Unleash Your Website Tech Stack's Full Potential with Automated Marketing

There are tons of tools on the market to help you automate marketing campaigns, from email service providers, social media schedulers and listening tools, customer relationship management platforms, and more.

But does it ever feel like you’re working in spite of your website tech stack, rather than it working for you?

If you feel held back from automating and scaling your operations, you’re not alone.

In the coming years, we can expect to see shrinking budgets impose pressure on marketing teams to work smarter, harder, and more efficiently. In fact, Gartner’s survey of Chief Financial Officers revealed that 75% have faced increasing pressure to do more with less to deliver profits.

Something's gotta give, right? Well-tailored automation tools can make all the difference. Let’s talk about how automation platforms can unleash the full power of your marketing tech stack.

Benefits of integrating marketing automation with your marketing tech stack

Automation is sure to save you time and boost your team’s productivity. Plus, it reduces the risk of manual error. Say goodbye to your fears of accidentally sending a blank test email to customers.

As your business grows, automation tools are ready to scale with you, allowing you to maintain a high level of marketing effectiveness without the extra strain.

But its real power lies in how it can enhance your customer engagement. By using marketing automation tools to leverage all that customer data gathered through applications in your stack, you can create hyper-targeted campaigns that really speak to what folks like and how they behave.

We know that trust is key to the longevity of a customer-brand relationship (or any relationship, for that matter). Marketing automation helps manage customer data responsibly, reducing cybersecurity risks and improving the consistency and cohesiveness of your brand across all your channels.

The basics of marketing automation

Marketing automation software handles repetitive tasks, freeing up time for strategic planning and creativity. These tools can deliver personalized content, analyze data, nurture leads, and more. Here are a few common use cases:

Email marketing automation
By analyzing data from your website on customer behaviour, automation platforms let you deliver hyper-targeted experiences to different segments of your audience—all on autopilot. These emails can be triggered by specific actions or behaviors, such as signing up for a newsletter, abandoning a shopping cart, or downloading a resource on your site.

One example is an onboarding flow, which gets triggered after a new customer purchases your product. These flows are important for both retail and SaaS businesses to teach new customers how to use your product to its fullest potential.

Depending on how much there is to learn about your product, you might send a range of 3-6 onboarding emails over a series of several weeks. SEOwind begins its flow with the email shown below, which shares the two most helpful links for users to get started.

Customer segmentation
Customer segmentation models are strategic methodologies used by businesses to divide their customer base into smaller groups that share similar characteristics. This allows businesses to swiftly categorize customers based on criteria like demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels.

With automation handling audience targeting, mailing list upkeep, and distribution, you gain more resources to enhance targeted campaign strategies and assets.

Here are the common marketing segmentation models:

• Demographic segmentation: Divides customers based on demographic factors such as age, gender, income, occupation, education level, marital status, and family size.
• Geographic segmentation: Groups customers according to their location, such as country, state, city, or even neighborhood. This can be useful for businesses tailoring products or services to local preferences or climates.
• Psychographic segmentation: Segment customers based on their lifestyle, activities, interests, opinions, values, and attitudes. This type of segmentation often requires more detailed data and research.
• Behavioral segmentation: Divides customers based on their interactions with a business, their purchasing behavior, user status, brand loyalty, and benefits sought. This can include factors like purchase history, spending habits, brand interactions, and product usage frequency.
• Needs-based segmentation: Focuses on the specific needs and wants of customer groups. Businesses use this model to identify and cater to the particular problems or desires customers are looking to address with products or services.
• Value-based segmentation: Segments customers based on their lifetime value to the company. Customers are grouped by their long-term revenue and profit potential, allowing businesses to focus more on high-value customers.
• Occasion-based segmentation: Groups customers according to when they purchase or use a service, either universally (e.g., Christmas, back-to-school) or personally (e.g., birthdays, anniversaries).
• Loyalty-based segmentation: Segment customers based on their loyalty to the brand. This model identifies brand advocates, frequent buyers, and those at risk of churn, helping businesses to tailor strategies to retain or enhance customer loyalty.
• Technographic segmentation: Divides customers based on their technology usage and preferences, such as preferred devices, software, and platforms. This is particularly relevant in today's digital age, where technology plays a significant role in consumer behavior.
• Cultural segmentation: Segment customers based on cultural, religious, or ethnic backgrounds. This can be crucial for global businesses seeking to tailor their offerings and messaging to fit the cultural norms and preferences of different regions.

These triggers are then used to create workflows like the following (an example from Hubspot):

These workflows then automatically bucket users into relevant lists (another Hubspot example):

From there, businesses can score leads and nurture them through the funnel.

Lead scoring and nurturing
With automation, you can get lead scoring and nurturing down to an exact science. These tools automatically sort your leads based on their interaction with your website and content. The most likely conversions are prioritized, and the system can be set up to automatically guide these users through the sales funnel with the perfect content at the right time.

Check out this subscription renewal campaign from DocuSign – using automated lead nurturing tools, you can target customers who may be at risk of leaving your funnel, and even offer customized renewal promo offers to certain audience segments based on previous engagement or brand loyalty.

Social media automation
Usually, one of the first types of automation that marketing teams are eager to incorporate is social media. These management platforms automate so many of the menial, tedious tasks we often associate with managing and growing your social media presence, such as scheduling posts, tracking social media engagement, social listening, and analyzing the performance of content across different channels.

Some of the most common tools include

• Buffer: for straightforward social media scheduling
• Hootsuite: for a fully-featured X experience
• SocialPilot: for small teams
• Loomly: for automating any social media service
• Hubspot: For keeping all marketing tasks in one system, including lead scoring from social media management

Analytics and reporting
Marketing automation tools offer robust analytics and reporting capabilities that can help you track the performance of marketing campaigns, understand customer behavior, and make data-driven decisions.

The software lets marketers quickly generate reports summarizing key metrics, such as website traffic, leads generated, and sales revenue, using standard and custom parameters. Engaging with data insights is made easy, with interactive reporting dashboards and instant data visualizations.

Multi-channel content and campaign management
Using automation features in a CMS, you can ensure consistent brand experience across multiple website touchpoints.

These platforms often include features that allow marketers to create, manage, and personalize content for different audience segments. For example, you can introduce personalized web forms and landing pages that are optimized for users based on their preferences, behaviors, or past interactions, enhancing the personalization of user experiences.

Check out this landing page from household cleaning brand Drops, which uses a quiz-style web form to direct users to a page with the right product for them

PTC Onshape’s Automation Journey

Many marketing teams are eager to explore automation capabilities but feel stuck due to the challenge of finding a platform that will work with their entire tech stack.

This was the case for PTC OnShape’s marketing team. Their automation tools were actually holding back their growth, making it tough to sync up with other PTC groups.

The team set their sights on the digital campaign management platform Oracle Eloqua, and reached out to LeadPulse to help them make the shift.

Shifting gears to Oracle Eloqua was a game-changer for OnShape's marketing team. Post-launch, OnShape’s website forms saw a 120% spike in conversions, and their intent-based trigger email campaigns based on these form submissions had a 26% open rate. Want to know more about our approach to transforming OnShape’s automation strategy? Read the full case study here

Our tips for integrating automation into your website tech stack

So, we’ve already covered the cardinal rule of implementing a marketing automation platform: The right automation tools should allow for data to be shared seamlessly between the platform and all other applications in your tech stack.

Automation tools can save you time and optimize the use of your data, but only if you set them up for success. Here are some other things to consider when planning to introduce a new automation platform for your business:

1. Take stock of your data - High-quality and complete customer data is the backbone of effective marketing automation. Ensure that your data, and how it will be used in your automation tool is compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA. But this shouldn’t just be a one-time data audit; implement processes for ongoing data management and updates.

2. Map the journey - Identify all key customer touchpoints where automation can make things easier, or more personalized, for the customer.

3. Start small and branch out - Begin by automating basic tasks and then progressively implement more complex automation strategies. This phased approach allows you to troubleshoot issues and make adjustments without overwhelming your system or team.

4. Bring your team along - Conduct thorough training sessions covering all the features of your new tool with hands-on demonstrations. Don’t forget – as tools evolve, your team will need to keep up. Stay on top of it with refresher courses, and create an ongoing support structure for team members to seek help when they face challenges.

5. Prepare for technical challenges - Have a contingency plan in place for dealing with system downtimes or data discrepancies.

Yes, there are countless applications of marketing automation tools that can take your work to the next level, but that doesn’t mean you should do it all. Over-automating your processes can lead to an impersonal customer experience. Preserve the touchpoints in your customer journey that benefit from that ‘human touch.’

How can you choose the Right Marketing Automation Tool for Your Tech Stack?

Marketing automation tools are game-changers, for resource and time-strapped teams eager to deliver a more personalized, consistent customer experience.

The journey to ace automation? It all starts with understanding your tech stack and data systems, identifying the automation processes that your organization needs, and finding a platform that fits. Here’s how you can start that process: Download our guide “Breaking Down The Tech Stack: A Guide to Web Technology for Modern Websites.”