How to Automate Your Marketing Funnel

Automating your marketing funnel involves mapping out how you’ll interact with leads during various stages of the marketing process.

This means considering your audience’s needs from the moment they become aware of your solution to their problem and then crafting your messaging to address those needs. To improve your marketing funnel, automate marketing touchpoints and create data-driven customer journeys from initial contact through conversion.

Keep in mind, though, that automation of your marketing funnel should always feature personalization.

“The marketing funnel can give marketers funnel-vision,” keynote speaker and author Tom Fishburne says. “In focusing on the transaction over the relationship, marketers can lose sight of the actual consumer the funnel was designed to reach.”

Let’s dive into how to automate moving prospects through your marketing funnel.

Key Takeaways

• Choose the right tools to automate your marketing funnel
• Plan the automation before you decide where and when to use it
• Automate each stage of the marketing funnel to make your process more cohesive

Tools for Automating the Marketing Funnel 

Before automating your marketing funnel, you must choose the right tools. 

Technology enables you to automate key touchpoints as you move a prospect through your startup’s marketing process. Automation boosts effectiveness, saves time, and produces more consistent results compared with manually moving prospects through your marketing funnel. 

To turbocharge your marketing funnel automation, use customer relationship management (CRM) software and an email marketing system. There’ll be some overlap in functionality, but pairing a CRM with an email marketing system can strengthen your marketing process.

CRM

CRM software from providers such as Hubspot and Salesforce lets you:

• Collect information about leads and customers.
• Manage and score leads.
• Personalize marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing System

An email marketing system from providers such as Klaviyo and Mailchimp allows you to:

• Customize email marketing campaigns
• Segment your marketing efforts
• Collect customer data.

Planning Automation of Your Marketing Funnel

When you’re automating your marketing funnel, consider these three elements.

1. Segmentation

Decide where you want to send different categories of leads when they enter your marketing funnel. Leads with different wants, needs, and interests might take different paths toward the sale. Integrating segmentation into the automation process will put leads on the right paths and improve conversion rates.

2. Channels

Identify which channels you’ll use for your marketing funnel. This will allow you to figure out how automation can support your efforts. In some cases, automation might not work with a specific channel, so you might need to adjust your process or avoid that channel altogether.

3. Navigation

Be sure leads know which step they’ll take as they move through the marketing funnel. Automation helps establish a roadmap for leads, informing them about how to make a purchase and contact your company. Automation also gives you options when a lead drops out of the funnel.

Automate Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

Here’s how to use funnel automation to move leads from one stage in the marketing funnel to the next — awareness, interest, decision, and retention.

Awareness

Focus on activities that help you reach leads and make them aware of what your company does. Doing so can help ensure you target and attract the right types of leads. It can also help prevent wasting time and money on funnel initiatives that don’t pay off.

Automate your marketing funnel by:

• Collecting as many targeted leads as possible.
• Creating a content offering, such as a case study, to collect visitors’ email addresses in exchange for them being able to download the content.
• Setting up your CRM to automatically trigger the next step in the conversion process.

Interest

You have the lead’s attention and want them to seek more information about your  offerings. Use automated email campaigns to build a lead’s interest in your products or services.

Automate your marketing funnel by:

• Relying on customer segmentation to send customized offers and promotions.
• Conducting A/B testing to pick the best-performing messages and ultimately lift conversion rates.
• Setting up drip campaigns that gradually educate leads on your business and its products and services.

Decision

At this stage, the lead is ready to make a decision — they might decide to make a purchase, sign up for an email list, or not be one of your customers, for example. Automation can help knock down hurdles in the decision-making process.

Automate your marketing funnel by:

• Establishing an automated email workflow to schedule tasks such as email distribution.
• Sending incentives (such as a discount count) to encourage conversion.
• Sending “abandoned cart” emails to entice a lead to complete an abandoned online purchase.

Retention

Once a lead has converted and become a customer, ensure you maintain their interest and trust. Automation helps you keep in touch with this customer over time in hopes of them evolving from one-time customer to long-term customer. 

Automate your marketing funnel by:

• Sending thank-you emails with useful information, such as shipping information.
• Following up with onboarding information like user guides or customer service contacts.
• Sending upselling and cross-selling offers.

Automate Your Startup’s Marketing Funnel 

Automating your marketing funnel should be part of your startup’s broader marketing strategy. Of course, automation includes installing technology aimed at promoting efficiency and effectiveness. Hubspot’s CRM is one technology option for automation of your marketing funnel.

Need help setting up an automated marketing funnel that’ll help attract and convert leads? Sellerant can lead the way.