Marketing automation fundamentals
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation coordinates repeatable customer communication from defined triggers and rules. Good automation uses meaningful context, respects consent, records outcomes, and leaves room for human judgment.
Start with an event or audience
A workflow might begin when a customer enters an approved audience, reaches a date, completes a service, changes a lifecycle stage, or meets another supported condition.
Control what happens next
Conditions, delays, channel choice, templates, approval steps, assignments, and suppression rules shape the action.
- Event and date triggers
- Audience-entry triggers
- Conditions and delays
- Email or SMS steps
- Approval and assignment
- Delivery and run history
Measure business outcomes carefully
Campaign delivery and engagement are useful, but connected appointments, purchases, services, and customer responses give a more practical view. Attribution should remain transparent about its limits.