12 Marketing Automation Best Practices to Implement in 2025

Do you struggle with clunky workflows, low email engagement rates, and underwhelming ROI from your automation efforts?

The problem isn't the tools - it's how you use them.

The good news?

Adopting the right strategies can transform your marketing automation into a powerhouse for growth.

This article reveals 12 marketing automation best practices designed to streamline your processes, enhance customer relationships, and maximize your marketing impact. Each tip is backed up with specific examples and frameworks.

Let’s dive in!

1. Plan the Overall Marketing Automation Strategy

Effective marketers develop a clear email marketing automation strategy, execute it with precision, and adapt it based on data and feedback.

But developing a strategy isn’t easy. In fact, 37% of businesses say this is one of the main challenges to adopting marketing automation.

As you build your plan, here are some key factors to consider:

• The 4 Ps of marketing: What are you selling (Product)? How much will you charge (Price)? Where will you sell it (Place)? How will you promote it (Promotion)?
• Marketing goals: What are the main, measurable objectives of your marketing automation efforts? Outline the email marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) that you will use to track and measure your success.
• Budgets and timeframes: What budget have you allocated for the resources needed to implement the strategy? Have you set specific time frames for each stage?
• Team responsibilities and alignment: Who do you need on board? Think of all stakeholders involved in the process, including any C-level decision-makers, copywriters, and developers required for the implementation.
• Target audience: How will you segment your audience, and what is your approach to targeting and positioning?
• Competitive analysis: What are your competitors doing in terms of marketing and automation?
• Content plan: What type of content do you need to create? Do you need to hire additional talent to produce it?

Read: Creating a Complete Marketing Plan: 23 Steps for Any Business

Draft your plan in a document or within a project management tool. (Check out our top picks for best project management software on the market if you need some help to find the right software for you.) Lay out the information in broad strokes to get the overall direction, but start small when you get to production. Make your plan is specific but flexible enough to adapt to change.

2. Understand Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The key to personalized automation campaigns is knowing your target audience intimately. This helps you ensure that you are connecting the right messages with the right people.

This is most often focused at the company level, and includes details like company size, revenue, industry, location, and other relevant factors.

When you understand your ideal customer’s problems, motivations, and objections, you can focus your efforts on the right channels and messages.

However, what's even more important is gaining a deep, detailed understanding of your buyer's “persona.” This involves developing a fictitious character of a person who uses and buys your products.

While ICPs are usually focused on the business/company level, the persona is focused on the person who will read your marketing messages. It outlines their personal goals, challenges, and fears.

For example, within a mid-sized tech company (your ICP), the persona might be a marketing manager who is responsible for online campaigns, struggles with budget limitations, and is looking for tools that streamline her job. This person is built out in enough detail that you can really get to understand them as a person and what might motivate them to make a purchase.

3. Map Your Customer Journey

A customer journey map outlines all the steps, interactions, and experiences a customer or prospect goes through to achieve a goal with your product or service. By putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, you can gain a deeper understanding of their needs, challenges, and motivations at each stage of the journey.

What specific actions or scenarios does a person go through to become a customer of your product? Consider how they discover your brand, interact with your marketing, evaluate your offering, and make a purchase decision.

Map these actions on a separate document or board to visualize and refine the process. In the customer journey map below, you can see what the process might look like for an entrepreneur who buys software to help with her company’s marketing.

4. Lay Out Your Automation Workflows

Each customer action (or set of actions) falls within a stage of the customer lifecycle marketing funnel.

Once you map your customer journey and understand how it aligns with the funnel, you have to decide which stage of the funnel you want to focus your efforts on. Are you going to build campaigns for the top of the funnel, focus on retention, or attempt to handle the whole funnel from start to finish?

Now is the time to consider what automation workflows you need to build for each stage, and what channels you will automate. For example:

• For the awareness stage, you might want to attract top-of-the-funnel traffic by automating your social media calendar.
• To spark interest, you can build informational lead magnets and automated lead-nurturing email sequences.
• To incite action, you can onboard your trial users with in-app messages and personalized onboarding emails.
• To retain customers and build loyalty, you can send automated net promoter score (NPS) surveys to gauge feedback and re-engage inactive customers with targeted ads and email messages.

5. Collect Lead and User Data

The biggest roadblock to adopting marketing automation is collecting and unifying data.

A complete 360-degree view of your customer data within your marketing automation tools is essential for delivering the right messages to the right people at the right time.

Without the right user properties and details, you cannot segment your audience or build custom-tailored journeys and messages.

Unfortunately, this challenge is one of the hardest to overcome. User data is frequently scattered across multiple platforms, and gathering it often requires assistance from the technical team.

As a marketer, you want to facilitate and supervise this process as much as possible. Here are some tips:

• Create a data tracking plan with a list of the user fields and properties you need to implement your messages and automations.
• Research the existing data in your marketing, sales, and support stack. What data do you have available in your email marketing tool? Do you need access to feedback data from surveys or support tools? Do you need billing data from the payment provider?
• Discuss data conventions and standards in your organization. Reach out to the development team about data governance to ensure a single customer view and avoid data silos.

6. Build Multi-Channel Campaigns and Experiences

When planning your marketing automation workflows, consider the different channels you can implement. Cross-channel marketing involves the cohesive and consistent use of multiple channels.

These channels can include:

Email

Automated lead nurturing, onboarding, re-engagement, and loyalty campaigns can be implemented across the customer journey using email marketing or marketing automation tools like Mailerlite and ActiveCampaign.

Social Media

You can use social media management platforms like Socialchamp and Buffer to automate and schedule social media posts. With a fully scheduled social media calendar, you can plan ahead to maintain consistent posting, engage your audience, and free up time for other strategic tasks.

Webinars

Webinar platforms like EasyWebinar and Zoom allow you to create pre-recorded sessions (or evergreen webinars) to fully automate the webinar process for attendees. This automation helps you focus on other aspects of your business.

Ads

Automation tools for ads can streamline your campaigns. For example, you can launch retargeting ads based on user behavior and engagement across channels by syncing audiences from a marketing automation platform like ActiveCampaign to your ad audience on Facebook.

With ActiveCampaign, you can also automatically sync ad leads to your marketing automation tool to nurture them with emails.

Push Notifications and SMS

Push notifications and text messages can re-engage users with discounts and limited offers, get people back to your app, or be used for cart abandonment campaigns. If you run a mobile app or your users shop on mobile, platforms like Twilio can help you set up effective campaigns with push notifications.

Site Automation

Website automation involves using tools to streamline various tasks on your website, such as lead capture, content updates, and personalized user experiences. By automating processes with AI chatbots, pop-up forms, and email triggers, you can engage visitors more effectively, provide timely responses, and nurture leads when they are most likely to engage with your messages.

7. Integrate Marketing and Sales

Marketing automation is one of the best ways to unify your sales and marketing teams throughout the customer journey and across business processes. You can do this by connecting your marketing automation tool with your sales CRM to enable both teams to access real-time data and improve the prospect experience.

This connection helps teams communicate better and focus on shared goals. Most business owners agree that having common sales goals and key metrics is important for keeping everyone aligned.

To achieve alignment:

• Meet regularly to discuss shared goals and reporting KPIs.
• Integrate your CRM tool with your email marketing or marketing automation platform. To ensure data consistency, choose tools that offer robust two-way sync integrations or all-in-one solutions that handle sales and marketing, like HubSpot.
• Coordinate content creation with sales.
• Develop a sales toolkit for salespeople to help them better understand - and sell - the product.

8. Create Engaging Content Across the Funnel

Marketing automation is simply a tool. It’s the quality of your content that delivers value and drives engagement. The trick about writing engaging content is to think about what your ICP needs at each stage of the customer journey.

Awareness Stage

In the first stage, buyers seek information to better understand and define their problems. For example, a lead might search, “How do I lose weight?” At this stage, you want to appear in the search engine results and ads with helpful top-of-the-funnel resources to build authority on the topic and earn trust.

To capitalize on this interest, implement lead capture forms and pop-ups to collect contact details and nurture further engagement. You can see how Healthline aims to do this on content below.

Interest/Consideration Stage

At the interest or consideration stage, your buyers have identified their problems and started to consider potential solutions. They might sign up for your lead nurturing campaigns or even trial your product or service.

Action/Decision Stage

At the action or decision stage, buyers are ready to choose a vendor and spend money. You can implement various automations to increase your conversion rate at this stage, including:

• Personalized product recommendations and abandoned cart reminders for ecommerce.
• Automated follow-up emails for prospects with strong interest.
• Remarketing ads to remind and get people back to your solution.
• Lead scoring to prioritize leads based on behavior and ensure sales teams reach out to the most engaged prospects.

9. Attract and Convert Leads with Lead Nurture Campaigns

Lead nurturing builds trust with leads by guiding them through their buying journey. You want to qualify your leads based on their propensity to become customers and ensure each lead type receives the right automation. Specific actions, such as going to your pricing page, indicate a higher interest and buying intent.

You want to set up lead nurturing emails whether you target cold or warm leads. These emails can include:

Welcoming New Leads

Introduce new leads to your brand and thank them for subscribing.

Educational Content

Provide helpful materials related to your product or service.

Case Studies

Share social proof and inspire leads with ideas.

Exclusive Offers

Create urgency with time-sensitive offers and discounts.

10. Onboard New Customers with Behavior Emails

Automated behavior emails are emails triggered by a specific action or actions your users perform or fail to perform. They are crucial for self-serve digital businesses because they catch the user at the right time when they are most likely to open your emails. This leads to much higher email engagement than newsletters and other time-based emails.

Onboarding behavior emails are crucial because they help engage and educate new users. They ensure a smooth transition and encourage long-term product adoption.

To set up automated behavior emails, you must have access to user events (actions) in your marketing automation or email marketing platform. Your development team must use the tool's native API or a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Segment to send user actions to your marketing automation tool.

Once the user events flow in, you can create email automations when a user performs a specific action. In the example below, Ascend (a Wix product) sends a reward email when users create their first email campaign.

Apart from onboarding emails, behavior-triggered emails can be used to remind users about expiring trials, request feedback after a trial period, re-engage inactive customers, and much more.

11. Personalize with Dynamic Segments

In marketing automation, segmentation involves grouping users, leads, and customers based on shared characteristics. For example, you might segment all U.S. users who have visited the contact page and signed up for a trial.

Here are some common parameters you can use for segmentation:

• Demographic: Age, income, gender, education
• Geographic: Country, state, city
• Psychographic: Personality, values, hobbies, interests
• Technographic: Device, browser used to access your site
• Firmographic (for B2B): Company size, company revenue
• Behavioral: Product usage, actions performed, email activity, features activated
• Need-based: Reasons for using your product, desired features, pain points

Advanced marketing automation tools like ActiveCampaign allow you to segment your audience and personalize your communication based on these conditions.

Unlike static lists, dynamic segments are updated live - people will enter or leave the segment when they satisfy or fail to satisfy its conditions. This makes segments powerful in building targeted campaigns that are sent at the right time and to the right people.

12. Test, Track Performance, and Optimize

Testing, tracking performance, and optimizing are key marketing automation steps to ensure effective campaigns.

Regularly testing elements like email subject lines, CTAs, and timing allows marketers to identify what resonates best with their audience.

Tracking performance metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, can provide valuable insights into what’s working.

When choosing a marketing automation platform, ensure that the tool supports the metrics you need. You can check out our top picks for best marketing automation software when starting your research.

How to Succeed in Marketing Automation

Getting started with marketing automation can seem overwhelming, but with the right approach, you can set yourself up for success. Here are some key pieces of advice to help you get started:

• Define clear goals: Know what you want to achieve, like boosting lead generation or increasing sales.
• Understand your audience: Create buyer personas to tailor your campaigns effectively.
• Choose the right tools: Select platforms that fit your business needs and integrate well with existing marketing and sales systems.
• Start simple: Begin with basic workflows like welcome emails before tackling complex automations. Focus on just one stage of the funnel at a time.
• Segment your contacts: Group your audience for more targeted and relevant messaging.
• Create quality content: Offer valuable content that addresses your audience's needs.
• Maintain data accuracy: Keep your contact lists clean and up-to-date by sunsetting old inactive contacts and invalid email addresses.
• Invest in training: Equip yourself and your team to make the most of your tools.
• Test and optimize: Regularly refine your campaigns based on performance data.
• Measure and analyze: Track key metrics, like email engagement and conversions, to understand and improve your ROI. ** Read: 5 Email Marketing Success Stories to Inspire Your Next Campaign**

Executing Successful Marketing Automation Strategies

Successfully executing marketing automation strategies involves more than just implementing the latest tools or trends. It's about planning, understanding your audience and their customer journey, creating effective content, and choosing the right platforms that align with your business goals across the funnel.

Check out our top picks for the best marketing automation software on the market. You can filter this list based on a number of different factors so that you get the best software for your needs. Additionally, check out our top picks for the best email marketing platforms for small businesses.

We've also developed tailored strategies for niche markets, including email marketing for photographers, email marketing for dentists, and email marketing for lawyers, with real-world examples to demonstrate how these approaches can be applied effectively in each industry.

If you’re stuck and don’t know where to start, try our Finder Tool. Just answer a few key questions and our tool will suggest the best email software for you.