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Elements of an effective marketing automation toolkit
By Zapier • Published April 7, 2021
It's likely you are already using CRMs, forms, or an email marketing tool somewhere in your business, even if they're not being used by your marketing department. Here are our recommendations for getting started with automating your marketing today with these (mostly free) tools.
Forms and surveys for following up with leads
Effective forms are the most important piece of your marketing machine. With the right information collected in a form, your marketing machine will qualify which folks are ready to buy and which ones are window shopping. This saves you time and manual work, and makes following up much easier.
Your automation system is only as effective as the data you put into it, so you have to standardize the information you collect about leads in order to automate anything. Plus, manually entering leads one by one wastes precious time.
And that's time you can't afford to waste. Businesses only have about five minutes to make contact before losing the lead's interest, but more than half of companies surveyed by Drift said they did not respond to their new leads over the course of five business days. Most businesses don't have time to individually respond to people that quickly 24/7, which is where online forms and survey automation come in to help.
You can use forms to properly categorize interested leads without manually having to ask or research details about the lead. Here's how: Leads fill out a form you share with them (on your website, in an email, in an Instagram ad) with information you ask them to share, like the country they live in or their job title. You can set up a desired action to occur after that form is filled out, such as adding that lead to a list, notifying your team about high-value leads, or sending the lead a thank-you email (or all of the above) using a Zap. The possibilities for automating forms are endless.
Automatically contact leads after they fill out a form:
Notify your team about high-value leads:
Track leads in a central spot:
Surveys and quizzes are a great way to collect standardized information, especially feedback. Want to know how much your leads like your website or the service your company provided? Trying to re-engage a lead who stopped opening your emails a long time ago? A survey or quiz is an easy way to connect with leads without making them say yes to a call, and if you ask the right questions, you'll be able to reach out to them with more knowledge next time.
Learn how to automatically segment leads who take your quiz or survey to send them highly targeted follow-up information.
When choosing a form tool for your marketing automation tech stack, we recommend looking for many customization features while still being easy to figure out. Google Forms, JotForm, or Paperform are some of our top picks. For surveys, use YesInsights to embed surveys into email or Typeform to make beautiful web-based surveys.
Be warned; forms automation can be a gateway to becoming obsessed with automation and using it everywhere in your business! Marketing tech company Outbrain got started with a Zap that sent new marketing leads into their sales team's work queues; now they use Zaps to help with customer service, too.
Email marketing for keeping leads engaged
With email marketing automation tools, you can reach your leads at scale without manually emailing each one—and without ending up in their spam folders. Email is free and lends itself well to automation because you can preprogram messages to send at the right time, whether you're inviting hundreds of people to an event or thanking one customer for a purchase.
However, “reaching your leads at scale” doesn't mean sending everyone the same message. Did they check a box asking you contact them immediately? Your email to those leads is going to be different than a newsletter that goes out to less-engaged leads who aren't ready to make a purchase. The magic that makes this possible is called segmentation, and automation is what makes segmentation work.
Segmentation is a fancy word for separating your contacts into groups so you can send more specific messages to smaller groups of people and get better response rates. Get started with segmentation by deciding which data points will be the most valuable—common ones include job type or title, age, gender, location, and company size. Use lists or tags within your email tool to separate these different people.
Once your segments are created, use Zaps to enroll them in different drip campaigns, which are lanes of email content your subscribers receive based on their segment. For instance, a big apparel brand might have a “new parents” segment for maternity clothing or a “vacationers” segment for people shopping for seasonal clothing, or separate audiences by gender or department. Learn more about drip campaigns here.
We recommend using a free tool like AWeber to get started sending simple drip campaigns. If you're looking for something more advanced, try a tool like ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit. You can also use something as ubiquitous as Gmail: Education nonprofit DonorsChoose.org uses Zaps with their existing Gmail email tool to collect responses to mass donor emails that get sent out. Instead of sifting through an inbox for donor questions and feedback, DonorsChoose.org logs it all in a central spreadsheet through automation.
Add leads to a list for future marketing campaigns:
Segment leads for drip campaigns:
A CRM for storing leads
A CRM platform enables you to keep a record of every single incoming lead. CRMs keep all your customer information in one place and log records of your marketing activities. This allows teams to collaborate from one central location and reduces the time spent looking for information. Each contact can be stored as a separate record, but linked together by company, so you can get account-level visibility. This allows you to virtually file away each lead and relationship according to hierarchy, and see everything in one place.
In marketing, this is helpful, because a company will never answer your ad or call your business—a person does, and people are fickle: Famously, it takes an average of seven interactions, called touchpoints, with a brand to convince someone to make a purchase. Someone may fill out a newsletter form, see a Facebook ad, open an email, come back to visit your website, download a piece of content, watch a video, and finally open another email before they're ready to buy. With CRM automation, you'll be able to track each touchpoint within that person's record. All it takes are Zaps set up between your CRM of choice and the other tools where your marketing happens (like Facebook Lead Ads) to get all of that activity synced up into one place.
Tip: Always check available Zaps and existing integrations between the tools you already use, like Gmail or Excel, and the CRM you're shopping for. You don't want to load all your contacts in there only to find out you can't do anything with them.
You can use a specific CRM built for marketing purposes, or you can use a more generic CRM that connects with other marketing tools. We recommend using Zoho CRM or Apptivo for a do-it-all app that's affordable (Zoho CRM starts at $7/mo per user, and Apptivo has a free plan), Ontraport if you need to automate marketing follow-ups for eCommerce customers, and of course, Salesforce for customization and volume. Learn more about how to pick the best CRM.
Capture leads in your CRM:
Notify your team of deal activity:
Learn about how a CRM can help your business and ways to add automation to your CRM to streamline sales workflows, track marketing, and improve internal collaboration.
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