Automate that: Types of marketing automation and how they're evolving in the AI era

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the way businesses think about automation. Once the conversation centered around taking daily, mindless tasks off the plates of busy marketers. Today it’s about how AI can predict outcomes, personalize content, and forecast results. 

In this updated guide to types of marketing automation, we’ll explore how these technological advancements are changing how we work and what to look for when you’re reassessing your tech stack. 

What are the different types of marketing automation?

In this section, we are outlining various types of marketing automation and how they're evolving in the AI era. In practice, marketers will use many or all of these types in omnichannel campaigns that are built, tracked, optimized, and reported on in one or two multi-use platforms.

1. Email marketing automation

Email is one of the most common types of marketing to automate. Because most marketers are already familiar with the basics of email marketing automation, it’s also the most logical place to start developing more advanced strategies and experimenting with how AI can help you improve outcomes. 

Automated email flows can help you to do things like:

• Save time by automating essential messages to customers

• Automate sales outreach to new leads

• Nurture leads with educational content

• Send personalized messages at scale

• Increase MRR and expansion with automated retention campaigns 

• Automate sending CSAT and NPS surveys 

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There are already several commonly used applications of AI in email marketing, like generating subject lines that are more likely to lead to a higher open rate, A/B testing, personalizing product or content recommendations, and analyzing data. 

On the receiver’s side, AI-driven spam detection and filtering are impacting the way marketers send. For example, AI in email providers like Gmail finds patterns in emails reported as spam and uses them to automatically send suspicious messages straight to the spam box. This is ultimately a good thing — it keeps phishing scams to a minimum and prevents bad actors from reaching the inbox. But it also means marketers need to adopt good email deliverability practices to prevent well-meaning messages from being mistaken for spam. 

Relatedly, AI algorithms can help marketers with list management by automatically removing unverified, invalid, or unsubscribed contacts from your database. Giving this time-intensive task to the robots can free your team up for more productive list management projects like win-back email campaigns and sunsetting inactive subscribers. 

As AI improves and adoption rates soar, its ability to make accurate predictions improves. The next phase of AI will be taking these predictions and automating optimizations based on campaign goals. For example, right now AI can tell us the best time to send an email and marketers use this information when scheduling their next campaign. In the future, the AI could make the optimization itself, updating old journeys and campaigns based on new information around the best time to send.

2. Social media automation

Manually posting every piece of social content on individual platforms would be almost impossible for most businesses. Instead, we have automation platforms to help us create and schedule posts, manage workflows, report on performance, and send automated messages to customers via direct message.

Social media automation platforms can help with:

• Organic social media posts across various platforms

• Social media listening 

• Automating workflows for direct messages and comments

• Automating replies to direct messages (for example, ‘out of office’ replies on weekends) 

• Analyzing the performance of posts and platforms

• Track competitors activity 

• Recommend optimal time to post 

One area of social automation that has become more powerful thanks to more recent AI developments is social media content crafting. We could soon be working in a world where AI creates, personalizes, and optimizes social videos before serving them to highly-targeted audiences. 

3. Customer relationship management (CRM) or customer data platform (CDP) automation 

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms have been at the forefront of automation for quite some time, helping sales, marketing, and success teams to automate follow-up emails, lead scoring, contact updates, revenue forecast, and more. Customer data platforms (CDP) can perform similar tasks, and use integrations with other platforms (including your CRM) to paint a complete picture of your customer and their experience with your business. 

Automating functions in your CRM or CDP can help to:

• View the entire customer journey to proactively manage relationships 

• Score and assign leads 

• Help forecast revenue 

• Automate administrative and organizational tasks like contact updates

• Ensure audience segments reflect real-time information 

As these platforms get smarter and more powerful thanks to AI, predictions on lead outcomes and revenue forecasts will become more and more accurate. Soon, it could anticipate a lead or customer’s needs in real-time, then proactively send emails with relevant how-to documents. 

4. Data analysis and reporting automation 

Since AI can chew through huge amounts of data quickly, automated data analysis is an incredibly powerful tool that enables real-time reporting across the business. Once reports and dashboards are built, they stay up-to-date and can automatically be shared at a regular cadence to keep individuals and teams accountable. 

Using automation in data analysis and reporting can also increase trust in the data. When rules-based and predictive models are able to check data integrity and consistency, there is less room for error. It also means that when a model or rule around data changes in your business, for example, a change to your attribution model, it can be applied to all existing and new reports automatically. 

Data analysis and reporting automation can help with:

• Tracking website performance 

• Measuring the success of campaigns, including attribution reporting 

• Identifying top-performing channels and tactics

• Tracking key business metrics, including financial performance 

• Streamline and simplify data visualization 

As AI algorithms become more sophisticated, reporting tools are getting better at drawing useful insights from data and generating accurate predictions for the future. This could help business leaders make data-driven decisions about things like marketing spend, headcount, and product development. 

5. Advertising automation 

Most marketers are using at least one automated advertising platform regularly. From Google to Meta, these platforms analyze user behavior to build targeted audiences and show them relevant advertisements. 

Automation gives you the ability to properly leverage data — both the zero- and first-party data you own and the huge amounts of third-party data the advertising platform owns — to do things like build audiences, determine keyword buying strategies, craft ad messaging, and set realistic budgets for your campaign.

Advertisers working with automation will benefit from the ability to: 

• Quickly build highly-specific target audiences, including lookalikes

• Craft high-performing content

• Trigger automatic actions based on users' behaviors

• Optimize spend based on data

• Identify keywords to target based on data

• Create reports to track performance

These platforms are already very sophisticated and good at making accurate predictions, in part because of the huge amount of data available to them. In time, they’ll continue to improve, predicting outcomes beyond the click and helping businesses turn more leads into customers. 

6. Mobile marketing automation

The benefits of mobile marketing automation are similar to that of email: You can automate personalized SMS messages and push notifications at scale, based on customer profile or behavior. 

In general, any obtrusive mobile messages like SMS and push notifications should be used sparingly and, ideally, in situations where the message is timely. For example, reminding a customer about an appointment or meeting booking, or alerting them to a one-day sale or offer when they are in the vicinity of a store. 

Because of this, it can be helpful to use a platform that allows you to build mobile experiences into larger omnichannel marketing journeys, rather than having a standalone SMS or notification platform. Seeing the entire journey mapped out in one place will help you to identify where a mobile push makes the most sense.

Mobile automation helps you to:

• Send personalized SMS messages and push notifications at scale

• Automate mobile messages based on events or activities

• Create omnichannel journeys including SMS and push notifications 

• Track performance of mobile marketing  

• Geofence messages to send based on your customer’s location

• Send rich messages including images, gifs or videos

There is still plenty of room for mobile marketing automation to develop, with improvements in conversational AI, predictive analytics, personalization, and targeting. 

7. Chatbot automation

Automated chatbots, powered by conversational AI, are seeing rapid adoption rates — it is expected that 25% of businesses will use chatbots by 2027. 

Chatbots are trained on content from your website, help docs, app, and past customer service interactions, giving them everything they need to answer common questions. They can also determine when a human would be better equipped to answer a question — for example, complex questions or some sales-related inquiries.

Where once chatbots operated predominantly on-site, they are now omnichannel customer engagement experiences and can operate on SMS, email, and apps like WeChat or Messenger. When conversations are tracked in one place, anyone can see a customer’s interactions with your business across channels, giving them a deeper understanding of the customer journey in its entirety. 

Chatbot automation helps your business:

• Resolve more tickets in less time

• Free up time for success and support to focus on larger customer satisfaction initiatives

• Offer personalized support at scale

• Increase customer loyalty 

• Offer 24/7 support in multiple languages 

• Create a more cost-effective onboarding experience 

• Direct up-selling opportunities to the right people

• See all customer conversations in one place 

• Track performance and trends 

Since the algorithm is partially trained on previously-answered questions, getting started with an automated chatbot now will be extremely beneficial in the future. As it learns, it can take on more complex and nuanced questions, giving your customer-facing teams back time for projects that lead to expansion and advocacy. 

In the future, chatbots will be all around us, operating wherever we are and able to answer any question we have about a business or product. As AI improves, we could see bots that respond via video, voice memo, or even “screen share” tutorials.  

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Examples of marketing automation 

Customers expect a consistent, personalized experience in every interaction they have with your business. Because of this, most businesses will benefit from utilizing many types of marketing automation in tandem, building customer journeys that send the right message to the right channel at the right time. Here are a few examples of how the different types of marketing automation could be utilized across the customer lifecycle:

Lead nurturing

Example: An insurance company has a lead generation campaign around a new report or whitepaper

Goal: Nurture leads to book an appointment with a consultant 

Types of marketing automation used: 

• Advertising automation: A lead gen form on LinkedIn and landing page promotion on Search. The ad platforms will automate the process of building a lookalike audience, reporting on performance, and making optimization decisions. 

• CRM or CDP automation: Your CRM or customer data platform (CDP) will automate the process of bringing new leads into your database, putting them in the right audience segment, and tracking their activity and behavior with your business. Later, when the customer schedules an appointment, the sales representative assigned will be able to see every step the lead has taken, along with data on who they are and why they are interested in your product or service. 

• Email automation: New leads will automatically be sent the whitepaper or report via email. Once they interact with that email, they will be automatically routed to a longer lead-nurture email journey where they periodically receive educational emails designed to nudge them to make an appointment. 

• Data analysis and reporting: Content downloads, lead nurture journey performance, and consultations booked will be analyzed against goals you set, allowing for real-time optimizations to be made. 

New customer onboarding

Example: New customer signs up for a B2B SaaS product

Goal: Guide the new customer through the onboarding process to fast-track value realization 

Types of marketing automation used:

• Email automation: Welcome email and a series of onboarding emails that are triggered when a customer does or does not complete steps in the onboarding checklist. For example, guide your new customer through the process of inviting team members and setting user permissions. If that step remains incomplete after three days, they will be sent a reminder. When the step has been completed, they will be sent an email showing them how to implement tracking codes or integrate relevant products. 

• CRM or CDP automation: Your customer records will be automatically updated with the customer’s details, along with relevant plan details. Activities like email opens and clicks or in-product behavior will be recorded, along with any interactions with sales, support, or chatbots. 

• Mobile marketing automation: Push notifications could be sent to customers to nudge them toward value realization in your mobile (or desktop) app. SMS messages inviting customers to onboarding webinars or sessions with success could be sent to high-value customers with dedicated support resources. 

• Chatbot automation: Chatbots can welcome new customers when they login for the first time, and ask them if they need any assistance. They can quickly answer common questions about the onboarding process and share additional resources like how-to videos or articles. 

• Data analysis and reporting: All onboarding activity can be tracked in onboarding reports, or can be combined into a real-time onboarding dashboard that tracks metrics like time to value realization.

Image: SimilarWeb via ReallyGoodEmails

New feature adoption

Example: A healthtech platform has released a new feature 

Goal: Nudge existing customers to adopt the new feature 

Types of marketing automation used:

• Email automation: Automate an email announcement to all customers sharing the launch and how-to documentation. Customers who open the email will be directed to a series of emails further explaining the benefit until they adopt the feature or stop engaging. Customers who do not open the email for one week will be automatically sent a reminder or follow-up. 

• Social media automation: Post about your new launch publicly on all your social media platforms. Use social listening to automatically surface and share conversations about your new feature, and track the performance of launch-related posts. 

• CRM or CDP automation: Customer records will be updated to reflect adoption of the new feature, allowing customer-facing teams to ask about or encourage usage.

• Mobile marketing automation: Push notifications or SMS messages can be automated to alert customers to the new feature. Customers who have requested the feature or sent interest signals could be sent a follow-up if they do not adopt it. 

• Chatbot automation: Chatbots can answer questions about the new feature, taking the heavy lifting off support during the launch. 

• Data analysis and reporting: All activity related to the feature can be tracked in real-time to keep teams accountable and on track toward the adoption goal. 

Image: Everlywell via ReallyGoodEmails

How to choose the right marketing automation platforms

Today, there are platforms that can automate everything we’ve outlined above, making it simple to centralize the customer journey and create a truly omnichannel experience. 

Whether you are assessing a multi-use solution or a stack of individual platforms, there are some key things to consider:

• How does the platform use AI? Look for a custom neural net, and ask whether the model that trains chatbots is custom-built or off-the-shelf. Ask about future plans and the role AI plays. 

• Use the ‘cost per wear’ analogy for pricing. One solution may be more cost-effective, but requires you to invest in a separate chatbot that sends your overall tech stack investment soaring. 

• What do the reviews say? Dig a little deeper than star ratings. What are reviewers saying about the pros and cons of the platforms in your shortlist? Are negative reviews about the platform, or could they be a customer misfit? It can be helpful to sort reviews by customer type to identify how similar businesses feel about the product. 

• Is there a free trial option? If yes, how do you make the most of it? Too often marketers sign up for a free trial, then don’t get time to use it. Before you sign up, identify a few things you want to do and free up some time to do them. Use the platform’s self-serve resources, chatbots, and support to work through questions. 

• Does this platform play well with others? If you have some platforms you love and want to continue using, ask whether they integrate easily with the new platform you’re assessing. 

• How easy is it to get set up and automate campaigns? Do integrations require coding? How much support will you need from your design, development, and data teams? Look for a marketing automation platform that has low- or no-code integrations, intuitive campaign builders, and built-in brand styling — the more a marketing team can self-serve, the better. 

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Types of marketing automation: The final word

As the customer journey gets more complex, communications happen on more channels, and AI gets increasingly intelligent, marketers need to use various types of automation to get their jobs done. While it can be helpful to consider the role each individual type and the role plays in the larger marketing ecosystem, the best campaigns are omnichannel experiences that utilize various types in a journey.