Marketing automation framework: how to automate like a human

A useful framing: marketing automation is simply trying to automate the things you’d do manually for each and every customer if you had infinite time.

If you had infinite time, you’d walk every customer through your product personally. You’d check in when something important happened. You’d send a thank-you note when they bought. You’d call to let them know when stock was running low.

In other words: the best automation is doing—at scale—what you’d naturally do for one customer if you could.

This framing matters because it keeps you grounded in value. Instead of thinking “what can I automate?” you’re really asking:

• Would this action feel useful, respectful, even delightful if I did it in person?
• Would I repeat it 100 times if I had to do it manually?
• Would I feel comfortable looking a customer in the eye and saying this?

This helps you keep your automations human. Real. Useful.

A fatigue check

If I ran a small sneaker store and I knew a couple of customers were big runners, loved the Nike Air Zoom Structure, typically bought a pair every year—because they run so much—and I only have two pairs left of the 2025 version, with six months until the next release, might I call them to let them know?

Yep, I really do think I would. It’s right in the sweet spot of genuinely useful and it’s obviously good sales for my business.

If they didn’t answer the phone, would I send them a text message with the same information?

Still yes, I think I would. There’s a strong argument this is valuable to my customer. Maybe they couldn’t get to the phone: now they get this information at a glance.

Would I then call, SMS and email them 10 times the coming week?

No. I would not. Because that would cross the invisible line between reasonable follow-up and “hassling” my customer. In other words it’s no longer valuable to my customer. At some point I have to accept they’re not interested, they’re on holidays, they’re unwell, etc. At some point, being overly pushy will leave a bad taste and ruin any chance we have of selling a customer a future product.

A value check

If you ran a small pizza shop on your local high-street, would you run out to every person that walked past and ask if they want to eat a pizza this evening?

You might. We’re all familiar with hawkers and we’ve all walked down streets with maître d’s out the front trying to entice you in for a meal.

But, it’s not for everyone.

Why? It’s spray-and-pray. It’s not only not valuable to most of the people you’re talking to, it might actually put them off.

Marketing automation makes it much easier to fall into this pattern. (Of course, regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM add clear legal requirements here too.)

Thinking about whether what we’re sending to potential customers (and current customers) and whether it is valuable is fundamental to good automation. Often the key here is information: understanding where customers are in the lifecycle, what they’re interested in, their context.

After all, if someone stops outside the restaurant and is reading the menu and you were to ask, in the right tone, if they have any questions: that’s very different to running up-and-down the street talking to every person you can.

An ethical check

You may have seen Nike has faced a lawsuit alleging misleading subject lines (here’s the actual filing). TL;DR the complainants argue that subject lines like “2 days only: Save up to 50% 😯” were misleading because the sale in question actually lasted a week beyond the claimed expiration.

Legal caveat: I’m not a lawyer. As I understand it, the question is whether this is deliberately misleading, resulting in psychological distortion: leading customers to make buying decisions they would not otherwise have made.

Regardless of the legal outcome, I think most would agree that no one likes being on the receiving end of “false promotions.”

Let’s take that as given for this post: i.e. no one wants to be lied to. One benefit of the “automate as if you were scaling yourself” framing is that it causes you to really consider whether you would, in fact, do something.

In this case: would I personally look a customer in the eye and say “This sale ends in 48 hours” if it, in fact, ended in 7 days? No. I would not.

If automation is simply scaling up what you’d do in person if you could provides a nice ethical check on our ideas as well. And that’s not a bad thing.

Moments of delight

If I could write a hand-written note to every customers to thank them for becoming a paying customer, would I? Absolutely.

This isn’t specifically marketing something. It’s not a transactional moment. It’s a moment of delight. It’s investing in the relationship, trying to create goodwill and perhaps some word-of-mouth.

Now, the challenge with automation is that, often, what makes a moment of delight “delightful” is that it requires unexpected effort and thoughtfulness. By definition, it can be hard to codify this, which doesn’t always lend itself to automation.

But it can be done. I use Superhuman, the email client. It’s a great product. Every 10,000 messages they show me a little popup that says something like “You’ve handled 70,000 messages with Superhuman ♥️” (for real: 70,000!) It’s not a hand-written note and I am fully aware that it’s feeding the beast that is my dopamine receptor but, hey, it works.

Part of what makes it a little moment of delight is there’s no specific, short-term outcome. I don’t even think there is a call to action. It’s just like “Hey, you really do get a lot of email. Good job keeping up.”

This wouldn’t be possible if Rahul (the founder) had to manually message every customer that sent 10,000+ emails.

A complex example, Spotify’s Wrapped fits into this section. Without analytics and automation at scale, Wrapped wouldn’t be possible. It’s been incredibly successful as a marketing initiative because it creates a moment of delight (and of interest).

Food for thought!

Power, responsibility and all that

Automation is awesome. It’s powerful. And that means you’ve got to wield it wisely.

This article outlines a rubric you can use when brainstorming or considering marketing automations:

• Is this ethical? How would I feel doing this face-to-face?
• Is it valuable?
• Are we going overboard here? Have we become annoying?
• Can we go a step further and delight.

Hope you find this rubric useful. This is an original idea so would love feedback, please hit respond and let me know your thoughts!

Keep growing, Chris