6 Best Marketing Automation Workflows That Can Increase Conversions For Your Business In 2023

With more and more businesses undergoing a digital shift, marketing teams are out of time and resources to track every lead in their sales funnel and nurture them into paying customers. This is where marketing automation is a lifesaver, and research indicates businesses automating marketing functions make 25% more revenue than those that aren’t.

Marketing automation can be used to put relevant content in front of your audience in a timely manner, send emails at different times of a prospect’s customer journey to increase engagement, eliminate repetitive tasks in an elaborate campaign, or simply correlate information from one platform to the other for a more holistic strategy analysis. 

If you would like a better understand marketing automation, you can refer to one of our previous blogs right here.

No matter your reason, once you decide to implement marketing automation, you will need to understand how to structure and break down your strategy into workflows. Marketing automation workflows allow you to engage your audience and nurture your leads while saving time and money. 77% of marketers using automation workflows significantly increased their conversion rates. Did that get your attention?

In this blog, I will tell you about marketing automation workflows—what they are, why they are important, and the key elements to creating one. Following this, I will also provide 6 examples of marketing automation workflows that can help your business acquire more customers and supercharge its growth.

Let’s do this!

Marketing Automation Workflows—Overview

What are they?

In a nutshell, workflow automation uses technology to automate and simplify a project's step-by-step framework or workflow.

In marketing, automation technologies use pre-defined conditional business rules and triggers to automate manual repetitive tasks and steps in your marketing efforts. A marketing automation workflow is a step-by-step blueprint that details the automation at each stage of a typical marketing workflow.  

A well-executed workflow automation can help you save time, reduce errors, and move prospective customers down the marketing funnel more quickly.

For example, if a user downloads a freebie of your website, the next step triggered may involve sending them a sequence of informative emails about how to use your product or service. This is how separate marketing automation points are linked to form a marketing automation workflow.

Each step in the sales funnel should ideally include an automation workflow.

Why are they important?

Workflow automation primarily helps you improve your marketing workflow efficiency by reducing the time spent on manual tasks. It may be a lifesaver if you have more tasks than staff to handle or if things are slipping through the cracks because you don't have time to manually lead prospects from one step to the next. 

Marketing automation workflows allow you a pre-defined path for your leads and customers instead of individually deciding what comes next every time they perform a desired action on your website, app, or social media channel.

How to create a marketing automation workflow?

Marketers can now automate their workflows with the assistance of many tools, apps, and integrations available in the market. However, before creating and implementing a workflow in a tool, it's ideal to have a strategy in place. Depending on the needs of the team, workflow marketing automation can be created with these four key elements:

1. Triggers

A trigger is an action or event that indicates to your technology that it is time to proceed to the next stage. A trigger is typically some kind of user activity (or it can even be a period of inaction).

When configuring your marketing automation workflow, some examples of triggers you can use include submitting a form, clicking a link in an email, making a transaction, and more.

2. Conditions

Conditions are attributes that must be present in order for the system to perform the triggered action. Personalized discounts and special offers, for example, are good examples of conditions that you can use to trigger the next step in your marketing automation workflow.

Let’s understand this with an example. You could set up a marketing automation workflow in which the trigger is a customer buying a subscription to your SaaS product for a month, and the action is to give them a discount code for an annual subscription plan. In this instance, the user must complete the trigger action and meet the conditions for the subsequent action.

Conditions establish boundaries around your automations to ensure that an action is only triggered under the right conditions if the customer fulfills your requirements.

3. Actions

Actions are your marketing automation platform's next steps once a prospect hits a trigger. The action happens in reaction to a trigger and can be a single or multi-step element. For example, if your prospect downloads a free e-Book from your website (trigger), you send them an email (maybe the first of a drip sequence) that educates them about how your product can provide the best solutions to their pain points. 

4. Flow controls

Flow controls, also referred to as time controls, are used to specify when an activity is performed. With custom flow controls, most of your automated marketing-related tasks can be scheduled from a few minutes to days or weeks

• The trigger informs your system that an action is required.
• Conditions serve as checkpoints to ensure that the action suits the prospect and the situation.
• Flow controls determine when the required action should take place.
• The action interacts with the contact in order to foster a lasting relationship.

Top 6 marketing automation workflows that can increase conversions for your business in 2023

1. Onboarding automation workflow

This is, perhaps, the most crucial of process automations for SaaS product companies. Acquiring a lead is just the beginning—you must ensure that they fully know how to utilize the product they’ve grabbed (free or paid) in order for them to transition into brand evangelists and purchase from you over the years.

Onboarding is a customer's first interaction with your offer, and first impressions count. To make the onboarding process as friendly and simple as possible, you can set up a workflow of emails that provide the required information to clients. The average open rate of the first welcome email is 30.69%, which is 202% greater than your usual drip sequence emails.

What should you include in a welcome email sequence? I got you. Here are the basics:

• Thank you message for signing up
• Your company’s “why” and “how”
• Best features of the product they have grabbed 9paid or free)
• Showcase of similar products
• Special offer or discount on their next purchase
• Testimonials and reviews from happy customers
• Invite to follow you on social media (with the links to your social media channels)

Tools like Moosend, Mailchimp, and ConvertKit simplify automating your onboarding process. When a visitor registers on your website by filling out a form, you can immediately trigger the welcome email sequence. Following the welcome email, you can begin sending automated emails with the client's required product information, and nurture them for future sales.

2. Customer service automation workflow

Customer service workflows can have multiple uses. However, the most common one is reducing the strain on support staff by allowing customers to resolve their problems.

A direct request for assistance, such as a customer emailing a support email address, mentioning a support account on social media, or filling out a support ticket, could trigger one type of customer care workflow.

Here’s how you could set up that workflow:

• The customer gets an automated email response informing them that their request was received and will be reviewed by an agent.
  
• The customer may also receive a follow-up email that includes recommendations for how customers can resolve typical issues independently.
  
• During this time, that marketing automation tool you have implemented pushed the customer’s query ticket in the queue of the service ticketing software.
  
• Once received by a customer service rep, they may answer the query with a pre-written response generated by your automation tool based on the content of the customer's ticket.

You can also set up another customer support workflow based on preemptive assistance. Using the data you derive from your existing customer base, you can identify usage patterns contributing to support requests. For this purpose, you can use customer data platforms (CDPs) like Segment, Emarsys, or ActionIQ.

For instance, customers with a specific issue may spend more time on a specific docs page.

The right marketing automation tool could use the time spent on that page to trigger an automated response, such as a chatbot or an email offering assistance.

3. Marketing team automation workflow

To spur the growth of your business, streamlining marketing operations into workflows is paramount. A marketing team workflow should outline what should happen with each content asset created by each team member.

One effective method to structure the workflow is to divide the work into simple sections such as:

• "newly assigned", 
• "in progress",
• "internal revision",
• “external revision”, 
• “published live”, and so on. 

This would majorly depend on the sort of assets you are creating and your marketing strategy. You can do this for both tasks related to clients as well as internal marketing functions.

Tools like Asana, ClickUp, or monday.com can be very helpful for a marketing team primarily focusing on content creation. It's easy to neglect to review a blog post or attach a Google Doc—everyone forgets or makes errors. 

With software like these, project management becomes infinitely easier, and various stakeholders can stay on the same page about every content asset, further paving the way from creation to approval fast and easy. 

4. Customer feedback automation workflow

Collecting feedback from existing satisfied customers is vital to improvising your product or service and delivering the best customer experience with them. However, acquiring feedback can be quite challenging if you don’t have a pre-defined workflow in place.

With a feedback automation workflow, you don’t have to individually reach out to every customer whenever they perform a desired action on your website or buy from you. 

You can create an automated feedback collection workflow initiated by a specific customer action. For example, when a customer purchases a product from your website, you can send them an automated email with a form that asks them feedback questions about their experience with your brand’s website.

Most email marketing tools like Mailmodo, Intercom, and Wrike make setting up this sort of workflow automation simple. You simply have to:

• Design an email template that includes a feedback form for customers to fill out;
• Select the trigger, which could be "after a transaction" here; and,
• Configure the conditions and the flow controls to automate the workflow. 

When a customer makes a purchase from your online storefront, they will receive an email with the feedback form. You can gather insights from the information they input to improve your product and brand experience.

5. Re-Engagement automation workflow

Customers get busy and may forget all about your brand. When a regular customer hasn’t purchased anything or opened any of your emails, you can target them with a re-engagement campaign. 

Automating a re-engagement or a churn reduction workflow involves re-targeting users who show a declining interaction with your brand with emails, pop-ups, or social media ads, to re-engage them before they abandon their cart (i.e., churn). 

You can use any email marketing solution, like ActiveCampaign, Woodpecker, or ElasticEmail, for this marketing workflow automation. You can create a campaign to re-engage customers or enable them to unsubscribe if that's what they want, depending on your brand, the products you offer, or the available promos.

Re-engagement campaigns must be supported by strong customer data that indicates an intent toward churn. Once you identify the users, you can implement the campaign to try and get them back one last time. For a B2B SaaS business, the automation software may flag the account in Salesforce and ping the account executive on Slack so that they can reach out to see what's wrong.

To automate a re-engagement email campaign:

• Build a list of disengaged users;
• Create an email template in your preferred email marketing solution; 
• Set a trigger (in this case, it can be the period of inactivity on your website or unopened emails); and,
• Configure conditions and flow controls, and automate your campaign to deliver your email to the inboxes of your inactive users.

6. Cart abandonment automation workflow

Cart abandonment workflows are essential for e-Commerce companies, especially when most online businesses have an average cart abandonment rate of 69.82%. This is mainly a type of email marketing automation, though cart abandonment alerts could also be sent via other channels, such as SMS from a marketing automation platform.

Cart abandonment workflows are typically basic email marketing workflows with a simple trigger: a user adds one or more items to their cart and then fails to check out within a pre-defined time period.

The best cart abandonment solutions combine multiple channels, such as:

• Workflow automation via email and SMS;
• Exit-intent popups with special offers to help you finish your transaction; and,
• Campaigns on Google or social media to remind them of the goods.

You can also use cart abandonment emails to market similar products or services and make recommendations for other items a customer may be interested in based on the items in their cart.

You can set the flow control to one or two reminder emails sent over a 24-to-48-hour time period. Additional emails will not assist if that does not convert the customer, and they may prompt the customer to unsubscribe from your emails permanently. 

Now that you understand marketing automation workflows — what’s next?

In conclusion, with marketing automation workflows, there are infinite variations and complexities, and what works for one business may not work for another. Everything comes down to experimenting and finding the right one(s) for your business.

While some businesses rely on email automation workflows to bring in new subscribers, others may benefit more from automations to improve internal team efficiency and collaboration. The six examples above are meant to be a place to start. 

However, once you generate a steady stream of leads, you must ensure that you give every prospect the attention they deserve and patiently nurture them to clock in the revenue. How do you do that simultaneously while managing your other business operations and your existing customer base?

Easy—you need an automation software to do it for you! Introducing RevenueHero!

It is software that helps you double your form-fill to meeting booking ratio, by qualifying and distributing the leads that fill out the “Contact Us” form on your website but not before gauging their quality based on their intent and their revenue-generating potentials, respectively.

Using this tool, your prospects and customers can arrange meetings between themselves and sales representatives from anywhere on your website, whether it's the webform on your landing page or any other page. The leads are evaluated, and communication is prioritized based on their potential to produce revenue for your company.

Here are some other features of this lead qualification and distribution software:

• Round Robin meeting scheduling: allows you to automate meeting allotment among members of your sales team and create your own distribution algorithm in seconds.
  
• Meeting process automation: enables you to send automated reminders and notifications with full context to prospects for meetings, thereby clarifying the agenda and eliminating no-shows.
  
• Automated CRM synchronization: correlates the outcomes of your meetings with the CRM to help you monitor each lead at any stage of the sales funnel, save time chasing non-viable leads, and provide for proactive discussion and nurturing of qualified leads.
  
• GTM stack integrations: connects information easily between multiple applications and ensures improved execution of your sales practices and communication tactics, particularly with high-value leads (which it qualifies with its powerful lead scoring system).

Do you want to know more? Schedule a demo on their platform right away!