Five Marketing Automation Tips: Increasing Engagement and Maximizing Customer Retention

1. Starting With the Basics: Newsletter Subscription Reminders

Let’s say you’re a marketer starting from scratch. Or maybe you’re a marketer who wants to make sure you’re not missing any of the fundamentals before you expand your use of marketing automation. 

This blog is a great starting point. Learn how to set up a newsletter subscription reminder and discover how to make the most impact when starting out with your first marketing automation. This strategy focuses on building automations right from the beginning of the customer journey, so that it can be used to inform your continued optimization efforts. 

What you'll learn to build: 

• Naming conventions and structure that make automations easy to read, maintain, and troubleshoot
• Effective finish steps that track completion across all branches and generate actionable performance data
• Email content strategy for automation: why your confirmation email should differ from your reminder email, and how AI can help draft both
• Measurement and optimization by connecting automations to Campaigns for asset management and Customer Journeys to identify where customers drop off

In the end, you’ll understand the basics for setting up an automation strategy for emails to support Customer Journeys and Campaigns, and also how to use AIRA, Xperience by Kentico’s native AI, to draft emails to make the process even faster.  

This blog also covers how automations can be used to reveal insights about customer behavior. By the end of it, you’ll understand how automation statistics can be used to identify bottlenecks, optimize send times, and continuously improve performance. 

2. Post-Purchase Personalization: Reach Customers at Their Most Receptive Moment 

Your first automation was a success, and a customer makes a purchase. Now what? This blog post covers a strategy for delivering product-specific guidance exactly when customers need it most in digital commerce: right after completing a purchase. The hours immediately after a purchase are when customers are most ready for help, but this window closes fast.  

What you'll learn to build: 

• Custom contact fields that store purchase information and make it available as an automation condition
• Strategic form placement on order confirmation pages to capture product details without friction
• Product-specific email branches that deliver the right guidance based on what each customer bought
• Engagement-based follow-ups that send additional content only to customers who engaged with your first email
• Scaling approaches for growing product catalogs without building unwieldy automations

The payoff from this blog post is that you’ll know how to build post-purchase sequences that feel personalized, because they are! You’ll know how to send customers the help or information they need for their specific purchase at exactly the right moment, without any manual intervention, which ultimately increases satisfaction and drives upsell opportunities. 

3. Content Series Automation: Build Engagement-Responsive Sequences That Adapt 

Do you want to send relevant content, but don’t want to send the wrong message to customers who haven’t opened any of your emails lately? This blog explores how marketers can approach building automations that are tailored based on how (and if) a customer is interacting with your emails. This will help you avoid flooding their inbox, and give you the opportunity to send them a check-in to see if they’re still interested in your marketing content.  

What you'll learn to build: 

• Chained automations that trigger sequentially based on engagement
• Double opt-in automation that confirms subscription while logging the activity that starts your content series
• Reusable page widgets that log customer activities without waiting indefinitely for responses
• Individual article automations that stay readable and focused by handling one article at a time
• Custom activities that signal when to move subscribers to the next step in their journey

The result of this approach is a content series that builds trust and can respond to real engagement. Subscribers who click move to the next article immediately. Subscribers who don't engage receive a gentle nudge before the series continues. This creates a more natural, responsive experience than pushing content on a fixed schedule. 

4. Event Marketing Automation: Connect Registration to Attendance to Follow-Up 

In-person events create a challenge: registration happens online, attendance happens offline, but your follow-up needs to happen back online. This blog offers a solution, with a strategy for follow-up that bridges the gap between the online and offline world and delivers different messages based on whether or not customers actually attended. 

What you'll learn to build: 

• Pre-event automations that send registration confirmations and day-before reminders with logistics information
• Reliable attendance tracking using QR codes and form submissions instead of unreliable page visits
• Merged contact records registrations and event attendance resolve to the same person
• Attendance-based segmentation that sends "thank you for attending" emails to actual participants and "we missed you" messages to no-shows
• Post-event chains that connect attendance to loyalty programs or special offers for event participants

This blog prepares you for the next event, you’ll be able to follow-up using automation that that is tailored based on if a customer showed up. Attendees receive targeted appreciation and exclusive offers, and no-shows get a softer re-engagement message. This two-path approach increases post-event conversions and gives you data on the impact of your event. 

5. Loyalty Program Automation: Celebrate Milestones Automatically  

A tier upgrade congratulations email sent the day after a customer qualifies lands completely differently than one sent weeks later when someone finally has time to run a report and identify which customers need communication. 

This post covers how to effectively automate loyalty milestone celebrations, so they feel intentional and timely. 

What you'll learn to build: 

• Automated tier progression that recognizes customer advancement immediately upon qualifying
• Guard conditions that prevent duplicate congratulations emails when customers advance faster than expected
• Milestone automations for each tier level: welcome, approaching next tier, and tier achieved messages
• Marketer-owned messaging while developers handle point calculations and threshold logic
• Contact fields for segmentation so you can target promotions or exclusive access based on customer tier

This process creates loyalty programs that feel personal; because congratulations messages arrive right on time. Customers feel recognized and appreciated, which leads to a higher chance of repeat purchases and brand loyalty. Your team can iterate on tier messaging and incentives independently without developer involvement for every change. 

Building a Cohesive Automation Strategy 

These five automation workflows, from first automation fundamentals to loyalty programs, work together to create a complete customer experience strategy. The principle connecting all of them is the same: separate the logic that determines what should happen (handled by developers) from the customer communication that responds to it (owned by marketers). This separation keeps automations maintainable, testable, and easy to optimize. 

When you stack these automations across your customer journey (capturing customer intent at purchase, nurturing them through content, recognizing loyalty milestones, and supporting event experiences) you’re able to sustain engagement long term and build better customer relationships that last.  

If you're looking for more technical details on how to actually set these workflows up, head over to the Kentico Community Blog where you'll find my complete Xperience by Kentico Automations series. It includes step-by-step guides and practical advice from developers who've built these exact scenarios. 

Whether you're a marketer planning strategy or a developer implementing it, there's something there to help you move forward.