10 Marketing Automation Workflows – Run Your Marketing Campaign To Get Better Results

Marketing automation workflows act as a savior for time-strapped teams. They also empower marketers to develop better customer relationships, increase conversions, and dramatically boost revenue. Today, we will be looking at ten great marketing automation workflows, and how they can support your business, and instructions for setting them up. The workflows are divided into the following categories, based on what you’re looking to accomplish:

• Improving engagement
• Building relationships
• Increasing revenue

Before we dive in, it is important to know the basics first. Then, let’s move forward to know what marketing automation workflows are.

Marketing Automation Workflows Explained

Marketing automation utilizes software to automate different marketing activities, including audience segmentation, developing and managing email campaigns, and tracking and analyzing results. In marketing automation, workflow defines a customer journey framework and the touchpoints where the automated interactions come in. 

For instance, someone visits your website and signs up for the opt-in forms. You can allow them to download a free ebook or sign up for a free demo. Whatever the case, they need more information about your product or service. 

You know their email address, and applying the marketing automation workflow, you can set up an email sequence. Then, when they first download it, you can automatically send them a welcome email sequence accompanied by other emails to nurture your leads more. 

A marketing workflow management software benefits in advancing leads down your sales funnel by nurturing and involving all your leads. You can build a marketing workflow in a very precise way.

For ensuring that your business gets the benefits, here are 10 marketing automation workflows and details on setting up your own.

Now, you know what marketing automation is; it’s time to get started. 

Marketing Automation Workflows To Get Maximum Return

Workflows for enhancing engagement

Whenever someone subscribes or becomes a paying customer, you still have to make efforts to sustain their interest and stop them from falling through the cracks. These marketing automation workflows will help you do just that!

1. Onboarding series

Onboarding emails are an important tool to make sure that customers stick with your company. You can further send these automated emails by creating an account or after a customer purchases your product or service. 

When users create an account on a website, they usually take several steps to complete their profile. There are a few things that you need to keep in mind to make the most out of their account. Your onboarding series needs some of these issues for a seamless customer experience. 

 By doing this you can have benefits in the longer-term such as:

• Improving customers’ engagement with your products or services and increasing retention
• Recognizing  low-engagement users or those who have not precisely set up their account for further outreach campaigns

How to set up the workflow

When users sign up or make a purchase, they submit a form that adds their details to your database. This action lets the rest of the workflow into motion. Once the user receives your initial email, you can add a condition that sends a follow-up message if they have not performed the required steps after a certain amount of time.

And if they have created their profile, you can send them a final email that tells them how to get the most out of their account. Optimizing your email timing and observing whether recipients achieved the last key action is required. It ensures that users get value from your onboarding emails and reinforces that your brand is there to assist.

2. Celebrating birthdays or anniversaries

Give your customers the VIP treatment by automatically giving them a special discount for their birthday or anniversary when they become consumers.

Personalized campaigns like this are an excellent way to create loyalty and keep your brand top of mind. Plus, they provide customers with an incentive to purchase from your company again or maintain their subscription. 

How to set up the workflow

It is one of the simplest workflows to get started with automated email workflows. 

For birthday messages, you’ll have to ask users for their date of birth at the time of signup. For other scenarios, you can utilize the date that contact has added to a particular list. 

Utilizing this contact data, you can then build a workflow that automatically sends a pre-prepared message to subscribers on the same date every year. 

If the customer doesn’t redeem their promotion, you could consider triggering a reminder to be sent after a particular period. 

3. Re-engaging subscribers

If you desire to combat low engagement with your content or product, a re-engagement workflow is a way to go. 

There are a number of possible scenarios for this, such as:

• Asking email subscribers with lower engagement if they still desire to hear from you
• Enticing a customer back who hasn’t bought in a while with a discount
• Reaching out to consumers who haven’t logged in or utilized your product in a while

How to set up the workflow 

The first step is to determine an inactive subscriber and thus the provisions for a contact to enter the workflow. It might be a subscriber who hasn’t engaged with your emails or bought something for a particular period. It then triggers either a particular message or a series of emails that strive to win them back. 

Note: you can further use re-engagement emails to clean your list of contacts who are no longer involved. Join a step to your workflow so that if a contact doesn’t engage with your “last chance” message asking them to re-opt in, they are automatically excluded from your list.

Workflows for building relationships

Automation plays a significant role when it comes to relationship marketing strategy as it allows you to get new customers and make sure that they stay loyal to your brand in the long term.

4. Offering gated content

Lead generation is not a one-way street. If you require information from your prospective customers, you have to give them a reason to share it! Gated content is one of the best methods to achieve this. First, you give something valuable to users, such as a downloadable ebook or a webinar. And in exchange, they give useful information like their name, company, email address, and other contact details. 

Gated content is especially effective as a lead generation tactic because it entices people who are likely to be interested in your offer. A well-crafted automation workflow can better capitalize on this. After automatically providing subscribers with the content they signed up for, you can nourish leads by following up with more content tailored to their interests. 

How to set up the workflow

Your starting point is to build a popup or landing page for your gated content connected to your database. When someone fills out the form to obtain the content, they are attached to an email list. It initiates the workflow.

From there, you can build a series of actions so that subscribers get relevant content at the right time. 

5. Welcoming subscribers

An appealing welcome email is a must for subscribers who sign up for content like your newsletter. This simplistic email automation workflow helps you show your audience you care and lays the foundation for a lasting relationship.

You can utilize welcome workflows to:

• Re-state (or create one) your value proposition. What makes you exclusive?
• Set expectations for your subscribers. What can they expect to get from your content, and how frequently will they receive it?
• Greeting your new subscribers to your community and giving them a taste of your sweet personality!
• Surprise subscribers with a bonus. It could be a coupon if you have a store or a bonus piece of content that they can download instantly.

How to set up the workflow

This workflow is a kind of email autoresponder. It’s one of the more straightforward workflows, with fewer variables and conditions required. So, the ideal workflow for those just getting started with marketing automation! 

The trigger is presenting a signup form on your website, adding the subscriber to your preferred list. Once they enter the list, this automatically opens the workflow and sends the welcome email campaign you have made. 

6. Lead nurturing

Marketing automation can nurture new leads easily and more effectively. 

The purpose of lead nurturing is to guide potent customers toward a conversion. You could use this kind of workflow to:

• Manage customer engagement throughout their research and shopping process
• Present prospects with the relevant information they require to make a purchase

How to set up the workflow

Your lead nurturing workflow should begin at the earliest possible point in the sales funnel. It might be when someone subscribes to your newsletter or requests a demo of your product. 

Once a lead enters your workflow, you can follow their engagement to customize the customer journey further. For instance, depending on which pages they hit on your site, you can catch up with an automated email campaign with appropriate content based on their interests.

7. Receiving Feedback

Customer feedback is a helpful tool for improving your service or product and building trust. And with an automated workflow accumulating feedback and measuring customer satisfaction is much easier!

How to set up the workflow

First, determine the touchpoint that should trigger a request for feedback. This should prompt a message that asks the customer about their experience. Some potential scenarios involve a product purchase or a customer’s communication with your support team. 

And you can go even further with a multi-step workflow based on the customer’s responsibility. 

For example:

• With happy customers, combine them with a loyal customers list where you send them exclusive offers and discounts to keep them coming back for more. Another option is to request a review from the customer so you can share their positive feedback more widely. 
• With unhappy customers, send a personal thank you message for their honest feedback and learn more about their negative experience. You could also allow refunds or discounts to try and remedy the situation from a customer service perspective.

Workflows for increasing revenue

With a sound workflow, marketing automation can do miracles for boosting your sales. Here are some workflows that you can put into practice.

8. Following-up abandoned carts

Abandoned cart workflows are a necessity for any eCommerce site. Why? By providing customers with a nudge, you can achieve more sales and increase your conversion rate. 

Empty cart follow-ups usually require a message prompting a shopper about items left in their online cart, along with a link to take them back to complete their purchase. 

Apart from this basic format, where feasible, your message should speak about issues that may have led to the cart abandonment. For instance, you could allow the shopper a discount or provide details for contacting your customer service.

How to set up the workflow

This workflow trigger is based on shoppers’ activity on your website, especially when adding one or more items to their cart. After a contact initiates the workflow, have it wait a certain period (24 hours is usually sufficient). Once the waiting period is over, the workflow should check if the purchase was completed. If the purchase was not completed it will automatically send your customers a message regarding the abandoned cart.

9. Upselling/cross-selling

Even if a consumer makes their purchase the first time, you can still take the chance to increase revenue using marketing automation. Use shopping history to furnish relevant recommendations, such as free products or items popular with the rest of your customers. 

This workflow is especially effective for promoting new customers to purchase again. Not only can it increase revenue, but when done right, you’ll also combine value to the shopper experience, which will let them come back for more. 

How to set up the workflow

This workflow is based on customers’ past shopping experiences. To achieve it, build a segment for customers who buy a certain product and set your workflow to start when a contact matches the segment conditions.

Then you can give them personalized recommendations they won’t be able to resist!

10. Lead scoring

Wouldn’t it be great if you could identify which contacts are your most promising leads and how close they are to making a purchase?  With the help of lead scoring workflow, you can do just that!

Lead scoring is exactly what it seems like—assigning points to prospective customers based on their behavior. It helps you better target your leads who are most likely to translate.

You can use lead scoring for automated list segmentation based on the score of any contact. 

How to set up this workflow

A lead scoring workflow automatically combines points to individual contacts when they take actions that suggest they are likely to convert. Before beginning your workflow, you must first build a column in your customer database for “score.”

This value will vary based on customers’ behaviors. You will also need to decide what actions prospects generally take before turning and how many points each of these actions should be worth. 

Once you plan out the way, you can build workflows that will check whether contacts perform the different actions leading to conversion. 

Start Creating Your Marketing Automation Workflows

Surely, these workflows have to hone your appetite and urge you to put your knowledge into action! We hope that this blog will help you apply the best and most suitable marketing automation workflows.