Marketing campaigns and strategies would have limited success without marketing operations processes happening behind the scenes. From running lead generation campaigns to communicating with customers to generating data reports, these processes—and the tools they require—allow your marketing channels to succeed.
With all these elements to manage, it's no wonder that marketers and marketing ops professionals tend to be automation power users. There isn't enough time in the day to manage marketing efforts manually.
With an automation tool like Zapier, you can connect the apps you use every day to cut down on manual work. Here are the top ways marketers use Zaps—what we call our automated workflows—to save time, improve data accuracy, and stay organized.
Automate your marketing operations
You'll need a Zapier account to use the workflows in this piece. If you don't have an account yet, it's free to get started.
Lead management
Managing leads is a full-time job in itself. For starters, you're managing multiple channels to attract prospects to your business. You also have to clean up lead information and store it in one place, so you can nurture those leads to become paying customers. And then you need to track what they're doing.
It's exhausting just reading that list. Automating those tasks with Zapier ensures that you're preserving your finite energy for strategic problem-solving.
Lead generation
Potential customers need to see the same marketing message multiple times in different channels before they bite. You're likely managing a stack of tools to source those leads, such as various forms and social media ads.
You can organize leads from multiple sources into a centralized place with a few Zaps. Just click on one below to get started:
Lead tracking
Tracking your leads' journey helps you make informed decisions on how your marketing campaigns are performing and how they're resonating—or not resonating—with potential customers.
You can automatically track conversions with the following Zaps:
Lead nurture
When done appropriately, nurture campaigns can turn prospects into paying customers—or keep existing customers coming back—through well-timed messages that encourage them to take a particular action.
While we can't write the nurture campaigns for you, Zapier can make enrolling leads in a nurture campaign easier when they've taken a particular action. Try any of the Zaps below:
Segmenting subscribers
Have you ever received an email from a company that seemed wildly out of touch with how you use their product? It's likely because they didn't segment their subscribers.
Segmentation is a critical part of any marketing strategy because you want to speak to potential and existing customers at the right moment to influence a purchasing decision. (And you don't want them to unsubscribe.)
If you need to clean up your segmentation workflow, try the Zaps below, which will tag leads when they take a particular action.
Read more: 7 ways to automate common newsletter tasks
Customer communication
It's hard enough responding to Slack messages from your own team. And while your coworkers may forgive you for leaving them unread, your leads and customers won't. Automation can help your team stay on top of communication at each stage of the customer journey.
Notify team about new leads
Timely follow-up is universal business etiquette, but especially so in marketing. You know there's a limited amount of time to capitalize on a prospect's interest.
If personalized introductions are part of your process, then your team needs to know when there's a new lead. You can use these automated workflows to automate lead notifications in your preferred communication channels:
Automatically message new leads
Maybe you don't have the bandwidth to send a custom message to a new lead, but you'd like some form of personalization. You can still benefit from automating responses to leads. These Zaps will send personalized messages to prospects using information they've submitted:
Send post-purchase notifications
Of course, the work isn't done once you've acquired a customer. Automation can help you manage timely messages with customers after they've made a purchase, whether it's a simple transactional email or enrolling them in a post-purchase nurture series.
If you want to go the distance—and why wouldn't you—you can also segment customers based on purchases they've made.
Collect and organize feedback
Whether you're soliciting feedback at the beginning or end of the customer journey, you need a place to organize that information so you can use those insights later.
While many form apps have native integrations with spreadsheet products, you can use Zaps to route feedback to a specific sheet based on how customers respond.
Start with the Zaps below:
And then add a filter between or a path step at the end to route specific feedback to your desired location.
Data reporting and analytics
Marketing ops professionals are often the chief data wranglers, pulling all sorts of information from siloed channels to create reports and make strategy recommendations. It's a herculean task because it often requires streamlining and cleaning up data. And if you don't have a designated MOPs lead, it can be even harder to get the job done.
You can use automation to save time, improve reporting accuracy, and, most importantly, get a holistic view of campaign performance. (And everyone will think you're a wizard.)
Streamlining data between apps
Marketers deeply relate to the problem of having too many apps to keep track of, many of which don't make it easy to sync data. That's why spreadsheets are often the makeshift solution.
Here are a few Zaps you can use to move the data from your super spreadsheets to your main source of truth.
Generating reports
Spreadsheets are incredibly powerful and flexible, but sometimes a specific data or analytics app will do the job better.
You can use automated workflows to create measurements in Google Analytics for specific activity that you want to measure outside of your website, such as calendar bookings.
To create more advanced charts or dashboards, these Zaps will push your data to apps such as Databox or Hotjar.
Keeping your team notified
Data helps everyone on the marketing team make decisions and strategy recommendations, so they're likely to be interested in the latest report. Instead of begging your team to read your latest insights, set up a Zap that will automatically send alerts.
Cleaning up data
Marketing ops teams are perpetually on clean-up duty, trying to keep data tidy so you can run marketing campaigns efficiently.
While there's a certain zen in tidying things up, constant data errors and formatting issues cause major headaches—and take you away from the problem-solving and strategy work you prefer.
Automating alerts can help you catch data errors right away. Set up a few Zaps like the ones below so you can troubleshoot early.
You can also automatically format data as it comes in. If you're constantly reformatting dates, separating first names from last, or other types of information, these Zaps will take care of that work for you.
Note: Formatter and multi-step Zaps are available on our paid plans and during the first two weeks of a free Zapier trial.
Keep your marketing processes flowing with automation
The processes running your marketing campaigns don't have to be chaotic. Automation can be the sidekick that helps you manage your tools and processes more efficiently, so you can devote time to problem-solving and strategizing for your next big campaign.
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