your marketers to cultivate a relationship with the prospect.

#10. Sales and marketing alignment automation

Despite sharing a common goal of increasing cash flow, sales and marketing teams generally operate independently.

The lack of communication and collaboration between these two groups is a major cause of lost time, missed opportunities, and stalled projects. In fact, up to 60-70% of B2B content is not utilized, and close to 75% of marketing prospects never convert due to a lack of alignment between sales and marketing teams.

Sales and marketing alignment automation assists better collaboration between the sales and marketing departments. How? These types of marketing automation can help:

Sharing information on customers, their interactions with the business, and their purchases
Sharing content and resources to optimize individual customer journeys
Connecting the dots between the sales and marketing departments
Defining shared objectives in marketing and sales
Integrating customer and account data into marketing and sales efforts

Benefits of sales and marketing alignment automation

Consistent messaging from every aspect of your business
Minimize wasted resources and maximize revenue
Shortened the sales cycle from the unified approach in guiding customers through the sales funnel
Better conversion rates

Let’s look at a case study of SuperOffice CRM, which implemented sales and marketing alignment. They combined the two teams and positioned “marketing as a shared responsibility.” Together, the two teams worked on creating content and running marketing campaigns to engage leads and build a larger customer base.

The result?

A video they posted on LinkedIn became viral with 65,000+ views. Additionally, they got:

168% more leads
61% of traffic on the website from social media
50,000 monthly impressions

According to William Sipling, Director of Workforce Transformation and Chief Brand Storyteller at Hubstaff, reducing repetitive and tedious tasks increases sales and marketing team engagement, meaning that they’ll have more cognitive capacity to do more creative work.

Sipling says, “According to Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Theory, roles with higher employee satisfaction must include a sustainable level of both skill variety and task significance. Therefore, letting marketing automation software handle mundane work — like keeping contact info current or mass updating CTAs across multiple landing pages — means your team will be happier and have more mental energy to craft compelling campaigns.”

#11. Web personalization automation

Web personalization automation allows you to automate tasks that help personalize website visitors’ experiences.

With web personalization automation, your website collects and analyzes data in real-time. Then, it automates decision-making to customize the content of your website and deliver personalized messages.

Benefits of web personalization automation

Enhances web-visitor engagement
Helps you convert more clients
Lowers the bounce rate and cart abandonment rates
Creates an improved user experience
Delivers more targeted messages
Caters to the needs and preferences of the individual visitor
Supports quicker purchase decision-making

Since personalization may boost the effectiveness of marketing expenditure by 10–30%, 89% of digital organizations are allocating resources to it. Take Sephora as an example. The company goes above and beyond basic product suggestions by comparing similar items you’ve been viewing. With this personalized service, customers can easily settle on a final purchase.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is more than simply the latest buzzword for keeping up with the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

It’s a long-term bet on your company’s success, and with the appropriate marketing strategy and automation software, it can pay off in spades for your marketing efforts. This guide aims to help readers navigate and implement 11 different types of marketing automation based on their business needs.

If you haven’t already begun implementing marketing automation in your company, now is the moment!

EngageBay is an affordable, all-in-one marketing solution for small businesses. Capture leads, create stunning pages, launch omnichannel campaigns, align marketing and sales, create powerful reports … the list goes on.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the three basic models of marketing automation?

Enterprises must automate marketing based on size, target audience, needs, and budget constraints. How these different types of marketing automation meet requirements depends on your business model, and they’re categorized under:

B2B marketing automation
B2C marketing automation
Small business marketing automation

How can different types of marketing automation benefit your business?

Each type of marketing automation has its unique benefits for a business. However, in general, marketing automation helps businesses:

Save time and money on marketing efforts
Streamline processes and workflows (workflow automation)
Provide data to support making better decisions
Increase your conversion rate
Boost your business revenue

How do you decide which marketing automation to implement in your business?

Choosing between different types of marketing automation depends on your strategy. You want to consider:

Your budget
Your marketing needs
Common functions that need automation
Ease of implementation
Scalability of platforms you use to automate processes

Making Sense of the Types of Marketing Automation