Marketing automation: definition, strategies, and tools in 2026

A huge saving of time (and money)

When you automate something, you save time. That’s obvious.

In concrete terms, marketing automation frees up time for your teams to focus on higher value-added projects.

For example, instead of spending hours sending the same prospecting message to each lead, only changing the recipient’s first name, your marketing automation software can do it for you. Faster and without ever making a mistake.

Better engagement of your leads

Automated interaction with your leads through workflows provides you with valuable insights about them. In this regard, it is also possible to automate a large part of qualifying your leads. This is also known as lead scoring.

Lead scoring is a scoring system that allows you to evaluate the quality of the leads you generate. It allows you to assign “points” to each lead generated based on the actions they choose to perform within a workflow. Based on this “score”, you can trigger a new scenario, adapted to the profile of that same lead.

Lead scoring therefore promotes better segmentation of your leads. The more your leads interact with your marketing automation system, the more it learns about your leads’ preferences. And the more qualified leads you get.

Such processes – automatic, of course – would have (very) positive effects on your conversion and sales rates.

Better conversion and sales rates

The numbers don’t lie. Marketing automation is responsible for a 14.5% increase in productivity for sales teams and a 12.2% decrease in marketing expenses.

Another study on SMEs, in turn, observed a 451% increase in the number of qualified leads, thanks to automated lead nurturing operations. Furthermore, this same study showed that these “nurtured” leads purchased 47% more products and services than “un-nurtured” leads.

Several reasons can explain such interesting performance:

• More precise and accurate reporting, which in turn allows marketing teams to detect where their marketing operations are going wrong and to correct them proactively
• The ability for teams to better analyze their data, thanks to time savings from task automation
• The ability to track and retarget leads more quickly, systematically, and effectively, and to more easily recover leads at risk of permanent loss

In short, marketing automation promotes better alignment between the Marketing and Sales teams, respectively. Thus, not only do conversion rates increase, but customer relationships become stronger in the long term. Your salespeople will therefore be able to introduce a greater purchase recurrence into the company’s customer portfolio.

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Effective segmentation: define your target well

No matter how powerful marketing automation is, it can’t do anything if you don’t truly know who you’re addressing upstream. For whom exactly have you created your product or service? This is the central question you must ask yourself before starting.

Certainly, marketing automation can help you a lot in qualifying your leads. You can indeed program and obtain a segmentation of your leads based on their behavior within your workflows.

Nevertheless, poor segmentation of your leads upstream – poor targeting – can render any segmentation you might want to do later, in your marketing automation software, useless.

Choosing acquisition channels

With your target well-defined, you need to know where to find them. You need to ask yourself what content your customers read, which social networks they consult, in which groups or communities they engage, etc. Acquisition channels are those places where you make contact with your potential customers for the very first time. They constitute the top of your marketing funnel, meaning the place where your leads are generated.

This step should not be taken lightly. Just like flawed targeting, choosing the wrong channels can harm your entire marketing automation strategy.

For example, it’s useless to use TikTok if you’re targeting a professional audience over 40. Likewise, it would be unwise to spend hours creating posts for LinkedIn if you want to sell a product aimed at housewives.

Implementing tracking

Once your leads enter your marketing automation system, you need to follow them. It is very important to observe how they interact with you. And more specifically, how they behave within your website.

Implementing tracking software on your site has several advantages. You can know, for example:

• the most visited pages on your site
• the average time visitors spend on each page
• the acquisition channels that bring you the most traffic
• the most effective call-to-action buttons and sales pages
• etc.

As you can see, choosing the right tracking software greatly determines the quality of lead scoring.

The most popular lead tracking software is Google Analytics. Free and feature-rich, it largely meets the needs of a large number of small and medium-sized businesses.

However, there are increasingly alternative or complementary tracking solutions to Google’s. These offer even more refined data analysis tailored to their clients’ needs.

Ultimately, the right choice of tracking software will always depend on the specific needs and market in which your company operates.

Choosing your marketing automation tools

Once you have clearly defined your target, chosen your channels, and implemented tracking, it’s time to – finally – choose a marketing automation software.

To ensure you make the right choice, you need to consider a number of factors, namely:

• Price

Most marketing automation tools offer pricing based on basic free versions that can integrate paid extensions. To avoid it becoming too expensive, you need to project yourself long-term. Ask yourself what features you will need in three years, considering the clients you are targeting and your acquisition channels.

• Ease of use

To make our lives easier, we often need machines. However, these machines are sometimes too complex for what we really need. Unfortunately, this is the case for many marketing automation tools. Prioritize intuitive software. The less time you spend trying to understand them, the more time you gain for truly important projects. And the less money you spend training your teams.

• Integration with your other software

An extremely important aspect and, unfortunately, very often overlooked.

A typical example: many companies using a marketing automation tool adopt it without checking if it can be integrated with their CRM tool. Consequently, communication between the Marketing and Sales teams, respectively, becomes much less fluid.

Hubspot

An essential reference in the market, this tool has the advantage of being a complete turnkey platform. It is essentially a CRM system integrated with prospecting channels.

Hubspot allows its users to very comprehensively track all team work, between Marketing and Sales.

This software offers a free version. However, it can quickly become a rather expensive solution as soon as you want to add certain essential, yet paid, functionalities. This is why this tool is often preferred by companies of a certain size.

Active Campaign

Another essential reference in marketing automation, Active Campaign is another very complete solution, with many features spanning marketing automation and sales automation. Although this software does not have a free version, its upgrade options remain relatively affordable given its number of features and its use is known to be very intuitive. It is therefore very popular with many SMEs, but also highly appreciated by some very demanding TPEs (very small businesses) in the field of marketing automation. For example, in the infopreneurship sector.

Sendinblue

An excellent email marketing tool, Sendinblue is recognized for its ease of use and its rather affordable price.

This French software can be particularly interesting for small businesses with limited budgets. They can gain initial experience with the benefits of marketing automation – especially regarding email marketing – before choosing to adopt a more sophisticated solution later on.

LaGrowthMachine

Created by the French company Deux.io, La Growth Machine is a marketing automation solution that stands out, among other things, for its multi-channel approach. Fully personalized, this solution allows for marketing operations via LinkedIn, Twitter, and/or email.

With this tool, all you need is drag & drop to create a multi-channel prospecting workflow. The idea is to approach on one channel, engage on another, and perhaps follow up on a third. The multi-channel approach allows, among other things, to give a more “natural” and personalized tone to sales prospecting. According to its founder, Brice Maurin, the results are 3.3 times better than with a more conventional approach.