Marketing Automation is a form of marketing that brings in different messaging platforms (email marketing, SMS, social media, etc) and adds automation to how they work.
Complicated sounding right? It can be.
At the core marketing automation relies on:
- list of customers
- list of triggers
- list of actions
Triggers look for customer behavior
A trigger is a bit of code that looks for a specific behavior by a customer.
This might be clicking a specific link, using a coupon, or even not clicking a specific link.
When that behavior happens, the trigger tells an action about it.
Actions do stuff
Action are more bits of code that do things. They verb.
- Add.
- Remove.
- Send Email.
- Send image over SMS.
They run by a trigger sending them a customer. The action then runs with that customer's data to do what it was coded to do.
Example marketing automations
When this link is clicked (trigger), add invite-accepted tag to the customer in Shopify (action).
When this coupon is used (trigger), schedule Follow up on your order email to be sent in 7 days (action).
Connecting triggers to actions to triggers to actions
The real power of marketing automation is connecting multiple triggers and actions together. Often called workflows, these bundles of code can perform a lot of work automatically for you.
You might have a trigger happen when an order is placed, cause the customer to be tagged, a sequence of emails to be scheduled, and then if they don't place another order after 1 year send them a winback sequence over SMS.
(If you've used Shopify Flow before, Flow is very similar though it can do more than just marketing automation)
Marketing automation adds complexity and cost
It's best to remember marketing automations as little bundle of code. Even if a provider has a pretty website to make them, they are code behind the scenes.
This means it can become very complex to build and run marketing automations. Oftentimes a software developer or a developer-like person is needed to step in and evaluate how the system as a whole runs.
This makes these systems costly to run and maintain (beyond just the per-month cost) but the benefits can be huge if they are taken advantage of.
Articles for further reading
The newest articles are at the top.
- Marketing Automation
- The curse of discounting in your abandoned cart emails
- Adopt automation slowly in your Shopify store
- Avoid marketing automation bugs in your email marketing
- Taking advantage of a software mistake to increase customer loyalty
- Lousy customer segmenting from Comcast
- How to integrate Drip with Shopify to automate your marketing
- Shopify store automation events that Drip can capitalize on