Marketing Automation For Growth Teams: Your Go-To Guide

Growth teams that leverage marketing automation are better equipped to achieve their goals and drive business success. If that interests you, then you’ve clicked on the right guide.

In this article, you will learn:

• What marketing automation means for growth teams and how it’s different from traditional marketing automation.
• Various aspects of growth that you can automate.
• The best automation tools and how they help you deliver tailored customer experiences.

TL;DR

• Growth marketing automation involves using specialized tools to optimize growth processes and strategies.
• Growth marketing automation isn’t the same as email marketing automation. The former is a broader concept that encompasses email marketing but also includes the automation of other tasks.

Effective growth marketing automation helps to:

1. Align sales and marketing teams
2. Personalize interactions at each stage of the customer journey
3. Scale growth marketing efforts faster

Few things growth marketing teams can use automation tools to achieve:

• Marketing analytics automation to segment users based on activity
• In-app onboarding automation to increase trial to paid conversion rate
• Automate content localization for personalized in-app communication
• User feedback collection and analysis automation
• Self-serve support automation to reduce friction and drop-offs
• A/B testing automation to improve conversion rates
• Automated upselling marketing campaigns
• Email marketing automation to re-engage inactive users
• Offboarding in-app automation to reduce churn rates

Best growth marketing automation platforms:

1. Userpilot: Best marketing automation software for growth teams
2. Hubspot: For lead scoring automation and personalizing campaigns
3. ActiveCampaign: For email marketing automation

What is growth marketing automation?

Growth marketing automation involves using specialized tools to optimize growth processes and strategies. With the right toolset, it becomes easy for SaaS growth teams to identify, validate, implement, and track product growth ideas.

Unlike conventional marketing automation, which prioritizes expanding audience reach, growth marketing automation centers on activities that drive rapid business expansion—e.g., A/B testing campaigns, behavior-triggered in-app experiences, viral growth loops, etc.

Email marketing automation vs. growth marketing automation

Email marketing automation empowers you to automate routine email marketing tasks, from delivering warm welcome emails to new users and nurturing leads through drip campaigns to rekindling engagement with inactive users.

Growth marketing automation is a broader concept that encompasses email marketing but also includes the automation of other tasks.

How growth marketing teams benefit from automation

Automation generally makes life easier for growth teams. Here are three main benefits:

• Align sales and marketing teams: Automation facilitates the seamless integration of customer relationship management (CRM) systems with various marketing and sales tools. This integration ensures both teams can access up-to-date customer data, allowing for better collaboration. Additionally, automation allows teams to gather and analyze data from multiple sources, providing valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and engagement. This easy data collection and analysis enables marketing and sales teams to effectively align their strategies.
• Personalize interactions at each stage of the customer journey: With the right marketing software programs, growth teams can segment users and automatically trigger campaigns or flows based on user actions. This personalized content delivered via email or in-app helps users progress smoothly through their journey. It enhances the customer experience and leads to better retention.
• Faster scaling: By automating repetitive tasks, growth teams not only avoid human error but also shorten the time to project completion. For example, imagine trying to onboard users manually; you’ll waste valuable time that could have been used for other activities. With automation, you’ll get things done at scale and achieve results faster without a linear increase in labor costs.

What should growth teams use marketing automation tools for?

This section shows you the various ways to maximize the use of marketing automation tools. Choosing the perfect tool for your needs is the first step in implementing a growth marketing framework.

Marketing analytics automation to segment users based on activity

Marketing automation tools have analytics functionality for data collection. They can automatically collect data on user activity across various touchpoints on your website and app.

You can then use this engagement data to build specific user segments and automate separate campaigns for each.

For example, through user behavior tracking, you can identify users that engage more with a specific feature and segment them to trigger messages about advanced features suitable to their use case.

In-app onboarding automation to increase trial to paid conversion rate

Personalized onboarding increases trial-to-paid conversion rates.

Use automation to segment new users based on their company size, JTBD, and other relevant variables. Then, provide branched onboarding for each segment, shortening the time to value and helping them reach activation faster.

But don’t stop there.

Since you know each segment’s JTBD, use automation to trigger event-based campaigns and help users engage with the right features. For example, imagine you have an invoicing software. One way to implement this is to prompt users to add an invoice immediately after they use your tool to add a new client.

Users will experience a critical Aha! Moment from seeing how your invoicing feature works, and they will be motivated to continue engaging.

Automate content localization for personalized in-app communication

Localization helps you break language barriers, reach a wider audience, and gain their trust. It also improves overall engagement and drives business growth.

One way to localize is by using translation agencies. But apart from being time-consuming, that’s not an efficient approach.

Instead, use automation tools built on AI technology to localize content speedily. For example, with Userpilot, you can localize content in your checklists, tooltips, or even your resource center with one click.

It automatically detects your end user’s default language and delivers content in that language. Alternatively, you can choose a language and segment your users to determine who sees what.

User feedback collection and analysis automation tools

With a dedicated tool, you can schedule and send automated surveys to users at strategic touchpoints, collecting feedback on their experiences and pain points.

After gathering feedback, use the tool to analyze user sentiment, categorizing their responses for actionable insights.

For example, here’s Userpilot giving live survey responses analytics. At a glance, you can see the percentage of users that gave what response. With that, it becomes easy to extract insights and make data-driven decisions.

Self-serve support automation to reduce friction and drop-offs

Making users contact support for every issue creates friction. It may even cause some people to stop using your tool out of frustration.

To solve this, create an in-app self-serve portal containing educational guides users can visit anytime. Use automation to suggest relevant articles or resources to users visiting the portal.

A/B testing automation to improve conversion rates

How can you be sure something works for your audience?

There’s only one way to find out: create hypotheses and test them with different audience segments. Experiment with landing page content and CTA, pricing page elements, form lengths, etc.

But don’t stop there. Also, test in-app flows and experiences.

For instance, to optimize your onboarding, you could test a video guide vs. a tooltip guide. Use short videos to onboard a segment of your users and implement interactive tooltips for others.

Test the results and see what works best.

Automated upselling marketing campaigns

Upsells are great for business. They also boost customer satisfaction because users are able to get more done with your tool.

But you can’t trigger upgrade prompts randomly and expect users to convert. Timing matters.

Set your prompts to appear to specific user segments based on their actions.

For example, Loom automatically triggers the following prompt when the user’s trial period is about to end. The timing is perfect, and trial users who have seen the tool’s capability and need it will upgrade.

Email marketing automation to re-engage inactive users

Use product engagement data to identify users that have churned or become inactive over a specific period. Then, set personalized campaigns to re-engage and win back these users.

For instance, you can have separate campaigns for:

• Users that haven’t opened your app in X days.
• Users who churned because you were missing a specific feature. (Re-engage them when you launch that feature or something similar).
• Customers who still log in but no longer engage with your platform as they used to (that’s a sign of churn).

Use automation to implement a gradual re-engagement email marketing strategy, starting with gentle reminders and escalating to more persuasive messages if needed.

Consider including special offers, discounts, or incentives in your emails. But don’t overdo it. Otherwise, users may just come for the reactivation offer and leave after it’s gone.

Offboarding in-app automation to reduce churn rates

Trigger exit surveys automatically when a user makes moves to downgrade or delete their account.

Focus your survey on uncovering their reason for churning. Be nice with your words because it’s possible the user is frustrated at this point.

Here’s an example of a good exit survey. Notice how courteous the intro is. Also, the survey offered users some options to choose from and a field to add any comments they wanted.

Once the user responds, trigger an alternative based on their choice. Of course, you can’t do this manually for every user; it has to be an automated process.

For Zoom, they offered to downgrade the user’s account:

Best growth marketing automation software tools for sales and marketing teams

There are different marketing automation tools out there. The ones you choose depend on your present business needs—and you can always use integration to supplement your tool’s capability.

Below are three growth marketing automation platforms and how they help:

Userpilot: Best marketing automation software for growth teams

Userpilot is a powerful product adoption platform that growth teams will love.

Here are a few ways you can use Userpilot to automate your growth efforts:

• Data collection and analysis: Use feature tags and custom events to track how users interact with your key features. By analyzing product usage data, you can identify patterns and anomalies in user behavior and make informed decisions.
• Trends and funnels: Userpilot’s Trends and Funnels features let you see user behavior over a specific period. You can identify drop-offs and friction in the customer journey from the results. Addressing these will enhance the customer experience and help you convert more users.

• Build highly advanced user segments: You can create user segments based on multiple characteristics from data collected with Userpilot and integrations like Hubspot. This is useful for A/B testing, triggering event-based campaigns, or simply studying user behavior.
• Automate in-app onboarding and feedback collection: User onboarding has never been easier. Create branched onboarding for different user segments. Using a combination of UX patterns— tooltips, modals, checklists, etc.—you’ll prompt users to take the right action and experience value quickly. That’s not all. Userpilot lets you send different kinds of in-app surveys and analyze the results to generate rich insights.
• Email marketing automation: With Userpilot, you can use webhooks to connect to your email marketing platforms and trigger personalized emails. This is useful for nurturing leads, sending welcome emails, or triggering reactivation email campaigns.
• Integrations: Connect to Hubspot and other product analytics tools.

Userpilot’s pricing starts at $249/mo, and you get access to the following:

Hubspot: For lead scoring automation and personalizing campaigns

Hubspot is a CRM platform that helps businesses of all sizes manage their marketing, sales, and customer service operations.

The platform offers a suite of tools that sales and marketing teams can use to automate tasks and track customer interactions—but mostly across the acquisition stage.

Here’s how Hubspot helps growth teams:

• Automated lead scoring: Hubspot assigns a numerical score to leads based on their behavior and engagement with your content and website. With this, you can segment leads and decide the ones worth pursuing.
• Personalized email campaigns: Using data such as the recipient’s website browsing history and email engagement history, you can send email campaigns tailored to audience needs and preferences. This increases engagement and conversion.
• Account-based marketing: Hubspot’s ABM aligns marketing and sales efforts and helps teams identify high-value opportunities for conversions and upsells.
• Integration with other tools like Userpilot: Hubspot’s seamless integration with Userpilot has many benefits for growth teams. For instance, you can score your Hubspot leads based on user activity, assign them to appropriate reps, use Hubspot data for better segmentation in Userpilot, etc.

Hubspot’s CRM Suite has a free plan that only gives you a taste of the real thing. The Starter plan goes for $20/mo, but you’ll have to use the professional plan to get the most out of the tool. It’s priced at $1,600/mo:

ActiveCampaign: For email marketing automation for growth teams

You’ll love ActiveCampaign if you need an email automation tool with multiple integrations.

• The platform allows you to create advanced campaigns triggered for different segments. You can also send event-based prompts.
• Additionally, ActiveCampaign is super friendly to use, with over 100 responsive templates new users can choose from.

ActiveCampaign’s pricing starts at $29/mo for the Lite plan. Here are the full price tiers and their use cases:

Conclusion

Combining automation with growth marketing means doing less repetitive tasks.

You can use the extra time to focus more on creative brainstorming and testing ideas to drive business growth.

Ready to embrace marketing automation for growth teams? Userpilot can help. Book a demo now and get started with automated in-app onboarding, user feedback, user behavior analysis, etc.