How to Develop Marketing Automation Strategy That Works

Are you struggling to develop a successful marketing automation strategy that delivers results? Around 31% of marketing professionals report that they struggle due to a lack of a clear strategy. Other challenges include usability concerns (35%) and insufficient customer data (28%).

These factors prevent many businesses from using marketing automation effectively. That’s why it’s crucial to follow best practices when developing your marketing automation strategy.

A well-crafted marketing automation strategy helps businesses scale faster, nurture leads effectively and generate more revenue with less manual effort. Companies that implement automation smartly report a 451% increase in qualified leads and earn back $5.44 for every dollar spent.

In this comprehensive blog post, we’ll explain how to develop a marketing automation strategy that aligns with your goals, delivers personalized experiences, and drives consistent growth.

Key Highlights

Here’s how you can make it work:

• Set SMART Goals: Define specific, measurable and relevant objectives tied to your business priorities, such as increasing lead conversion rates or reducing churn.
• Understand Your Audience: Create detailed buyer personas utilizing data from interviews, analytics, and surveys to develop personalized campaigns.
• Map the Customer Journey: Identify key touchpoints (like onboarding, follow-ups, and loyalty programs) and use automation to optimize each stage.
• Choose the Right Tools: Select platforms that integrate seamlessly with your CRM and align with your goals.
• Track and Improve: Utilize dashboards to monitor metrics like conversions and customer lifetime value. Also, test, analyze, and refine your campaigns.

Marketing Automation Strategy Best Practices

Here are five best practices to implement a successful marketing automation strategy for your business:

1. Set Clear Goals That Support Your Growth

Every effective marketing automation strategy begins with clear, strategic goals. Without them, you’re simply automating tasks without direction. Your goals should be SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

For example, instead of saying “increase leads,” a better goal would be: “Increase sales-qualified leads by 25% within the next quarter by refining lead-nurturing campaigns.” This goal is not only specific and measurable, but it also aligns with broader business objectives.

Align Automation Goals with Business Objectives

Marketing automation must align with your company’s top priorities. Whether you’re aiming to increase revenue, reduce customer churn, or expand into new markets, your automation workflows should directly support these goals.

Start by identifying your company’s top three business priorities for the year. For instance:

• For revenue growth: Use lead scoring and behavior-based workflows to prioritize high-intent prospects and move them through the sales funnel faster.
• To improve retention: Implement automated onboarding sequences, renewal reminders, and personalized engagement campaigns that keep existing customers active.
• To break into new markets: Set up regional campaigns with messaging tailored to local audiences, leveraging demographic and behavioral segmentation.

Involving sales, customer service, and executive teams in setting these goals ensures your marketing automation strategy is aligned across departments.

Track Success with the Right KPIs

Choosing the right metrics is essential for evaluating the performance of your automation. Focus on metrics that directly impact business growth:

• Engagement metrics: This measures how your audience is interacting with your content. Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, time spent, and content downloads provide insights into the effectiveness of the message.
• Conversion metrics: It tracks how well your automation moves prospects through the sales funnel. Landing page conversions, lead scoring progression, and form completion rates evaluate your efforts impacting the sales pipeline.
• Customer metrics: This focuses on long-term outcomes such as retention rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV). These metrics help assess the efficiency of your lead generation campaigns.
• Revenue metrics: Metrics such as total revenue generated from automated workflows, average deal size, and marketing ROI provide a clear picture of the financial impact of your strategy.

Create dashboards to monitor these KPIs in real time. This allows you to pivot strategies quickly based on what’s working, what’s not.

2. Know Exactly Who You’re Targeting

To develop an effective marketing automation strategy, you need to understand your ideal customers. Successful automation depends on delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. This means building accurate buyer personas and segmenting your audience based on real data.

Marketers who use buyer personas see 73% higher conversions compared to those who don’t. Additionally, 24% of businesses report generating more leads, and 36% experience shorter sales cycles by leveraging personas effectively.

Create In-Depth Buyer Personas

Building robust buyer personas begins with gathering insights from various sources. Start by interviewing your top customers. Ask about their motivations, the alternatives they considered, and the triggers that prompted them to make a purchase.

You should analyze CRM to identify patterns in behavior, purchase history, buying trends and engagement. Website analytics tools can reveal how visitors interact with your site. You can track behaviors such as which pages they visit before converting, how long they engage with specific content, and where they drop off in the funnel.

Additionally, use social listening tools to monitor conversations about your brand and industry. This can uncover your audience’s preferences and frustrations.

Surveys are also a great way to gather qualitative data. You can include open-ended questions to capture your audience’s thoughts in their own words. This can reveal patterns in language and concerns that you can incorporate into your messaging.

Duolingo increased user engagement by customizing its campaigns for multiple regions, age groups, and language preferences. By understanding their users, they created personalized and effective workflows.

Segment Your Audience for Personalization

Segmentation is one of the best practices for marketing automation strategy. It enables you to tailor your campaigns based on what matters most to each group. This allows you to deliver messaging that resonates with each segment’s unique characteristics and buying habits.

Companies that use segmentation report earning 10% to 20% more revenue and boosting conversions by up to 50%. Segmented campaigns can even lead to a staggering 760% increase in revenue compared to generic marketing efforts. Around 77% of ROI in marketing comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered email campaigns.

Here’s how segmentation can work, using three key criteria:

Criteria Type	Examples	Applications
Demographic	Age, gender, location, income, education	Broad audience differentiation and targeting
Behavioral	Purchase history, website activity	Interest-based targeting and recommendations
Psychographic	Values, interests, lifestyles, attitudes	Aligning messaging with emotions and motivations

According to a case study, Nissan demonstrated the value of segmentation with a re-engagement campaign targeting inactive leads. Out of the group, 1,700 individuals expressed interest, 88 visited the showroom, and 69 offers were sent out. Ultimately, the campaign resulted in the sale of 7 cars.

Whether you’re running re-engagement campaigns or launching a product, segmentation ensures your messages are timely and relevant.

3. Map the Entire Customer Journey

Understanding your customer journey is crucial to building a high-performing marketing automation strategy. This journey from awareness to advocacy offers multiple opportunities to automate touchpoints that guide prospects toward conversion and beyond.

Customer-focused businesses are 60% more profitable, and brands that deliver strong customer experiences see 4-8 percent higher revenue growth. Also, enhancing satisfaction across customer journeys can increase overall satisfaction by 20%, boost revenue by 15%, and cut service costs by up to 20%.

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” – Steve Jobs

Visualizing every customer interaction, from the initial search to post-purchase, helps you uncover automation opportunities that can elevate the experience while reducing manual work.

Break the Journey into Stages

Every journey has distinct stages, and each one requires a tailored approach:

• Awareness Stage: Prospects discover your brand through blog posts, SEO, or social media. Businesses that have blogs on their website generate 67% more leads than those that don’t. Use automation to deliver educational content that builds trust.
• Consideration Stage: Leads are evaluating their options. Offer comparison guides, case studies, and testimonials through automated nurturing campaigns.
• Decision Stage: Prospects are ready to buy. Send exclusive offers, free trials, and urgency-based CTAs. Automation can provide timely reminders, exclusive offers, and testimonials to encourage conversions.
• Retention Stage: Keep customers engaged with post-purchase emails, renewal prompts, and educational content. For example, Starbucks’ rewards program in December 2021 allowed customers to earn points on purchases, redeemable for free drinks and perks, promoting loyalty.
• Advocacy Stage: Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews or refer friends. Research reveals 81% of US and UK consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over brand messaging, and 92% trust these recommendations more than any form of advertising. Reward them with loyalty points or special offers.

Automate High-Impact Touchpoints

Once you’ve mapped the journey, identify where automation adds the most value:

• Lead Capture and Welcome Sequences:  When someone signs up for your email list or creates an account, an automated welcome series can introduce your product, highlight key features, and encourage long-term engagement.
• Onboarding Automation: It helps new users achieve value quickly. In December 2021, Peloton offered onboarding sessions to new customers, helping them set up and personalize their bikes. This ensured a seamless start and boosted customer confidence.

• Abandoned Cart Recovery: Automated reminders for abandoned carts can encourage customers to complete their purchases, significantly improving conversion rates and recovering lost sales.
• Re-engagement Workflows: For dormant contacts, automated campaigns showcasing new features or offering special incentives can rekindle their interest.

• Loyalty Campaigns:  Automated loyalty programs reward customers for repeat business and referrals, increasing their lifetime value.
• Feedback Collection: Automated surveys sent after key touchpoints, such as onboarding or support interactions, show customers that their opinions matter and provide valuable insights for improvement.

These strategies can deliver impressive outcomes. For example, Thomson Reuters saw a 23% increase in leads, a 72% boost in conversions, and a 175% rise in revenue by automating email campaigns.

Brands like Amazon and Warby Parker have perfected automated post-purchase communications, which not only reduce support tickets but also improve the customer experience.

4. Choose the Right Tools and Integrate Seamlessly

Your choice of marketing automation platform can make or break your strategy. The right tool should fit your business size, align with your goals, and integrate smoothly with your existing tech stack. With 63% of businesses seeing results within six months of implementation, selecting a platform that aligns with your specific needs is vital.

Compare Tools Based on Features and Fit

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Mostly, small businesses prefer tools like ActiveCampaign or MailerLite for their simplicity and value. Mid-sized and enterprise businesses prefer platforms such as HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Evaluate tools based on:

• CRM and third-party integrations
• Lead scoring and segmentation features
• Usability and training support
• Analytics and reporting capabilities

You should take advantage of free trials or demos and test your key workflows before committing.

Integrate Your CRM for Consistency

Marketing automation and CRM integration are one of the best practices for marketing automation strategy. It ensures data flows smoothly between marketing and sales teams, enabling you to:

• Personalize communication based on lifecycle stage
• Trigger actions automatically when a lead reaches a specific score
• Measure ROI across campaigns

Companies with integrated systems report a 30% increase in sales and a 25% improvement in lead conversion rate.

Start by reviewing your current systems and pick an integration method that helps keep your data accurate and up to date. This is important for creating personalized campaigns.

For example, Holmes Murphy, an insurance brokerage firm, used CRM automation to study prospect behavior and develop tailored campaigns, saving 44,000 hours and $6.9 million.

Training is also crucial. Since 39% of users say they struggle because they don’t understand the system, it’s important that your team learns how well to use the integrated system.

Good communication between sales and marketing teams is also vital. Integrating your marketing automation with your CRM can enhance the effectiveness of both tools and improve how you connect with customers.

5. Monitor, Test, and Improve Your Strategy

Developing your marketing automation strategy is just the beginning. Continuous improvement ensures you stay competitive and effective.

With 80% of marketers reporting an increase in leads after implementing automation, focusing on the right data is essential.

Set Up Smart Dashboards

Build dashboards that give you a real-time look at your funnel:

• Top of funnel: Traffic, impressions, content engagement
• Middle of funnel: Email metrics, lead scoring, campaign responses
• Bottom of funnel: Conversions, revenue, ROI

Also, your dashboard should provide a clear view of performance at every stage of the funnel.

Funnel Stage	Key Metrics	Automation Elements
Awareness	Impressions, traffic, new contacts	Social posting, content distribution
Consideration	Content engagement, return visits	Nurture sequences, retargeting
Conversion	Conversion rate, opportunity creation	Personalized offers, cart abandonment
Retention	Repeat purchase rate, LTV	Onboarding flows, loyalty programs

You should monitor performance weekly or monthly and use these insights to improve your marketing automation strategy.

Run A/B Tests on Key Campaigns

A/B testing helps you find what truly resonates with your audience. Start by experimenting with subject lines, call-to-actions, email layouts, and send times. Use insights to refine each part of the workflow.

A marketing reporting provider company, dashthis, increased onboarding completion by 50% just by improving layout clarity and content accessibility. Similarly, Evernote increased user retention by 15% by studying how people interacted with their app. Their testing revealed areas for improvement, leading to better user experiences across devices.

Use Feedback Loops to Stay Agile

Encourage feedback from both customers and internal teams. Review campaigns regularly and ask:

• Are we meeting our goals?
• Are there new pain points we should address?
• Is our segmentation still accurate?

Monthly audits can help you evaluate workflow efficiency and keep processes relevant as your business evolves.

Marketing automation best practices include routinely auditing your data, updating personas, and optimizing workflows based on real-world performance.

Final Thoughts

To develop a marketing automation strategy, start by setting clear business goals such as boosting lead conversion or improving retention.

Then, define your audience, map out the customer journey, and choose tools that work with your CRM. Focus on touchpoints where automation can save time and personalize communication.

Finally, track your results and start improving based on data.

Whether you’re a startup or an SME, following these best practices for marketing automation strategy will give you a competitive edge. Start with high-impact workflows, test and refine them, and scale gradually as you learn what works.

For more information on creating an effective marketing automation strategy, schedule a free consultation with one of our automation specialists.

 

Marketing Automation Strategy Related FAQs

Why is a marketing automation strategy important?

It streamlines communication, increases efficiency, and boosts ROI by delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

What’s the first step in developing a marketing automation strategy?

Begin by setting clear, SMART goals that align with your business objectives. Define what success looks like and structure your automation workflows to achieve those outcomes.

Can I use marketing automation without a CRM?

Technically, yes, but it’s far less effective. A CRM ensures consistent data flow and helps personalize messaging at scale. Integration is strongly recommended.

What are the best practices for marketing automation strategy?

Focus on alignment with business goals, deep audience insights, journey-based workflows, the right tech stack, and ongoing testing and optimization. These elements ensure your automation drives real results.

Which tools should I use for marketing automation?

Popular options include HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Salesforce and Eloqua. You should choose a tool that fits your budget and integrates with your CRM.