Where to Start With Marketing Automation in 2026
Marketing automations don’t need to be advanced, or involve multiple tools, to be effective and save your team time. The purpose of marketing automations are to clear some of those manual tasks off your plate so you can focus on higher value tasks like strategy, relationship-building, and market research.
Marketing automations can feel intimidating, because at face value, the word “automation” is pretty technical. People might be concerned they won’t be able to figure out how to set it up properly, or they’ll break it, or they’re worried the brand will lose it’s human touch. The purpose of this blog is to help walk you through where to start in 2026.
What’s the cost of not using marketing automation?
When you don’t leverage marketing automations in your business, you end up paying for it in other ways. This shows up as:
Slower decisions and execution
Missing leads and by the time you realize it, they’ve gone with someone else
Clients experience inconsistent delivery experience
Teamwide burnout
Revenue leaks that aren’t immediately apparent in your reporting, but you notice a general stagnation in growth
This is nothing you would notice in your day-to-day, but something you might review at the end of 2026 and get that sinking feeling when you realize all of the opportunity cost.
What marketing automations should you prioritize in 2026?
In this blog, we’ll review three different categories of marketing automations and a few for you to try. We’ll look at customer lifecycle automations, lead management automations, and operations based automations.
Marketing Lifecycle Automations
You’re paying in either money or time to acquire leads. Whether it’s spending hours crafting the perfect Instagram Reel or paying $2K a month in digital ads to attract prospects, marketing lifecycle automations ensure you capitalize on your lead generation spend. It’s a strategy to protect your potential revenue. The first four automations for you to test drive here are:
Welcome email sequences
Abandoned chart & checkout sequences (for product-based businesses)
Post-purchase sequences (thank you’s, review requests, purchase confirmations, etc)
Recapture campaigns (shooting your shot with leads who went cold 6+ months ago)
We’ll deep dive into post-purchase sequences later in this article and on our socials this week.
Lead Management Automations
At the end of the day, certain leads hold higher value than others. They’re a better fit for your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but if you don’t have tightened operations around lead management, you’re making your best leads wait for you just as long as your least relevant leads. This is a big one.
Businesses need to maintain a certain level of pipeline velocity to maintain a general level of health. Automations can help seal a lot of these gaps. The top three automations to focus on here are:
Lead scoring (having a system to automatically score leads based on alignment to your ICP)
Automated lead routing (if you have a big enough team for this to make sense)
Behavior-based nurturing
We’ll deep dive into lead scoring later in this article.
Marketing Operations Automations
Every business can relate to the day the people (usually the founder) became a bottleneck for the entire business. Deliverables got caught, miscommunications were on the rise, and client dissatisfaction was apparent. This is a big, blinking arrow towards the operations and systems at play.
If you don’t tighten this area of your business up, you will literally lose hundreds of hours of time and your sanity. Four automations to focus on here for highest impact are:
Client onboarding
Social media scheduling (a quick win)
Automated, live reporting
Internal task handoffs
Let’s deep dive into client onboarding.
How do you build a client onboarding automation?
Congratulations, you signed a new client! Now, what? If you aren’t sure, that means your client feels even more unsure. And your onboarding process and is the first impression for a lot of key contacts. Not to mention, if you fail to capture the right data, you’ve also crippled your team to perform their job well, which inevitably pushes your team into a reactive state.
A tight client onboarding system not only improves your team quality and speed to execution, and your clients feel taken care of and confident in you.
The easiest way to do this is to create a trigger when someone becomes a client. For example, let’s say you use Honeybook for your CRM. Once a lead is marked as “Onboarding” or “Active” or “Client” (you can choose what you name the various pipeline stages in most CRMs), you can fire an email sequence.
Welcome email: a fluffy marketing email that restates your mission & values, intros the team, and sets expectations for next steps. Your client will probably skim it, yes, but it’s a goodwill measure that goes a long way.
Intake form: In most email builders, or CRMs, you can set a delay. So 24 hours after the welcome email, you send another email with the intake form. This is where your client uploads any key info you need: whether it be for billing, a file attachment section for brand guides, etc. We recommend setting up automated email nudge reminders.
Internal setup: you need to get the client setup in your project management tool. If you hosted your intake form in ClickUp, and used the embed to send the email through your CRM, this is pretty simple. You can set up an automation in ClickUp that once the form is completed, a new folder is created (populate name of the folder using a field from the form), and files are stored accordingly. We recommend setting up an automation to create two tasks and assign it to someone to 1) QA the new space, what was uploaded, and add the client to the space as a Guest, if appropriate and 2) send a manual timeline + next steps email to client.
Timeline + next steps: what should your client expect next? A kickoff call? Silence while y’all pull together a strategy? Whatever the answer is, that’s fine, they just need to know.
How do you build an automated post-purchase sequence?
Whether you’re service-based or product-based, if you purchase something and don’t hear anything from the business you bought from — that’s unsettling. As marketers, we want to reinforce the buying decision and make our customers feel confident. Post-purchase is a key time to request reviews, upsell or cross-sell, or turn purchasers into brand evangelists (people who go tell others about your business).
A post-purchase sequence is the difference between a transactional relationship and a genuine relationship with your audience. So, how do we get there?
The lowest barrier to entry here is using an automated email sequence. A lot of CMS’ (i.e. SquareSpace) have built in email automations.
Confirmation emails: thank your customer for their purchase and confirm what was purchased, and what to expect next. This might be when to expect a tracking code if you’re product-based or an outline of next steps if you’re service-based.
Review requests: you can set up automations in your email builder, especially if it’s tied to your online store (like a SquareSpace plan) so it sends a review request a couple days or week after services rendered or product is delivered.
Future offer: you can set up a major time delay to offer a coupon or re-engagement a couple months post purchase in an attempt to extend their lifecycle and build loyalty.
This is one of the most effective ways to continue building revenue from contacts even after the initial purchase is made.
How do you build an automated lead scoring system?
Not all leads are made the same. And this isn’t a dig at small businesses. It’s all about what fits your ICP. Honestly? If Apple approached us tomorrow wanting an RFP, we’d of course fulfill that, but they aren’t really our ICP. Our ICP is more in line with mid sized businesses (50-500 employees). So any company who fills out our form and has 50-500 employees is immediately weighted differently than a company like Apple.
Building a lead scoring system is the simplest way to objectively review prospects and prioritize your next steps. We’ve seen this smooth over the sales vs marketing showdown in multiple organizations simply because it brings that visibility and clarity to both departments.
So, how do you build this? Erica is going to be doing a live build on her YouTube channel later this week, so stay on the lookout for that.
But essentially, you’re going to need to have a very clear idea of who your ICP is. If you don’t have that, you’re not ready for lead scoring yet. Check out this blog first.
Once you have that cleared up, you’re going to look at:
What behavior indicate higher interest? (certain pages being viewed on the website, time spent on pages, certain events being fulfilled in Google Analytics, etc.)
What engagement threshold do they need to cross to be considered “warm”? (certain # of email clicks, certain # of forms filled out, etc.)
What is the right “fit” for your company? (industry, company size, location, etc.)
From here, you can create a lead scoring system where leads accrue points based on the above questions. And you work with sales to define, how many points do they need to hit to become “sales qualified”? And when they hit that point threshold, can you set up an automation to notify sales?
Closing
Marketing automations don’t mean you need to spend 12 hours behind the computer hardcoding. It’s reviewing where gaps exist, where manual work is unnecessary, and creating systems to solve for both. This is a major operational transformation your business needs in 2026.
Don’t try to build all of these automations today. Start with the heaviest hitter for you. And if you’re feeling even more overwhelmed and lost, but know your business needs this, drop us a line. We’d love to help.
