Marketing automation workflows are sets of rules used to automate different steps of the marketing process. For years, they’ve helped teams streamline time-consuming marketing tasks, mainly around sending emails, managing leads, and sharing data between systems.
However, many teams are still only scratching the surface of standard email marketing automation. At the same time, there are plenty of ways to use marketing automation to achieve strategic goals across other channels and use cases, like:
- Delivering relevant content and product recommendations that drive revenue at each brand touchpoint.
- Improving lead generation and nurturing potential customers down the sales funnel.
- Promoting new products in a relevant and engaging way.
- Recovering abandoned shopping carts.
- And much more.
In this guide, we’ll explore nine proven marketing automation workflows that can help you do these things (and more). The first six are simple but powerful workflows that span one or two channels, while the last three are complex custom workflows, which our customers have used to improve revenue, ROI, and other key results.
6 simple and powerful marketing automation workflows
We’ll begin this list with some well-known but essential workflows that most online businesses should implement and optimize.
Before we dive in, note that you can build all of these workflows with Insider — our AI-native platform for individualized, cross-channel customer experiences. Our solution offers:
- A flexible marketing automation tool for 12+ channels. You can use it to build automated workflows with a simple drag-and-drop editor across your website, mobile app, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.
- AI-powered features that save you time and optimize your workflows. These include send-time optimization, next-best channel selection, A/B test winner auto-selection, and more.
- A plethora of workflow templates for tons of use cases and industries. Each template can be easily customized to your needs without any coding.
1. Workflow for welcoming new email leads
Pretty much every online brand has some type of automated welcome email sequence for new leads. However, few brands actually make the most out of these workflows as they just send one standard message to their entire email list.
At the same time, a good welcome workflow can do so much more — like guiding users to their first purchase quickly and efficiently. This can be done by creating an automated sequence of emails (instead of sending just one) and personalizing it based on users’ actions.
For instance, Remix used a three-step email marketing campaign for their lead nurturing needs:
- If new subscribers don’t make a purchase one week after registering, Remix sent an email prompting them to save their preferred search filters.
- After a few days, a follow-up email is triggered. Its goal is to showcase a list of brands available on the site and how to mark one as a favorite.
- The last email offers details on how to save money by combining orders.
This drip email campaign resulted in a 104% jump in first purchases compared to the previous quarter.
You can take the same idea and apply it to your unique business needs by:
- Starting with an email survey to gather first-party data and continuing the workflow in different ways depending on the answers.
- Creating different flows depending on the source that led new leads to your site (e.g., social media, email newsletters, and so on).
- Building a distinct onboarding journey for users who browsed a specific category on your site.
2. Workflows for recovering abandoned carts
Cart abandonment remains one of the biggest problems in the world of eCommerce. Any marketing team that’s looking to maximize their budget and revenue should constantly be looking for ways to get cart abandoners to complete their purchase.
Insider helps you do this by automatically creating segments of cart abandoners and letting you easily add cart items to your emails, push notifications, and messaging channel communications.
You also have ready-made cart recovery templates for different channels. These templates are easily customizable, so you can adjust their colors, branding, and other elements without any coding (or even changing the HTML).
Here are a few of the channels that our clients use to recover lost carts:
- Email and SMS, which is the most widely-used combination of channels by retail brands worldwide. Slazenger used both channels to build cart recovery campaigns that produced a 49x ROI in eight weeks (we’ll discuss their use cases later in this guide).
- WhatsApp, which is an underutilized but extremely powerful channel for recovering potentially lost revenue. Picniq used it to achieve an 80% open rate and a 5x ROI on their cart abandonment campaigns
- Web push notifications, which can be incredibly powerful and cost-effective compared to traditional channels like email and SMS. Marks & Spencer used push notifications to achieve a 15.1% cart recovery rate, compared to the 3% industry average for abandoned cart emails.
3. Workflows for confirming orders and purchases
Transactional flows are a must for any online business. That’s why most eCommerce platforms and content management systems (CMSs) have built-in automated email workflows that trigger immediately after a successful transaction.
However, you don’t need to limit yourself to email. For example, with Insider, you can also send confirmation messages on channels like SMS and WhatsApp. Again, we have plenty of templates to make the process easier, like the WhatsApp message template shown below.
All you need to do is set our journey builder to trigger your emails or messaging channel communications immediately after a successful purchase event. Then, you can build strategic follow-ups for promoting other products after a set amount of time, as we’ll discuss in a bit.
4. Workflows for sending targeted price drop and inventory alerts
These workflows are powerful for targeting users on the verge of making their first purchase, as well as those with a high discount affinity.
Since Insider automatically collects data about each user’s interests and preferences, you can use that information to trigger emails, push notifications, or SMS and WhatsApp messages whenever:
- Products that users have been browsing are back in stock.
- Products that users have shown interest in get a price reduction.
In both cases, your messages have a much higher chance of engaging new customers as they’re based on their needs, interests, and preferences.
At the same time, you can get even more targeted with our AI-powered predictive segmentation. Specifically, you can use our platform to only target customers with a high discount affinity who are much more likely to respond to a price drop alert.
This tactic also guarantees that you’re not wasting discounts on people who might’ve bought a product at its regular price.
5. Workflows for upsells and cross-sells
Upsells and cross-sells can help you drastically increase key metrics like average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and customer retention. That’s why you should find strategic places during the customer lifecycle to implement upsell and cross-sell workflows.
For example, you can build marketing automation workflows that automatically:
- Suggest products that are frequently purchased with the one currently in the customer’s cart. This can be done with a good product recommendation engine that analyzes browsing and purchase history, as well as real-time behaviors, to deliver relevant recommendations across landing pages and channels like email.
- Employ this same strategy but on a channel like SMS or WhatsApp a few days or weeks after a customer has completed their first purchase.
- Generate upsell and cross-sell opportunities by offering discounts on customers’ registration anniversaries, birthdays, or other important events.
6. Workflows for pre- and post-purchase feedback
With the cookieless marketing era upon us, teams need to rely much more heavily on zero- and first-party data gathered directly from customers. That’s why it’s crucial to have workflows for collecting that information at different stages of the customer journey.
The classic way to do this is by sending a post-purchase email survey that asks customers to rate your product and the overall experience. This can also be done on messaging channels like SMS or WhatsApp, depending on your customers’ preferences.
One way to take this tactic to the next level is by using AMP emails. The AMP technology lets customers answer surveys directly in the email, without having to go to your site or app.
This removes a lot of friction from the process an
