Marketing automation is a powerful tool for businesses. By utilising software to automate key marketing tasks, it can streamline both your marketing operations and your customer journey, driving efficiency gains and delivering highly personalised experiences for your users.
At its best, digital marketing automation extends way beyond the remit of email campaigns. From social media and mobile marketing to managing online advertising budgets, it can be used across your business to break down silos, maximise resources, and make the most of your customer data.
This comprehensive guide gives you a detailed look into the world of marketing automation, exploring the value it can offer, the different types of automation, tools you might want to consider, and effective strategies for automating tasks as part of your campaigns. Those who are new to the topic will benefit from a cover-to-cover reading. If you already have a base level of knowledge and need information on something in particular, use the links below to navigate to it.
- What is marketing automation?
- The value of marketing automation
- Streamlining business operations
- Enhancing customer engagement
- Implementing effective lead scoring and nurturing systems
- Upselling and cross-selling via behavioural triggers
- Increasing customer retention
- Managing data more effectively
- Types of marketing automation
- Email automation
- Social media marketing automation
- SMS and mobile marketing
- Managing cross-channel campaign messaging
- Marketing automation tools
- Effective marketing automation strategies
- Customer segmentation
- Customer journey mapping
- Personalisation and localisation
- Gamification and customer engagement
- Measuring the impact of marketing automation
- Challenges in marketing automation
- Deliverability challenges
- Reporting
- Understanding complex tools
- Maintaining data quality
- Overcoming resistance to change
- Addressing ethical concerns
- Looking ahead: The future of marketing automation
- Marketing automation by Impression
Impression isn’t just a marketing automation agency. Our service offering also spans a variety of connected areas like media planning, measurement and paid social advertising for an integrated approach. Request a consultation from our team to get a sense of what we can do for your business.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the process of using software to automatically manage marketing tasks, without the need for human input. These tasks can include email and social media marketing, mobile messaging, and personalised advertising.
By enabling businesses to reach more customers, nurture leads and encourage future purchases, marketing automation is essential for fuelling growth. This growth can be broken down into two key methods: acquisition and loyalty.
When it comes to acquiring new customers, marketing automation can be used to capture real-time data across your customer touchpoints – whether that’s website visits, email sign-ups, social media interactions, location, weather condition and local TV schedule. This data then fuels highly personalised customer experiences, which can be triggered by a variety of predefined behaviours – such as viewing a specific page, abandoning a cart, entering a predefined geo location or signing up for marketing emails. Once this data has been captured, the relevant marketing consent given and the customer journey triggered, your marketing software can then automatically start to retarget these leads, helping to move them through your sales funnel.
Once you’ve converted your leads into customers, marketing automation can then be used to turn those customers into loyal brand advocates. Through techniques like RFM segmentation – which divides customers into groups based on the ‘Recency’ of their last interaction with a brand, the ‘Frequency’ of those interactions, and the ‘Monetary Value’ of their transactions – marketing automation can target and personalise content to your different customer groups, nurturing one-off purchasers into frequent visitors and rewarding your most loyal shoppers.
But all that automation still requires a human touch. To maximise the impact of your marketing automation, you’ll need to use clean, accurate and up-to-date data, along with an effective measurement strategy to help you track the results. In this guide, we’ll take you through these essential pillars of marketing automation – but for now, let’s dive deeper into the value marketing automation can add to your business.
The value of marketing automation
In a saturated market, the most effective way to engage customers is with content that’s highly relevant to them. But manually creating and managing that content is a mammoth, unending task – one that most businesses can’t feasibly undertake. That’s where marketing automation comes in.
From automating campaigns to lead scoring and data management, here are some of the ways marketing automation can add value to your business.
Streamlining business operations
One of the key benefits of marketing automation is the time and resources it frees up. By automating those day-to-day marketing tasks – such as sending follow-up emails to leads or generating reports – marketing teams can spend more time on creative thinking and strategic planning. It also means that they can be more reactive to world events and cultural moments, ensuring your brand is showing up wherever your customers are.
But it’s not just marketing teams that can benefit from this kind of automation. By automating tasks like gathering data, building customer profiles and prioritising leads, marketing automation makes it easier to identify ways to bring value to your business, allowing you to allocate budget and personnel more efficiently. For example, your customer profiles might indicate a preference for short video content, which could signal to invest more in TikTok and Instagram Reels.
Enhancing customer engagement
Marketing automation doesn’t just make your marketing efforts easier: it can also make them more effective. By analysing customers’ unique characteristics and behaviours, marketing automation gives you a better insight into who your customers are and the kind of content they prefer to engage with. These behaviours and preferences can then be used to automatically segment your customers into unified profiles, so that every customer is shown the right content – at the right time.
This kind of targeted content is essential for customer engagement. By receiving and viewing well-timed, personalised messages, customers will start to feel more connected to your brand, which makes them more likely to become repeat customers. It also makes them more likely to recommend your brand to others, which will ultimately boost your acquisition – and improve your bottom line.
Implementing effective lead scoring and nurturing systems
Some advanced marketing automation systems include features like lead scoring capabilities, helping marketing and sales teams to identify those more promising leads. These scoring methodologies take into account a range of criteria, which can be customised according to your audience and specific business goals. For example, if you’re a B2C brand that only ships to certain countries, any leads outside those locations can be automatically assigned a low score.
Behavioural data is another element that impacts these overall lead scores. If a potential customer has visited multiple pages, they’ll be given a higher score than those who only visited a single landing page. Similarly, leads who added items to their shopping basket, saved items to a wishlist, filled in a marketing information form or downloaded a piece of content will all receive higher scores.
This AI-powered lead scoring makes it easier to prioritise and nurture the right leads, focusing efforts on those that are most likely to convert and drive revenue. Once they’ve been identified, you can then create workflows to automatically nurture those leads, drip-feeding them content that’s specific to where they are in the sales cycle.
Targeted drip campaigns can, over time, build recognition of your brand and keep you at the forefront of your customer’s mind. They can be used to guide leads through your sales funnel at minimal cost to the business. For example, leads who are coming to a brand for the first time may be met with a campaign educating them on the benefits of a product, whilst those further along could be presented with a personalised offer to incentivise purchase.
Using knowledge of your prospect’s behaviours, you can ensure, using automated triggers, that these messages are delivered at the optimal moment to maximise customer interest and success rates, working to grow your bottom line.
Upselling and cross-selling via behavioural triggers
As well as being handy for scoring leads, the behavioural data that your marketing automation platform gathers can also be invaluable for converting those leads into actual sales. By setting specific behavioural triggers, you can initiate different marketing actions based on a user’s interactions. For example, if a potential customer clicks through to view a product, but doesn’t purchase right away, the system can automatically send a follow-up email to stimulate the sale with an offer or personalised messaging.
This kind of timely and targeted engagement is key to increasing conversion rates, but it can also be a great tool for upselling and cross-selling. One example of this is through related or recommended products. When a customer purchases a product, rather than sending a generic follow-up email, you could create a workflow that automatically sends an email advertising a complementary product to ‘complete’ their new purchase.
Interested in discovering more about how Impression can help your organisation automate its marketing through behavioural triggers? Get in touch today.
Increasing customer retention
As any marketer knows, acquisition is only half the battle. The next step is turning those one-off sales into loyal customers. Fortunately, as with the acquisition process, this is something you can automate.
From resolving customer issues to lifecycle nurturing campaigns, marketing automation offers a wealth of tools to increase your customer retention. Through personalised deals, loyalty programmes and automated email drips, you can keep your brand at the top of your customers’ minds – delivering consistent, timely communication when they’re most primed to engage with it.
Managing data more effectively
Data is the beating heart of marketing automation – but in a world of constantly evolving privacy regulations, capturing and managing that data can be difficult. That’s why some advanced marketing automation platforms offer in-built functionalities for managing consent, handling data subject access requests, and ensuring that all marketing activities are compliant with the latest regulations.
As well as reducing the risk of costly legal complications, this automated data management also helps build trust with customers, giving them a safe and secure way to engage with your brand.
Types of marketing automation
Marketing automation is often closely associated with email campaigns – and, indeed, email plays a huge role in any marketing automation strategy. But as a whole, it extends to any kind of marketing communications (or ‘marcomms’ for short). From social media and mobile marketing to cross-channel insights and reports, marketing automation can streamline and enhance a huge range of marketing tasks.
Here are some marketing automation examples you can utilise in your business.
Email automation
Email marketing automation uses predefined rules – also known as workflows – to trigger personalised emails to your customers. These emails are often based on a specific action, such as completing a purchase, or lack of action, such as adding items to a basket without checking out. They can cover a huge range of circumstances, including welcome emails, product recommendations, lead nurturing, personalised rewards, replenishment reminders, and hundreds more.
As well as automatically reaching out to customers in their moment of need, as in the case of abandoned basket campaigns, automated emails are a useful way to nurture new leads, build loyalty, and keep your brand on your customer’s radar.
And it’s not just your customer base who can benefit from automated emails – they can also be an invaluable tool for your business’s internal communications. From onboarding emails to newsletters and company updates, email automation can help businesses streamline their internal comms, keeping employees engaged and ensuring consistent messaging across the company.
This is especially true of businesses operating remotely. By providing live updates and feedback, automated emails can be used to support the workflow of remote teams, helping employees feel connected to the business, regardless of their location.
Looking for a deeper dive? Check out our definitive guide to email marketing.

Social media marketing automation
Social media marketing automation covers two distinct areas: organic social media marketing – such as scheduling posts and analysing metrics – and paid social advertising.
On the organic side, as well as insights into how your posts are performing, some of the more advanced social media automation tools also allow for ‘social listening’, which refers to the analysis of online conversations relevant to your brand, competitors and industry, making it easier to spot trends, track influencers, and pinpoint any areas where competitors are falling short. These insights are then broken down further with sentiment analysis, with platforms using AI to automatically categorise brand or product mentions into positive and negative categories, allowing you to spot any spikes in negative sentiment.
With this data automatically collated into understandable, easy-to-action insights, you can tailor marketing and PR activities to specific themes and moments in your customers’ conversations. You can also hit these key moments the instant they happen, such as by scheduling various versions of Instagram posts or story updates, with rules to publish a specific version if a specific event happens – like a goal being scored in a football match, or changes in the stock market.
With paid social advertising, marketing automation tools can be used to automatically target potential or existing customers with specific content, such as promoting recommended products in their social feeds after they’ve visited a product page, or interacted with a competing brand. It also makes it simple to automate and manage the A/B testing of any paid social ads, so you can put more spend behind the highest-performing content.
Through features like dynamic audience segmentation, you can also refine this content further by continuously analysing user engagement data, allowing you to hone audience segments based on real-time interactions. Rather than targeting ads to fixed segments, this dynamic analysis allows you to adjust messaging to evolving customer profiles, so they’re always seeing the content that’s most relevant to them.

SMS and mobile marketing
Similarly to email marketing, SMS and mobile marketing automation involves the use of established workflows to trigger personalised messages through customers’ mobiles, tablets or wearables – whether that’s through SMS, in-app, push or location-based notifications.
Although email is an important part of any marketing campaign, many email platforms now segment promotional materials into separate folders – making them easy for customers to miss. So, with time-sensitive offers or content, automated mobile messaging is a great way to make sure customers don’t miss a thing.
Another benefit of automated mobile marketing is the ability to localise content based on a customer’s exact location. By utilising geo-fencing technology, you can create automated campaigns that target potential customers based on their proximity to a store, event or service. This can be as general as letting them know that a service is available in their area, or as specific as offering discounts when they’re within a certain radius of a store. For physical shops or events, this kind of hyperlocal approach can significantly boost foot traffic.
Managing cross-channel campaign messaging
By giving you the freedom to synchronise activities across your channels, marketing automation empowers businesses to deliver personalised, consistent messaging. Whether it’s Instagram or email, text or in-app, you can align your campaigns to create a seamless experience for your customers – which, in turn, fosters brand recognition.
For a cohesive cross-channel approach, it’s a good idea to synchronise your marcomms through a single content calendar, bringing together your social media, SMS, email and blog channels. Although this can be done through a shared spreadsheet, some marketing automation platforms include content calendar features, which not only allow you to see what tasks are coming up, but also which tasks have already been completed.
Keep reading for an overview of some of our preferred marketing automation tools.
Marketing automation tools
Marketing automation software is an incredibly broad term, and can actually cover a whole host of different systems – some of which you might already be using. Email, content management and CRM platforms, for example, all include marketing automation capabilities. But when it comes to creating a synchronised, holistic strategy, you need a platform that integrates with all these different tools – or has them built in.
One such platform you’ll probably already be familiar with is HubSpot. With a powerful workflow builder, advanced analytics and over 1700 native integrations, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub offers a great all-in-one solution, connecting seamlessly with HubSpot’s CRM, CMS, customer service software, and more.
Bloomreach is another platform that encompasses a range of different products, including marketing automation, ecommerce search and merchandising, and customer and data management. Utilising real-time data and AI, Bloomreach’s marketing automation covers SMS, email, web and mobile campaigns, making it perfect for an omnichannel approach.
For an easy-to-customise option, Klaviyo’s marketing automation is incredibly flexible. From workflows to dashboards, everything can be customised with ‘drag and drop’, making it easier to tailor your campaigns and insights to your specific business needs. With a free plan option, it’s also more affordable than some of the more complex systems, making it ideal for smaller businesses. Likewise, if you’re looking for an affordable all-in-one solution, Brevo’s marketing platform also includes a CRM suite.
Ultimately, the tools that will work best for your business will depend on your specific objectives, along with your existing software. For the best results, opt for a platform that can collate data and automate tasks across your tech stack, so you’ll never miss an opportunity to get your message in front of the right people.
Effective marketing automation strategies
The most effective marketing automation strategies are those that use clean, high-quality data to fuel personalised content for your customers, whether that’s segmenting them into groups based on their purchasing history, or delivering geotargeted ads directing them to a nearby store.
Here’s a closer look into some of the most effective strategies for your marketing automation.
Customer segmentation
As we touched on earlier in the article, one of the most valuable uses of marketing automation is the ability to automatically segment customers. By collating data from across your channels, marketing automation software can automatically group your customers into different profiles, whether that’s through RFM segmentation, psychographic profiling or specific behavioural triggers.
These individual profiles can then fuel your marketing efforts, allowing you to tailor your messaging to your different customer groups. If you’re using RFM segmentation, an ‘at risk’ or ‘hybernating customer’ can be re-engaged with specific offers and incentives, while loyal customers and ‘champions’ can be directed to reward messaging, personalised product recommendations and new releases. Or, if you’re using behavioural triggers, you could identify a group that has viewed a certain product or range several times in the last few days, and trigger sponsored ads to remind them of what they’ve left behind.
By giving you a clearer idea of who each customer is, customer segmentation also makes it quicker and easier to show up for them when they need it most – ensuring you hit their ‘moment of need’. For example, when a shopper picks up their phone to look for a specific item, you can send them personalised messaging to guide them to relevant products or offers, right when they’re most primed to engage with them.
Customer journey mapping
Another useful strategy for marketing automation is customer journey mapping. Similarly to segmentation, marketing automation can integrate data from different areas of your business to create nuanced customer journey maps, giving you an overview of how customers interact with your brand – from that first impression right through to becoming a loyal customer.
Through behavioural analytics and propensity modelling, these customer journey maps can then be used to predict changes in your customers’ needs, and to anticipate their future purchasing habits. It also leaves scope for experimentation with your customer journey as a whole. For example, if customers regularly visit a specific landing page before making a purchase, you could A/B test different messaging and analyse the effect these changes have on conversions.

Personalisation and localisation
From product recommendations to incentives for ‘at risk’ customers, the ability to personalise content is the cornerstone of marketing automation. As well as tailoring messaging to specific customer groups, you can also automate campaigns targeted to each individual person – such as rewards or offers for their birthday, or for the anniversary of their first purchase with a brand. By recognising real events in their day-to-day life, these kinds of well-timed messages can help customers build a connection with a brand, making them more likely to become loyal shoppers.
Marketing automation also gives you the freedom to customise products and offers based on your customer’s location. Even better, beyond delivering personalised content for a customer’s established location, some marketing automation tools also allow for geotargeting, enabling you to localise content as and when a customer’s location changes. This can be a great way to direct shoppers to nearby stores, or showcase content that’s specific to local weather or events.
Gamification and customer engagement
When it comes to personalised content, gamification is a great way to take this one step further. Whether it’s tailored rewards and challenges or dynamic leaderboards and competitions, adding gamified elements to your marketing campaign can be incredibly effective for engagement, breaking up the everyday influx of ads with something more interactive.
To avoid overwhelming your audience, you can also use marketing automation to schedule campaigns that gradually introduce new gamified elements over time, depending on each customer’s engagement with those elements. That way, if a customer doesn’t respond to that kind of content, you won’t risk putting them off your brand as a whole.
Measuring the impact of marketing automation
Whether it’s ad spend, video budget or platform fees, marketing automation can involve a significant investment. To make the most of that investment – and to help direct your future resources – it’s important to have a solid measurement strategy in place.
When establishing your measurement strategy, one of the first things to do is to decide which metrics and KPIs are going to be used. These metrics can be incredibly varied, given the range of marketing activities that can be automated, but they should always be agreed in advance before any activity is signed off.
For email and SMS marketing, open rates are a good place to start. But, particularly in the case of emails, open rates shouldn’t be given as much focus as they once were. Because of new privacy-preserving technologies, some email platforms now mask users’ IP addresses, meaning marketers often can’t see when an email has been opened. Because of this, click rates are a much more reliable metric to track the results of email and SMS campaigns, giving you an insight into not only how many users clicked a link within an email, but also – because those messages were opened – a clearer indication of open and deliverability rates.
Once those links have been clicked, link tagging is a useful way of understanding the subsequent behaviour of those users, such as whether they engage in a primary conversion event (like making a purchase). By adding specific parameters to the end of a URL, link tagging lets you see where different traffic on your website is coming from, giving you a clearer idea of how your various marketing campaigns are performing.
With paid media campaigns, one of the simplest KPIs to track is the amount of revenue generated. But beyond that overarching metric, it’s also important to identify the return on advertisement spend (ROAS). This figure can be calculated by taking the total revenue generated by the ads and dividing it by the total cost of the ad (factoring in both the ad spend and the resources used in creating and managing the ad). The most common expression of ROAS is in a ratio, showing the revenue against what you spent. For example, if you spent £1000 on an ad that generated £10,000 in revenue, the ROAS would be 10:1 (£10 revenue for every £1 spent).
Once you’ve established and started tracking your KPIs, you can adjust and optimise any further campaigns to make the most out of your budget.
Challenges in marketing automation
Along with its many benefits, marketing automation also introduces some key challenges. From navigating algorithmic biases to making sure emails actually land in your customers’ inboxes, here are a few things you need to be aware of when implementing your marketing automation strategies.
Deliverability challenges
An optimised, well-timed marketing campaign is a wonderful thing – but if large portions of your customer base never see it, it won’t have the impact it deserves. Unfortunately for marketers, new and ever-evolving privacy regulations make this an increasing challenge – particularly with email campaigns. Without the right preparations in place, there’s a good chance those carefully created emails will head straight to the spam folder.
These preparations come down to two key things: sender reputation and domain security. To develop a positive sender reputation, it’s essential to maintain warm domains and IP addresses with your customer base. That means, if you’re getting a new IP or email domain – for example, if you’re rebranding or switching to a new email service provider – you’ll need to warm up your new domain or IP by slowly sending emails from your new address, gradually increasing the volume over time. This allows internet service providers (like Google and Hotmail) to decide whether to deliver your emails to your customers’ inboxes or to their spam folder, based on how they engage with your emails.
In fact, even if you already have a warm IP or domain, it’s still a good idea to initiate a warm-up campaign before any significant change in your standard email marketing schedule, such as leading up to a big event. That way, you’ll avoid deliverability issues that could be triggered by a sudden influx of emails.
It’s also important to let email service providers know your domain is secure. To do this, you’ll need to make sure you have the relevant email authentication methods in place: primarily, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). These methods are best utilised together to ensure a high deliverability of your messages.
Once these core securities are in place, you can work to enhance your deliverability further with Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). As well as adding an extra layer of security to your emails, BIMI allows brands to attach their logo to any authenticated emails, which can help to improve brand trust.
Ideally, with these preparations in your place, your emails will land safely in your customers’ inboxes – but it’s still important to keep an eye on your deliverability performance. You can do this through the various ISPs’ postmaster tools (such as Google Postmaster Tools for Google inboxes), which allow you to check things like your domain and IP reputation, spam rates and any delivery errors.
Reporting
Similarly to the deliverability of automated email campaigns, increased privacy regulations also raise challenges when it comes to reporting on those emails. As highlighted in our ‘Measuring the impact of marketing automation’ section, certain ISPs now mask their users’ IP addresses, which prevents the sender from seeing whether the email has been opened or not. As such, open rates are no longer a reliable metric to track the success of email campaigns.
Fortunately, click rates and link tagging still offer an effective means of reporting on your email campaigns. By measuring both the engagement (click rates) and subsequent behaviour (link tagging) of your customers, these methods also give you a more detailed idea of how your message performs – as opposed to simply identifying whether it was opened.
Understanding complex tools
Whether it’s through your email or ecommerce software or through an integrated marketing hub, marketing automation relies on various tools – some of which come with an incredibly steep learning curve.
Although a certain learning curve is expected when adopting any new software, some of the more advanced and complex marketing automation tools can take significant time and resources to master effectively. And without a thorough understanding of things like reporting, segmentation or creating workflows, campaigns are unlikely to reach their full potential.
To combat any skill gaps, it’s important to invest in dedicated training and development on your marketing automation tools. This might be through hands-on training sessions, certification programmes, or by encouraging the relevant teams to devote several hours a week to learning their way around your technology stack. Most marketing automation platforms have a host of resources to support this kind of training, such as e-books, how-tos and webinars.
Another way to navigate this is by partnering with a dedicated marketing automation agency like Impression. From consultation and implementation through to ongoing management and optimisation, we’ll act as an extension of your marketing department, helping you to achieve the best results for your business.

Maintaining data quality
As we’ve discussed throughout this article, the way to utilise marketing automation effectively is to deliver highly personalised, carefully timed messages to your customers. And doing that requires a whole lot of data.
Maintaining the quality of that data is one of the biggest challenges marketing teams face when automating their campaigns. High-quality data is accurate, timely and complete – but even the most accurate datasets are subject to change and degradation over time. Addresses and circumstances change, interests evolve, and once-warm leads go cold.
Without relevant, up-to-date data, automated marketing can run into a host of issues – including inaccurate customer segments, misleading reports, and ineffective personalisation. Emails land in inboxes that no longer exist, duplicate entries skew databases and misinform strategies, and potential customers are shown irrelevant messages or offers.
To maintain the quality of your data, there are a few active steps you’ll need to take. Start by cleaning and validating your existing data, purging any incorrect, outdated or irrelevant information and implementing validation checks to ensure ongoing accuracy. Make sure to update your data to keep it relevant, and run regular tests to help spot any issues. Many of these tasks can be automated and managed by your CRM software or CDP, but it’s still important to keep an active role in this process.
As with email marketing, changing privacy regulations create ongoing challenges with building and maintaining accurate data. Although most platforms include website pixels and JavaScript tracking features, which allow you to track customers’ web events against their profiles in your marketing, CRM or CDP software, relying on third-party data has become increasingly difficult. To combat this, one useful alternative is server-side tagging, which you can learn more about here.
Overcoming resistance to change
By automating many of the more repetitive, day-to-day marketing tasks, marketing automation can feel like a no-brainer. But as with any automation, it can also trigger fears around redundancies, creating a reluctance within an organisation to start automating those everyday processes.
To encourage people to adopt marketing automation, it’s useful to assuage those fears early on in the implementation. Rather than making marketing staff redundant, automation frees up time for higher-value activities, such as big-picture thinking, strategic planning, and creating those high-performing campaigns. It also brings with it the potential for new jobs, particularly around data processing and clean-up.
Addressing ethical concerns
As with the broader world of AI, marketing automation raises some important ethical considerations. If, for example, campaigns utilise every scrap of data to achieve the best results, this could potentially lead to manipulative marketing techniques, working to exploit customers’ vulnerabilities. Moreover, a reduction in human oversight can leave issues like this unchecked.
Further to the previous section, where we touched on the fears of redundancies surrounding automation, this potential for exploitation is another reason why marketing automation still requires human input. By creating carefully targeted workflows and considered messaging, marketing teams can work to ensure their campaigns inform and inspire, rather than taking advantage of vulnerabilities.
Another common concern with automation is the perpetuation of algorithmic bias. If the data your marketing platform analyses is biased, then these biases can be unintentionally amplified in your marketing, which can lead to certain demographics being unfairly targeted or excluded. This reinforces the need for human insight and intervention in marketing automation. To overcome these biases, encourage teams to critically evaluate the output of your marketing automation, and to speak up when something doesn’t seem right.
Looking ahead: The future of marketing automation
Whether it’s streamlining operations, creating hyperlocal campaigns or scoring and nurturing leads, marketing automation can revolutionise your organisation’s marketing efforts. And it’s evolving all the time.
As we’ve covered in this article, privacy regulations and privacy-preserving technologies present several challenges for marketing automation. As such, marketing technology is evolving to meet these challenges head-on, giving marketers access to better, more reliable data, while also improving the privacy of the users involved. Examples of this include privacy-first tracking tools, such as Simple Analytics, as well as server-side tracking, which gives you full control of the data that’s passed on to third parties (such as your marketing partners).
Another tool we can expect to see more of is no-code marketing automation platforms. Most marketing teams will already be using some no-code tools, such as Mailchimp or Zapier, but the range and capacity of these tools will continue to grow as marketing teams strive to be more agile. Rather than relying on external IT departments and development teams, or trying to navigate what feels like an insurmountable learning curve, these tools give you the freedom to create workflows, build landing pages and gather more data – in just a few clicks.
Advancements in data analytics are fuelling the growth of new branches of data science, such as predictive analytics. Providing insights about both current and historical data, predictive analytics helps businesses forecast future outcomes, like when a potential customer might convert, or when an existing customer might be at risk of leaving a brand. AI and machine learning will continue to power this branch of analytics, becoming more mainstream as brands seek to keep their competitive edge.
And it’s not just the tech itself that’s evolving: the way we use marketing automation will continue to adapt as marketing trends change. Rather than focusing on conversions, marketers are increasingly turning towards lifecycle marketing – tracking customers way beyond their first purchase to turn them into loyal brand champions.
With so much on the horizon, it’s an exciting time to think about marketing automation – whether you’re new to the practice or optimising your existing strategy. And we’re here to help you every step of the way.
Marketing automation by Impression
Impression is an independent, operator-owned marketing automation agency. We also offer a broad suite of other services that can complement your automation efforts and support business growth, spanning areas such as digital experience, paid media and analytics.
Interested in learning what we can do for you? Speak to our team for a free consultation.