Marketing automation is a very powerful tool that can boost your sales and marketing to a whole new level, however, unfortunately, many marketers are not using marketing automation to its full capacity and in fact, some marketers don’t fully understand the term “Marketing automation” and how to get started with it.

Marketing automation is, as the term suggests, is putting marketing and sales tasks on autopilot.

Think of all the repetitive time-consuming tasks that marketing includes and consider the possibility of having all that work done automatically, efficiently sent to the right people at the perfect times. Sounds magical?! No! That’s a marketing automation

In GoCRM these automation can be built it out in a visual canvas by connecting shapes, this shapes create different personalized pathways, that contact would progress to when interacting with your business. It allows for the easy and efficient delivery of information to your contacts.

Each automation starts with a segment, the segment defines which contacts should enter the automation. It may be that they are on a static list or they submitted a form.

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After you enter your title you will be asked to select a Segment, these will be the contacts entered into the automation. To learn how to create a segment view the following article.

→ Segments

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There are 3 different types of shapes in GoCRM, these are filers, events, and actions.

Actions are things that happen to contacts when they are in automation. You may want to send them an email or an SMS or wait for a certain period of time to pass to follow-up. You can also do updates like adding contacts to a list or creating a task.

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Filters are the traffic directors of the automation, they check if a contact meets certain criteria and then routes them accordingly. For example, I may want to send a different text message to contacts depending on the time of day, or if it’s a weekday or a weekend, or if they have responded in the past or not.

Events are conditions in order for the next step to continue, the automation waits until the user or contact has completed one of these steps before progressing to the next shape. For example, the automation may wait until the contact has replied to a text message, or the deal stage has been changed by a user.

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Now we will connect each action shape together, when connecting a filter, make sure to select the appropriate option to stop or progress contacts through the automation.

When these shapes are connected into sequences the automation will progress through each stage doing exactly what you tell it to. Automations will not become active until you're completely ready to go, this means there are no accidental emails sent or confused customers.

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When a contact reaches a Filter, if it meets the criteria the contact will go down the green path, if it doesn't then the contact will go down the red path. If there's no red path available the contact will stop, indefinitely until it meets the criteria down the road to keep moving forward.
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As an example, if you have a Filter that says "In Time Range 9 AM - 6 PM but it's 8 PM and there's no red path, then the contact will wait until it's 9 AM to continue. If there is a red path, then it will go down the red path, and keep moving forward through your automation.

For ideas on how you can use automation, visit our Templates section! But for now, that’s what is an automation

→ Examples

→ Templates