Marketing Automation Glossary

Marketing Automation refers to a single tool or, more commonly, a suite of tools that enables repetitive tasks to be automated (operated by computer programs) and measured. These tools can automate and monitor tasks like email marketing, social media posting, website personalisation, customer segmentation, A/B testing and event management, to name a few. This allows marketers and business owners to focus on more important things while their marketing efforts improve.

Email marketing involves communicating information to targeted customers via e-mail. Email marketing can include things like sending product catalogues and updates, sales information, advertisements, business requests, donation requests and others.

Good email marketing can create brand awareness, build trust and loyalty. Email marketing is definitely one of the most cost-effective forms of direct marketing these days, so is highly favoured by marketers.

Engagement Scoring – which is also sometimes called lead scoring or grading – refers to a system of scoring the actions or interactions, behaviour, demographics and history of the people who engage with your brand.

Each interaction has a specific point value that varies by the lead management system used. To give an example, as a customer progresses through their User Journey, they automatically accrue these points based on what they do and once these points reach a specific threshold, the customer is then considered a qualified lead for sales purposes.

The term User Journey – which is also sometimes called a customer journey – refers to the pathway that a customer takes when engaging with a brand. Each User Journey begins from the first time a person interacts with a brand and continues indefinitely past their first purchase and beyond.

The software used to monitor the User Journey tracks a customer through the sales funnel and marketing strategies, collecting data about each point of contact as it occurs.

Event automation refers to the automation of event-related tasks and monitoring. Event Automation can be used for every step of the process, from event promotion, websites and organisation to event registration, onsite management, logistics and success evaluation. It provides tools for simplifying personalisation, brand customisation and marketing optimisation, as well as cost effectiveness, time effectiveness, advanced analytics and more.

Event automation has been around for a while, but only in recent years has it been streamlined by incorporating all of these steps into one platform, which is obviously a huge boon to event planners.

Monitoring the online behaviour of a customer’s interaction with your brand and then using the information gleaned to trigger automation of marketing and lead generation efforts is referred to as using Behavioural Triggers.

For example, a customer may fill in a form which may trigger the delivery of specific information or content from a brand whilst also subscribing them to your email list, they may open an email that triggers a related follow-up email, or they may visit a specific page which triggers their addition to a list or causes a popup to be displayed.

Date triggers allow users to set up and start automations – usually emails or popup reminders – based on a custom date field.

For example, emails can be released on a specific date or date range and can be set to continue on multiple dates into the future, if needed. A date-based automation trigger initiates an automated action based on the date field on a customer’s file (birthday, subscription date, date of first purchase etc) or date / time of an action.

You can also specify a certain automation to occur using time frame conditions, which means that people who attain the conditions (e.g., subscribed or made a purchase within a specific time frame, had their birthday in a particular month or similar) will be automatically added to the automation. By using this, you can choose to trigger the automation on, before or after the date displayed in the field. This is ideal for event based marketing like birthday discounts, recurring communications (subscription dates, payment processes) and event reminders.

Customers love personalisation and this meets those needs.

Website Triggers – sometimes called ‘web page is visited’ automation triggers – are implemented by using the site tracking data available to you and beginning an automation process when the contact views a single designated page or any page correlating to your website.

For example, if a customer visits a specific product page on your site, a follow-up email could be triggered offering discounts on the products on that page. To be able to use this trigger, you must set up site tracking correctly and carefully, which can be tedious and difficult to master.

The process of automating triggers is extremely strict and it needs to be setup meticulously, with best practices a must if it’s even going to work at all.

The idea behind Drip Campaigns lends itself pretty closely to its name – marketing information strategically sent to contacts over a designated time frame. There are many great reasons to use a drip campaign; it can be designed to nurture contacts and/or generate leads into a marketing funnel. It can also be used to send informative packages to on-board clients or potential prospects and is an awesome way to leverage engagement, etc.

The idea behind the term comes from planned messages being dripped or trickled carefully and systematically over a set period of time.

Also known as an Email Workflow, this term refers to a series of automated emails that are triggered by a customer’s data or behaviour. These emails are usually assembled as a drip campaign with the primary goal of achieving a task, such as making a sale or nurturing leads. An example of a workflow would be a person clicking to download a free guide (the trigger) and then being sent a series of automated emails offering more free information on the same topic, designed to onboard new customers.

Audience segmentation refers to the division of individuals into homogeneous subsections constructed by a defined criteria, demographic, usage, communication behaviours or usage of media.

Audience segmentation can design and adapt a brand’s services and products to satisfy the needs and wants of each particular group.

It’s considered a fundamental strategy in any campaign, especially one that focuses on health and social change.

The campaigns are generally more effective when a majority of the efforts are matched to the target audiences structured to their receptivity and susceptibility.

An example of the use of audience segmentation would be to market baby products to pregnant customers or wrinkle cream to customers over a specific age.

Audience segmentation refers to the division of individuals into homogeneous subsections constructed by a defined criteria, demographic, usage, communication behaviours or usage of media.

Audience segmentation can design and adapt a brand’s services and products to satisfy the needs and wants of each particular group.

It’s considered a fundamental strategy in any campaign, especially one that focuses on health and social change.

The campaigns are generally more effective when a majority of the efforts are matched to the target audiences structured to their receptivity and susceptibility.

An example of the use of audience segmentation would be to market baby products to pregnant customers or wrinkle cream to customers over a specific age.

The term inbound marketing refers to the act of using content, social media and search engines to bring customers to your site. It differs from outbound marketing in that instead of needing to go out to find leads, they come to you by choice.

A form is an information gathering tool – usually on your landing page – that a customer will fill out to give you their email, name and other relevant information in order to access site content or to subscribe to your email list.

A call to action (CTA) refers to a banner, button or direction that asks your site visitors to complete a task (an action) such as ‘visit this page for more’ or ‘register by clicking here’ for example. The most effective CTAs are clear and firm in their instructions, such as directing a customer to ‘click here to download our fantastic guide’, rather than ‘please download this great guide’.

Progressive profiling is used in forms and other information gathering tools and refers to the process of questions being automatically updated to reflect the information already entered.

For example, if a person has already entered their name and email, the next time the form is used, these questions will not appear again or will be pre-filled. Similarly, if a person indicates they are a parent, the form will add questions based on that, such as ‘what are the age ranges of your children’.

Progressive profiling ensures you’re not bombarding your new leads with too many questions in one session, which would usually have a negative effect on conversion.

A nurture campaign – which is also sometimes referred to as a drip campaign or a lead campaign – refers to an email campaign that uses ongoing promotion to help influence the decision of a prospect to become a customer. These campaigns are generally the same length as your ‘days to close’ and should be aiming to support your prospects decision via good quality additional information and content relevant to your product or service.

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to software that is used by companies to record every contact / interaction with their potential and existing customers. From the first contact, CRM keeps information such as names, emails and other contact information and demographics and adds to this information when customers give the company more details.

Depending on the software or program, CRM also keeps logs and details of things like email and phone communications, in-store enquiries, appointments, faxes, payments and purchases. It can also perform automated tasks like sending personalised emails, scheduling appointments, keeping track of social media contact and more.

A first time visitor is a person who has decided to visit your site or try your product / service for the very first time.

Interruption marketing – also called outbound marketing – is considered the ‘old school’ form of marketing and refers to any form of unsolicited marketing that interrupts an audience with a message.

You will almost definitely be familiar with this form of marketing, as television and radio ads are considered interruption-based. Other forms of interruption-based marketing include cold calling, unsolicited emails (spam) and print advertising (including online advertising). This form of marketing is optimised for immediate conversions and is a great way of boosting views for a campaign, but is not very sustainable.

Multichannel marketing pertains to the use of lead nurturing and email campaigns to market across a number of different platforms or channels, such as email, social media and similar. This is not just about promotion via different channels, but also places a strong emphasis on the overall experience that customers and leads have when they interact with a brand.

Landmark emails are emails that are sent out to customers on special landmark days such as birthdays, sign-up or first purchase anniversaries, yearly anniversaries and other milestones. Landmark emails are great as they elicit higher open, transaction, and revenue rates than regular promotional email campaigns because they are personalised and targeted. These emails are generally accompanied by a promotion or discount of some kind (e.g., ‘here’s a $5 voucher for your birthday!’) and to boost your transaction rates, these promotions do better when they don’t stipulate a minimum spend requirement.