What is marketing automation? A complete guide for 2025


In a domino effect, you lose control of the chain reaction the moment you tip the first domino.

You don’t have a say when the next domino falls or if one particular piece should stay upright.

That’s how many brands used to handle communication with their customers. Like falling dominoes, one action triggered the next in a rigid, predictable chain. 

An online purchase simply triggered a generic thank-you email that failed to mention what the customer just bought, never mind featuring related items that might also spark their interest.

Modern marketing automation—technology that manages, schedules, and executes marketing processes and campaigns, automatically, by applying if/then logic to prospect and customer behavior—helps brands avoid these generic chain reactions with their existing and potential customers. 

Now, marketing automation helps you engage with your audience across the entire customer journey. 

Marketing automation, to me, is speaking to the right customer, at the right time, with the right content.
Chris Gordon
Head of client success, Noticed

Chris Gordon, head of client success at leading ecommerce and marketing agency Noticed, puts it simply: “Marketing automation, to me, is speaking to the right customer, at the right time, with the right content.”

What are the key components of marketing automation?

Marketing automation components work together like a living organism. Each component feeds into the others, creating an intelligent ecosystem. Understanding how these parts work together reveals the true power of modern marketing automation.

Here are all the different pieces that make today’s marketing automation tools so sophisticated and critical for B2C marketers. 

1. Customer data management

Successful marketing automation starts with understanding your audience. Every customer action tells a story, and the more data you have about your customers, the more effective your marketing automation will be at turning that one-time, one-sided story into an ongoing conversation.

But this data can be hard to act on when it’s fragmented across marketing multiple channels and platforms. Modern marketing automation technology consolidates customer data from multiple channels and systems into a single platform, giving you a complete, accurate, and up-to-date profile of each customer.

With all this data gathered and easily accessible in one place, brands can better understand who their customers are and how they like to shop—which is the foundation for an effective marketing automation strategy

2. Audience segmentation 

Segmentation involves splitting your audience into groups based on what you know about them. Historically, marketing automation tools let marketers create static and dynamic segments. 

  • Static segments are based on identifiers that do not change, like someone’s birthday. 
  • Dynamic segments are based on data that does change, like the last product you browsed or your average order value. 

In marketing automation, dynamic segments are more common because they help marketers send the right message to the right person at the right time, without much extra work on the marketer’s part. That’s because marketing automation for dynamic segments is triggered by actions your customers take or don’t take—also known as behavioral segmentation

This behavior might include:

  • Website behavior: acquisition source, products browsed, time spent on page
  • Purchase behavior: frequency, lifetime value, average order value
  • Marketing engagement: email or SMS sign-ups, opens, clicks
  • Customer satisfaction: positive or negative reviews, referrals, customer service interactions
Go beyond segmentation 101
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3. Personalized marketing content

This is the part of marketing automation that puts your data into action. It’s when certain segments of customers receive automated messaging or content based on the actions they take (or don’t take).

Here are a few simple examples of personalized marketing automations:

  • Web forms: When a current email subscriber lands on your website, they’re greeted with a sign-up form that only asks for their phone number, since you already have their email address.
  • Email: When a customer leaves a great review for a recent purchase, follow up with an automated cross-sell email a few weeks later. For example, “Hi Jess, we noticed you recently loved our dreamy floral sundress. Check out these similar items you might like.”
  • SMS: When a customer abandons their cart, send an automated text message with an exclusive discount or promotion tailored to the item they left behind. For example, “Hey Jess, enjoy 15% off your next sundress order with code SMMR24! Offer ends August 31.”
  • Push notifications: When a customer buys a product through your mobile app, send a personalized push notification to keep them informed about their order status. For example, “Your dreamy floral dress is on its way! Track your order here.”

4. In-depth insights and testing  

Analytics and reporting are essential components of marketing automation because they help you understand the health of your entire marketing engine. When you can measure key marketing automation metrics like email opens, SMS clicks, and conversions, you can make data-driven decisions to improve them over time.

But modern marketing automation analytics shouldn’t just tell you what happened—they should also uncover areas for improvement and growth.

AI-powered marketing automation, for example, might optimize forms display timing based on your unique audience, while marketing automation that uses AI-powered predictive analytics can help you: 

  • Uncover customer churn risks. 
  • Automatically adjust send times for optimal impact.
  • Identify the most effective message types for different audience segments.
  • Identify which customers might be more likely to spend more based on past purchasing behaviors. 

The result? Marketing that feels less like broadcasting and more like an intelligent conversation with each customer. Messages arrive when customers are most receptive. Content reflects real interests and needs. Offers match actual purchase patterns. Voila.

“After we started sending campaigns to segments created with Klaviyo’s predictive analytics, all our metrics improved, and our revenue improved drastically,” says Jade Richardson, email strategist at Agital. “It taught us so much about the subscriber base—when they shop, how they shop, etc. It really opened up a whole new world to us.”

What are the benefits of marketing automation?

In an ideal world, the impact of marketing automation grows exponentially. It not only saves teams time, but also strengthens customer relationships throughout the whole customer journey. Here’s how. 

Improve your customer experience by exceeding expectations

According to McKinsey & Company, 71% of consumers expect personalization from the brands they interact with—and even more (76%) get frustrated when they don’t get it.

That means in order to build credibility with consumers, your marketing can’t just be the smartest or the sexiest or the most engaging. With so many marketing messages out there that check all those boxes, what your marketing efforts should aim to be, above any other adjective, is relevant—a word whose meaning may change drastically from individual to individual. 

Because automated emails and texts are based on unique, behavioral customer data, “it’s great from a customer perspective—the experience is inherently tailored specifically to every customer,” explains Sean Donahue, director of email marketing at nationally recognized digital marketing agency Power Digital.

If you’re not sending messages on a 1:1 level, you’re doing it wrong.

The explicit goal of marketing automation, Gordon agrees, “is to make the marketing experience more personalized. You want to make it feel as much as possible like a customer picked up a product in your store and a sales associate came over to talk to them about it.”

It works, too: McKinsey also reports that companies that excel at personalization in marketing generate 40% more revenue from related activities than average players.

“It’s the new gold standard to have personalization,” Donahue says. “If you’re not sending messages on a 1:1 level, you’re doing it wrong.”

Increase employee efficiency by doing more with less

Importantly, marketing that’s automated and personalized at scale achieves that 1:1, “I’m a priority” feeling—without costing you the time, money, and effort of maintaining a personal relationship with each and every customer.

As Lindsey Murray, VP of performance marketing at leading digital customer experience company Blue Acorn iCi, points out, “especially for brands with a large client base, you would need an incredibly large marketing team to be able to provide the level of customization and personalization at the same number of touchpoints if it wasn’t automated.”

Donahue agrees that marketing automation is a way for marketers to create “meaningful personalized experiences” without needing to have “hands on keyboard all day long, building emails and getting them out.”

You get to actually spend your time digging into data and working on campaigns that require more human input and creativity.

Instead, “we can initially build it, set it, and forget it,” Donahue explains. “We can find these core different areas in the customer journey, set up the automations so they’re sending at all different times around the clock, and then make it so that we don’t need to be manually punching all this in on a constant basis.”

And because it frees up your marketing department from investing time and effort into time-consuming, repetitive tasks, marketing automation also contributes to employee productivity and retention.

“It really allows you to have a lean team,” Murray points out. “You get to actually spend your time digging into data and working on campaigns that require more human input and creativity.”

Drive more revenue with automations 

According to Klaviyo’s latest email marketing benchmarks, automated email flows generate up to 30x more revenue per recipient compared to one-off campaigns. 

“Marketing automation for us is just efficiency,” says Heather Browne, director of performance marketing at Blue Acorn iCi.

“We know these are proven tactics,” Murray adds. “It’s ongoing revenue. You put in the effort up front, and then outside of some updates here and there, it really works on its own.”

6 marketing automation best practices

A sophisticated marketing automation system without a clear strategy is like a high-performance car without a destination—powerful but purposeless.

Marketing automation is not without its challenges, but several best practices separate successful marketing automation implementations from those that merely run on autopilot.

1. Set strategic objectives that drive growth

Marketing automation goals should cascade directly from business objectives. A clothing retailer, for example, might map their automation strategy like this:

  • Business goal: Increase customer lifetime value.
  • Marketing objective: Drive repeat purchases within 60 days of first order.
  • Automation goal: Identify optimal timing for post-purchase recommendations.
  • Success metric: X percentage of customers make a second purchase within the target window.

Each automated workflow then connects to a specific stage in the customer lifecycle:

  • Welcome series → first purchase conversion
  • Browse abandonment → product discovery
  • Post-purchase → category expansion
  • Reactivation → customer retention

This strategic alignment transforms marketing automation from a collection of triggered messages into a precise business growth engine. Each automation has a clear purpose, a specific goal to hit, and metrics that directly tie to business outcomes. 

The result? Marketing teams spend less time questioning which automations drive value and more time optimizing the ones they know matter to the bottom line.

2. Build a foundation of quality data

Data quality determines the difference between precise personalization and misguided messaging. The implications ripple through every customer interaction. 

With poor data quality, a customer might receive a review request when their order hasn’t yet been delivered, or product recommendations for items they’ve already bought. 

With quality data, the same customer receives perfectly timed reorder reminders, complementary product suggestions based on their complete purchase history, and messages through their preferred channels at optimal times.

3. Layer intelligence progressively

Marketing automation capabilities should grow with your understanding of customer behavior. Start with your most reliable signals:

First layer

  • Purchase history
  • Email engagement
  • Website visits
  • Cart abandonment

Second layer

  • Browse patterns
  • Category preferences
  • Time-of-day engagement
  • Device preferences

Advanced layer

  • Purchase probability scores
  • Customer lifetime value predictions
  • Churn risk indicators
  • Next best action recommendations

Each layer builds upon previous insights, creating increasingly sophisticated automation capabilities while maintaining accuracy and relevance.

4. Strike the right balance

The more sophisticated the marketing automation, the finer the line between what’s personalized vs. what’s invasive. The challenge lies in delivering relevant, personalized experiences while respecting customer privacy and comfort levels.

Getting this balance right means creating automation rules that enhance rather than detract from the customer experience. It requires:

  • Testing messaging frequency
  • Monitoring engagement metrics
  • Adjusting based on customer feedback
  • Maintaining consistent brand voice

It helps that marketing automation is based on zero- and first-party data, which means people have explicitly consented to receive marketing messages from you. But as consumer data privacy requirements grow more complex every year, remember: the goal isn’t to automate every possible interaction, but to automate the right interactions at the right time.

5. Continually optimize and improve

Marketing automation isn’t a one-and-done, set-it-and-forget-it solution—it’s an evolving system that grows smarter with every customer interaction.

Start by mapping your current automation capabilities:

  • Which customer behaviors trigger automated responses?
  • How well do your current segments reflect customer behavior patterns?
  • Where do customers fall through the cracks in your automations?
  • What data points inform your personalization decisions?

Then, look for quick wins where small changes could drive significant impact:

  • Adding browse abandonment flows to complement cart recovery
  • Implementing post-purchase education sequences
  • Creating segments based on engagement patterns
  • Testing send-time optimization

Finally, build your roadmap for evolution:

  1. Start with foundational data collection and unification.
  2. Add behavioral triggers and basic personalization.
  3. Layer in predictive analytics and advanced segmentation.
  4. Implement cross-channel orchestration.
  5. Integrate AI-powered optimization.

Remember, sophisticated marketing automation doesn’t happen overnight. Focus on improving your automation tactics over time by learning from your customer data and engagement findings so your customers are always at the center of your strategy. 

6. Choose the right platform

Your marketing automation platform should scale with your business needs. Consider platform capabilities like:

  • Data unification across channels
  • AI-powered predictive analytics
  • Cross-channel orchestration
  • Robust segmentation tools

It should bring customer data management, automation, predictive analytics, and more together into one system.

Turn insights into action: next steps for B2C marketing automation

Klaviyo automates every aspect of the customer experience, from data collection to sending engaging messages:

  • Segmentation: Create dynamic segments that populate automatically when someone fits the criteria you set.
  • Simplified automation: Use the drag-and-drop flow builder to save time and visualize your flow.
  • Cross-channel reach: Engage customers across email, SMS, and push notifications through one platform.
  • Flows AI: Take the guesswork out of building flows. Just describe what you’re going for, and Klaviyo AI builds it instantly.

Join the hundreds of thousands of B2C brands that choose Klaviyo to build better customer experiences throughout the customer journey. 

Power smarter digital relationships with Klaviyo.
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Jax Connelly
Jax Connelly
Lead editor
Jax Connelly (they/she) brings 15 years of editorial experience to their role as lead editor at Klaviyo. She started her career doing SEO at a small digital ad agency and spent most of her twenties managing a financial magazine for a trade association based in Washington, DC. Most recently, they studied and taught writing at Columbia College Chicago during the peak years of the pandemic. Outside of her day job, Jax is an award-winning creative writer who has received honors including 4 Notables in the Best American Essays series, contest awards from publications like Nowhere Magazine and Prairie Schooner, and a residency from the Ragdale Foundation. Jax lives in Chicago, a block away from Lake Michigan.
Joshua Ogunjiofor
Joshua Ogunjiofor
Joshua Ogunjiofor is a dynamic content writer specializing in crafting expert-level blog posts that drive product sign-ups for B2B SaaS companies. With his diverse background and uncanny gift for research, he creates results-driven, strategic, and captivating content that entices customers to eagerly embrace offerings.

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