Marketing Automation 101
January 8, 2024
This post walks through what Marketing Automation is, why it exists, and how it impacts your business.
More Users More Problems
You just launched your product. Your landing page is smashing, your message is resonating. But one problem: when a user signs up, they click around a few times and bounce, never to return.
You dive into your product analytics, identify the problem and push out what you hope to be a fix, and blast out a newsletter to try to re-engage the users you lost. Some come back, most don’t, and life goes on.
This is the story of every startup to varying degrees. The reality is that your sign up to active user rate will always be something that could use improvement, and you can either hack away at it with bursts of attention, or you can build a journey that addresses the most salient areas of concern, automate your re-engagement campaigns, and build reporting with notifications for when something out-of-whack happens.
That’s where Marketing Automation comes into play.
What is Marketing Automation
The easiest way to conceptualize Marketing Automation is any non-Product engagement that happens after a user signs up. This usually takes the form of welcome nurtures, resurrection/re-engagement campaigns, transactional notifications (receipts, account notifications, etc), and so on.
Sophisticated Marketing Automation software works across multiple mediums like email, SMS, in-app push, web push, direct mail, and more, and you can build user journeys that include sophisticated logic and touch points in any medium.
What does it affect
Marketing Automation touches nearly all of a startup’s core conversion rates, including:
- Activation rate
- Average Revenue Per User
- Retention Rate
- Average Revenue Retention Rate
- Resurrection Rate
Nothing can replace an amazing Product experience, but when dropoff inevitably occurs, Marketing Automation software is the highest leverage investment to shore things up.
What’s included
Most Marketing Automation software should be able to do the following things:
- Ingest user profile and event data
- Send email, SMS, and push notifications, at a minimum
- Trigger customer journeys based on multiple criteria, including events, anniversaries, API calls, etc
- Perform sophisticated logic within those journeys, including delays, inclusive and exclusive filtering, conditional branching and split testing, etc
- Send event data like sends, opens, clicks, etc to your other tools
What it costs
The cost spectrum for Marketing Automation software is wide and software decisions should be made on a business-by-business basis. Pricing models are variable, but many providers charge (primarily) on a per contact basis.
At the lower end of the price range, you can get great software for about $150/mo and at the upper end, you can spend tens of thousands per month if you have the user base to support the additional cost.
There is usually a high upfront cost to integrating your Marketing Automation software with the rest of your stack, and it’s worth it to spend the time doing this well in order to save your Product and Engineering time dealing with overall low priority requests that are very high priority to the Marketing team.
At Pacaya, we integrate Marketing Automation software with the rest of your Growth stack as part of our Growth Setup and Total Growth plans.
Pacaya Digital is a Growth consultancy that specializes in early-stage startups.