10 Great Marketing Automation Examples for B2B and B2C

It takes only one excellent, well-executed strategy to bring a remarkable change in incoming leads, revenues, and customer retention.

Marketing automation executes your strategic marketing ideas with 100% accuracy. It allows people to be thinkers and frees up the doers to add more value to their daily tasks. Unsurprisingly, 63% of marketers plan to increase their marketing automation budget this year.

We’ve collated a list of 10 marketing automation examples which are inspiring and creative in equal measure to automate monotonous marketing work.

Table of contents

• What is marketing automation?

• Top 10 examples of marketing automation

  • 1. For lead management and customer acquisition
  • 2. Welcoming a new user
  • 3. Onboarding communication
  • 4. For customer support and customer retention
  • 5. Social media management
  • 6. Multichannel marketing
  • 7. For refill purchase
  • 8. Customer re-engagement
  • 9. Cross-selling and upselling
  • 10. Product upgrades and launches

• Wrap up

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is used to trigger certain marketing activities. It collects information based on preset rules around customer behavior.

• Marketing touchpoints are created through the entire customer life cycle, right from pre-sales and acquisition to support.

• Such touchpoints can be automated through integrations with composite applications like CRM, customer support, ERP, etc.

• It results in a meaningful experience for customers, higher customer stickiness, increased revenue, and CLV.

• This is a win-win scenario for the internal marketing team as well as end customers.

Let us look at some classic examples of how marketing automation can be brought to use.

Top 10 examples of marketing automation

Here are the top 10 marketing automation examples you can get inspiration from:

1. For lead management and customer acquisition

Follow-ups and informative campaigns convince prospects to become customers. Marketing automation can help convert a lead into a customer via both.

23.7% of marketers saw a rise in their conversions by 10% with AMP emails, which are known to enhance customer engagement and responsiveness.

Automation tools make it easier to send timely nudges, product differentiators, and success stories, especially across multiple channels.

2. Welcoming a new user

The easiest, most classic marketing automation example is the welcome email. With stats like a whopping 50% open rate and 5X more clicks than any other emails, it’s a no-brainer for marketers across industries. Yet, only 57.7% of brands send out welcome emails despite 74% of people expecting to see a welcome email immediately after they sign on.

Based on the content marketing strategy, you can plan content for the welcome email. It could include engaging information, a discount voucher, or even info about product features. Combine that with the power of AMP to bring website functionalities to the email body. As a result, you have one effective welcome email.

This is a great example of a welcome email. It showcases clear differentiators and unique benefits a premium user gets. The objective is to convince the user to be a premium subscriber for longer.

3. Onboarding communication

Onboarding communication can go at a predefined interval after the welcome email. It is like showing a customer the ropes of how everything works. It could be a high-level product demo/welcome tour and answer the basic how-to questions. It can also include account activation information to increase the open rate.

Communication from Grammarly, as shown below, is an excellent example of automated onboarding communication. It gives a high-level product demo and highlights unique features along with support connect.

4. For customer support and customer retention

Guess where you go as soon as you have a problem? Customer Support. No experience or product can be perfect for all users. Customers have questions, issues, and concerns. Despite a great product, if the post-sales support is not up to the mark, customers do not hesitate to move away. And so, having a spot on customer support experience goes a long way in customer retention.

So how can automation help here?

It is common to send out push notifications, SMS, or emails with customer support surveys and NPS. Depending on the customer interaction, you can also share discount vouchers or referral schemes. But, it is too tedious if done manually. It also takes precious personnel bandwidth. Automation gets it done faster in less time with 100% accuracy.

Applications like Zendesk are widely used by customer support teams. Support activities like support ticket closing can trigger communication. Push notification or AMP emails can be sent for better customer engagement and response.

Furthermore, automation is also used for chatbots for preliminary customer support. This helps manage traffic as well as provides timely support to many users.

5. Social media management

Social media is huge in influencing customers to form brand perceptions. It also affects their decision about buying a product. Inversely, marketing automation is also used for social listening. Social listening is understanding what people are saying online about your brand and products.

Marketing automation software help you get insights into what interests your customers. What information your customers are looking for, and what topics are trending. Then you can tailor your social media content and schedule the posts according to that. This helps to sharpen your content marketing strategy to make it more accurate.

Applications like Hubspot help with the consistent scheduling of social media posts. It can help to get all the information like replies, keywords, and mentions in one place, making it easy to respond on time.

Based on your customers’ behavior on social media, you can directly reach out to them. Personalized emails along with social media reach out are a great way to keep your brand front and center in their minds.

6. Multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing needs too much done at the same time.

It involves executing a strategy based on tracking customer behavior on multiple channels. It is to engage a customer through a variety of direct and indirect mediums such as websites, search engines, email, social media, push notifications, direct texts, promotional events, etc.

Automation is the only way to get it all done. The important aspect is to process large amounts of customer behavioral data and act accordingly. Many applications like CleverTap and Freshmarketer are used for multichannel marketing automation. If you want to sharpen the ax further, you can use AMP emails along with existing channels of multichannel marketing.

7. For refill purchase

Communication about products that need refill is another automation that can be set up easily. This is more popular in eCommerce like daily needs and medical supplies, but not limited to that. Using existing user purchase data like items and frequency, a predictive model can be created easily. Using that model, communication can be triggered when the items are likely to run out.

Information regarding item replenishment along with engaging content and applicable offers can be pre-scheduled to go to customers through push notifications, SMS, or AMP emails.

While push notifications and SMS direct the customer to the app, AMP email can show the cart with a link to the payment gateway and drastically reduce the number of intermittent steps. This makes the customer journey shorter and smoother.

Not only are you reaching the customer at just the right time, but it also creates a highly personalized experience for the customer.

The communication below is a spot-on example of the same.

8. Customer re-engagement

Customer re-engagement is a classic example of marketing automation.

Based on the data that Baymard Institute collected, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.82%. Reengagement can be done for abandoned shopping carts as well as inactive customers.

In the case of an abandoned cart, the customer has already chosen the product, and it is just a matter of that one final step. A workflow can be set up to remind the customer about the items in the abandoned cart. Instead of sending only one reminder, it makes sense to create a series. You can also add information specific to items, revised pricing, or even the end of the sale to increase the opening rate for this communication.

The communication below brings up the urgency required in action and also creates a cross-sell/upsell opportunity.

In the case of inactive customers, there are chances that the customer is no longer using the application. We miss you’ emails and text messages are a great way to keep such customers in the loop about amazing deals, discount vouchers, and new products and make them active again. ​​

9. Cross-selling and upselling

Automation for cross-selling and upselling works beautifully! It is the perfect example of how data can be used to meet customer needs proactively.

Because of customers' extensive online presence, companies have better quality data about customer behavior. That data is key to accurate customer behavior prediction. The more personalized your upselling and cross-selling predictions, the better is the success rate.

Cross-selling and upselling, by preset automated rules, result in higher revenue per customer, increased customer lifetime value, and even an increase in each order value.

10. Product upgrades and launches

Sharing information about product upgrades and new product launches is a great way to showcase the company. It establishes that you are dynamic and innovative. It makes the customers want to be part of the journey. This information can also be shared as scheduled newsletters to people who may not even be customers yet.

Wrap up

Marketing automation is a large umbrella under which it is possible to execute thousands of specific variations. It is amazing how it allows a small team with a limited budget to achieve widely impactful results.

A significant aspect of it is email marketing automation. It automates all your email sequences and flows and allows you to focus your efforts where it matters. Read all about the best email automation softwares of 2023 here to supercharge your triggered emails.