Marketing automation
Marketing automation is software that sends messages to an opted-in audience based on behaviour, attributes and lifecycle stage rather than on a person pressing send. It covers nurture journeys, behavioural triggers, segmentation and broadcasts, and is distinct from sales automation, which opens individual conversations from your own mailboxes and stops as soon as a human replies.
How it works
Contacts enter a workflow via a trigger — a form fill, a lifecycle change, a product event — and move through branching steps with waits and conditions until they hit a goal or an exit. Sending is usually from the vendor's shared infrastructure.
Why it matters
It removes the manual work from journeys you would otherwise run by hand, and it fires at moments a person would miss. It earns its cost when the journey is repeatable and the audience is large enough that running it manually costs real hours.
Why it is the wrong tool for cold outreach
Most marketing platforms prohibit purchased or scraped lists in their terms, send from shared pools whose reputation you would be risking, and lack the per-mailbox pacing, warmup and inbox rotation that cold email depends on.
How Autocloz handles it
Autocloz automates the outbound sales motion, not marketing nurture: multichannel sequences that send from your own mailboxes and numbers, pace against per-mailbox daily limits, and cancel on reply. There are no landing pages, forms, popups or lifecycle campaigns — that work belongs in a marketing platform.
FAQ
What is the difference between marketing automation and sales automation?
Marketing automation nurtures people who opted in, using behaviour and lifecycle stage, usually from shared sending infrastructure. Sales automation opens and advances individual conversations from your own mailboxes and numbers, paces conservatively, and stops the moment a human replies.
Can I use marketing automation for cold email?
Usually not within the vendor's terms and rarely well in practice. Run cold outreach through a tool built for it, from your own mailboxes, on a separate sending domain from your marketing mail.
Related terms
Multichannel sequencing is automating a coordinated outreach cadence across more than one channel — for example email, then a LinkedIn touch, then a call, then a WhatsApp follow-up — from a single sequence, with per-channel timing and safety rules.
Cold email is an unsolicited but permission-conscious, personalized outreach email sent to a prospect you have no prior relationship with, for a business purpose. Done well it is targeted and relevant (not bulk spam) and complies with laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR.
A sales cadence (or sequence) is a structured, time-based series of outreach touches — emails, calls, LinkedIn actions, texts — designed to reach a prospect across multiple channels and attempts before disqualifying or moving on. It defines what to send, on which channel, and when.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B go-to-market strategy that treats individual high-value accounts as markets of one — coordinating marketing and sales to target a defined list of named accounts with personalized, multichannel outreach, rather than casting a wide net for individual leads.