What Is Marketing Automation? A Beginner's Guide to Smarter Customer Engagement

You’ve probably been hearing about AI and automation all the time lately, but have you considered taking advantage of it to market your business? 

Marketing involves a lot of repetitive tasks that, while simple enough, can quickly eat up your time. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.

Marketing automation uses software to tackle repetitive marketing tasks across channels like email, social media, and SMS marketing.

You save time while still reaping all the benefits of active digital marketing. 

Discover how you can implement marketing automation to nurture leads while also maintaining authentic personal touchpoints. 

The Quick Breakdown Of Marketing Automation Goals

The core purpose of automation is to take repetitive tasks off your plate without compromising quality. Automating marketing tasks lets you scale your marketing efforts while becoming more efficient and even creating new opportunities for personalization. 

Specifically, marketing automation examples include:

• Automatic abandoned cart retargeting
• Birthday/anniversary messages for customers
• Automatic lead stage changing in your CRM
• Win-back campaigns for inactive email subscribers
• Post-purchase upsells at a set period after customers make a purchase
• Content scheduling and publishing on social media
• Cross-platform social media posting

Depending on the tools you use and the types of campaigns you’re running, you can implement digital marketing automations for almost any repetitive marketing task. 

How Marketing Automation Works In Your Daily Business

When you use marketing automation, the first step is choosing the right tools and software to handle the automations. Then, you specify what you want the software to do automatically and when. You do that using “triggers” and “actions.”

For example, say you want to automatically send new email subscribers a welcome email right after they sign up. The “trigger” is the user signing up for your email list. The “action” you want your marketing automation software to take in response is sending a pre-written welcome email right away. 

You can use this trigger and action system for any marketing task you want your software to handle automatically. 

Another example is abandoned cart reminders. The trigger could be a customer adding items to their cart and then not checking out within 1 hour. The action would then be to send a reminder message with the details of their abandoned cart, possibly including a discount offer to pull that customer back in. 

In this system, you only need to designate the trigger and the action once. After that, the marketing automation software for your small business will handle the tasks on its own with no additional effort or time required from you. With the welcome email example, you write your welcome email once, and the software sends it to each new email subscriber as specified. You wouldn’t have to manually track new subscribers and send the email each time. 

Common Automation Tools That Save You Time

You need the right tools to create a marketing automation system that works for your automotive business. Consider implementing tools with features like:

• Automatic SMS reminders: Send customers appointment or service reminder texts automatically to help reduce no-shows and keep your bays full. 
• Automatic review requests: Many customers just need a little prompting to share an online review of your business. Send automatic reminders 3 to 7 days after each customer’s appointment directing them to your online listing and politely requesting a review. 
• Social media scheduling: Staying active on social media boosts your online visibility and can bring in customers, but it takes up a lot of time. Automate the scheduling and posting with social media automation tools to save some time and effort while maintaining your online presence. 

Many customers find local businesses online through online directories like Yelp and Google Business Profiles. Keeping your profiles on these sites active and optimized is another key part of digital marketing you can automate with specific tools. For example, you can use a tool that automatically responds to the reviews you receive. Sharing responses to reviews shows customers and these platforms that you’re engaged and committed to delivering strong customer experiences. 

Keeping The Personal Touch In An Automated World

One of the things that often holds small business owners back from implementing automation is the fear of 'looking like a robot.' You don’t want to lose what makes your business special when automating marketing tasks, especially communications with customers. Luckily, there are ways to avoid that off-putting, impersonal feeling that some automated messages get. 

Try implementing these tips:

• Use natural language: When you’re writing the messages that your automation software will send out, write like you actually speak. The message should still sound like you, even if you’re not the one sending it.
• Add dynamic personalization: In most automation software, you can actually personalize the automated messages with details like the recipient’s name or specifics about their purchase. You typically write something like [First Name] in the message, then your software fills in the correct details for each recipient. 
• Regularly review: Read through your templates and sent messages every once in a while to make sure there are no issues and you’re happy with the tone. 
• Don’t automate everything: Automated messages and tasks aren’t perfect substitutes for messages that come directly from you. Make sure to communicate with customers directly every once in a while so you never lose that human touch. 

Find the balance between automating to save time and handling some interactions individually to make sure your customers feel valued. 

Is Your Business Ready To Start Automating?

Automation isn’t the right solution for every business in every moment, but it might be right for you now. If any of these signs feel familiar, it’s probably time to think about automating some marketing tasks:

• You have too many leads to call each one back individually with a quick response time.
• You spend lots of time on repetitive tasks, like sending the same welcome emails or scheduling social media posts.
• You can’t keep track of the follow-ups you have to send, like to customers who recently made a purchase or abandoned an online cart. 
• There’s a disconnect between your different marketing channels, like your website, email, and social media. 
• Leads are slipping through the cracks, and you don’t have clear visibility into what’s going wrong or how to fix it. 
• Your marketing strategy is getting more complex as your business scales, but it’s also harder to manage. 
• You want to increase your inbound marketing through a scalable process. 

Keep in mind that automating will be an adjustment, but it will pay off soon if these signs apply to your business. 

Getting Started With Your First Automation Strategy

Before you can dive into the nitty-gritty of automated marketing strategies for service businesses, there are a few things you need to do:

1. If you don’t already have customer relationship management (CRM) software, choose and implement one. 
2. Define your goals. Are you hoping to increase repeat sales? Boost lead capture? Be specific. 
3. Identify the manual tasks you want to offload. 
4. Choose your marketing automation software accordingly. 
5. Build your automated workflows within this software, with the specific triggers and actions you want automated. 

If you’re setting up complex automated workflows, a professional marketing team like Optimize Digital Marketing can be incredibly helpful. We’ve partnered with countless automotive and service businesses to build customized, effective marketing strategies that implement automation where it makes the most sense. Contact us today to discuss how we can automate digital marketing for your small business to nurture leads while saving you time.