Types of Marketing Automation

When it comes to types of marketing automation, both internal and external tactics are necessary for running a successful business. Learn more about these two types of marketing automation and why each one is so beneficial in helping your company thrive.

What is the difference between internal and external marketing?

To put it in the simplest terms, internal marketing focuses on the employees, while external marketing emphasizes customers.

Between the two types of marketing automation, the purpose of internal marketing is to empower and motivate employees to work better as a team for the benefit of the customers. In other words, satisfied employees provide higher-quality customer service.

On the other hand, external marketing is essentially the promotion of goods or services to consumers. It’s what most people think of when the topic of marketing comes up.

What are the different types of marketing automation?

Marketing automation refers to software programs that take control of various internal and external marketing tasks. Depending on what kind of marketing stack you decide to go with, you can alleviate many tedious or repetitive jobs by incorporating automated marketing into your company.

Customer Relationship Management automation

One of the biggest features in automated marketing is customer relationship management (CRM).

A good CRM program will aggregate customer data in one convenient space (often referred to as the dashboard). Marketing team members can quickly access relevant customer data such as email addresses, phone numbers, location and other demographics. They can also see where a specific lead is currently at in the sales funnel, which allows the marketer to send out relevant marketing materials to guide that lead to conversion.

CRM automation also allows your team members to communicate with one another via social notes and reminders. Social notes streamline communication between your employees by allowing them to share tips and quickly track any interactions with customers. Reminders can also be attached to leads so your marketing team does not forget to follow up.

Email automation

Another type of marketing automation that affects both internal and external marketing efforts is email automation. Externally, a program such as this allows email campaigns to be sent out based on triggers. Internally, it cuts out a lot of repetitive tasks and contributes to a smoother workflow.

A good email automation app has a designing platform loaded with email templates for marketing team members to customize. Extensive graphic design or coding skills are not required; your creative team can quickly generate dynamic emails by using the point-and-click feature to add, delete, move or edit elements. If you have skilled team members who prefer to build emails from scratch, they can exercise their creativity by writing the custom design in HTML.

Once your team is satisfied with the personalized email campaign, they can set up triggers to send the email. For example, a new lead signing up to receive notifications can trigger a welcome email.

Another great example that combines email automation with CRM automation is a birthday email. Your marketing team can design an email that is sent out on your customers’ birthdays. It’s a great way to humanize your business and show your customers that you care.

If you really want to make them happy, include a birthday discount code!

Landing page automation

At this point, you might be wondering how it’s possible to automate landing pages. With the right marketing automation software, it’s actually very simple.

Landing pages are critical to generating high conversion rates. If your website does not have designated landing pages based on your company’s top buyer personas, then your site is not optimized.

The right software lets your marketing team build dynamic landing pages in minutes. Again, no coding is required. Using the point-and-click editor, marketers can choose pre-designed layouts and customize them with CTAs, images, text and other types of content.

A good landing page builder can also generate sales funnels that guide leads through to completion of a purchase. Marketers can track where leads are within the sales funnel and adjust their strategy accordingly.

A solid landing page automation tool should optimize your landing pages for all devices, including computers, smartphones and tablets. With many consumers turning to their mobile devices for online shopping, ensuring that your website runs with a fast page load speed is crucial to boosting conversions.

Web form automation

Part of a marketer’s job is optimizing the website for conversions. Engaging web forms are necessary to encourage visitors to take action.

Web form automation is somewhat similar to the landing page builder. Your creative team can generate dynamic web forms in seconds. As a user-friendly interface, marketers can customize pre-designed web form templates with your brand’s aesthetic.

Add custom data fields to generate as many data points as you deem necessary. You can use the information you collect via the web forms to enhance your buyer personas, customer service and products. Not only can you customize the data fields to appear as you want, but you can also use the drag-and-drop feature to arrange the fields in the order you want.

A good web form builder will also allow for third-party app integrations, analytics and reporting. You should be able to see how well your web forms are performing and adjust them as needed.

Social media automation

Aside from email marketing, there isn’t another form of digital marketing that can eat up more time than social media. If your marketing team has to spend hours every day tending to social media posts and followers, that means they have less time to generate creative content.

By utilizing social media marketing automation, your team can stay busy brainstorming and creating dynamic content for your social media accounts instead of wasting time on repetitive tasks.

Automated social media marketing takes care of scheduling and publishing content. It also handles cross-posting, conversations and tracking. When you have content to post on multiple social media sites, the automated program can schedule and publish across multiple channels with no problem.

Frequently asked questions can be programmed into a basic chatbot to respond to general customer inquiries through messenger apps. You can even use this type of software to track how many website visitors found your site via your social media accounts.

By understanding how well your social media posts are performing, you can drastically improve your sales numbers. Your marketing team can generate content that your followers want to see, and in return those followers have a higher chance of becoming customers. After some time, you can identify your biggest brand advocates across your social media channels.

Blog automation

A common theme by now is that each of the types of marketing automation thus far has been beneficial to both internal and external marketing to some degree. Blog automation is no different.

While automated blogging does not generate content for you, it does make building and managing a blog much easier. Again, no coding skills are required to utilize a blog builder. Your marketing team can create an engaging blog in minutes, or you can do it yourself.

Quickly swap out images, text and CTAs to customize your blog. With access to a vast index library of pre-designed blog templates, the sky’s the limit. You can even use RSS email syndication to sync your blog posts with your email campaigns. Every time you post new content, an automated email will be sent to your subscribers, notifying them of the new blog post.

Schedule and publish blog articles automatically to your website, and share them to your social media accounts as well. With integrated analytics, you will also be able to see how well your articles perform and adjust your blog content strategy accordingly.

Marketing analytics automation

The last of the types of marketing automation is analytics and reporting. As a form of internal marketing, this feature makes it easy for your marketing team to access statistics and results without having to spend hours combing through endless data points.

Marketing analytics automation lets you track all sorts of campaigns, including email, social media, blog articles, ads and more. With email campaigns, you can easily see the delivery, open, click-through and bounce rate of every email sent. For social media, blogs and advertisements, you can view how well each campaign is performing and use that data to optimize future campaigns.

Power up your marketing strategy with automation

When it comes to utilizing the different types of marketing automation, keep in mind that there’s no need to stick with just one! Power up your marketing strategy by strategically using the automation mix that makes the most sense for your business.