10 Marketing Automation Strategies That Work
Ten marketing automation tactics that were working in 2015, when tools like Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign brought automation to teams too small for Marketo.
Marketing automation in 2015 looked different from marketing automation in 2012, mostly because far more companies could afford it. Mailchimp had added automation workflows on top of its email base, ActiveCampaign and Infusionsoft were competing directly for small-business budgets and HubSpot kept growing its mid-market share. The enterprise platforms, Marketo and the Oracle and Salesforce suites, were still there, but the strategies below worked whether you were running a five-figure enterprise contract or a fifteen-dollar-a-month plan.
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Tune lead scoring against real conversion data. A scoring model built purely on assumptions drifts from reality fast. Pull a quarter’s worth of closed deals, see which score ranges they came from and adjust your weights to match.
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Build nurture tracks by persona, not by product. Two prospects buying the same product for different reasons need different emails. Split tracks by the problem a persona is solving, not the SKU they’ll eventually buy.
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Use progressive profiling on every gated asset. Ask one new question per form fill instead of front-loading a long form. You’ll convert more visitors and still end up with a full profile after two or three touches.
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Trigger campaigns on real behavior. Browse abandonment, pricing page revisits and content downloads all predict intent far better than a fixed number of days since signup. Build workflows that respond to what someone did.
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Personalize with dynamic content blocks. Rather than building five separate emails for five segments, build one email with content blocks that swap based on segment. It’s less maintenance and it scales better as you add segments.
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Close the loop with your CRM. Automation without CRM integration can tell you who opened an email. Integration tells you which campaigns produced closed revenue, which is the number that gets budget renewed.
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Route hot leads to sales in real time. A lead who just requested a demo shouldn’t wait for a weekly report. Set up instant alerts for your highest-intent behaviors so sales can follow up while the interest is still fresh.
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Run structured win-back campaigns. Every list accumulates subscribers who’ve gone quiet. A dedicated re-engagement sequence, offering something different from your regular content, recovers a meaningful share and identifies the rest for removal.
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Test send time and subject line systematically. Automation platforms made this easier to run at scale than it had ever been. Treat every send as a chance to learn something, not just a chance to hit a number.
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Match your platform to your team’s actual capacity. The most sophisticated workflow in the world doesn’t help if nobody has time to build and maintain it. Pick tools sized to the team running them, and grow into more complexity only once you’ve outgrown what you have.
The common thread across all ten is that automation platforms had become accessible enough by 2015 that the limiting factor was rarely the software anymore. It was whether a team had the discipline to define its segments, its triggers and its scoring model clearly enough for the software to act on.
Keep exploring: browse more Email Marketing guides, see everything we published in 2015 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
