⚙️ Real-Life Marketing Automation Wins for Small Teams

Ready to stop chasing tasks and start scaling smart? In this episode of Kids, Chaos & Killer Campaigns, we’re diving into real-life marketing automation wins—built for small teams, tested by a mom of two, and powered by HubSpot.

Whether you’re a marketing team of one or juggling multiple hats, this episode is packed with practical, scalable automations that save you time and reduce manual work. We’re talking:

•  Welcome email series & lead nurturing
•  Lead scoring and routing
•  Marketing-to-sales handoffs
•  Client renewal workflows
•  Automated data hygiene

I’ll walk you through exactly how I’ve used HubSpot to build these workflows—and sprinkle in some parenting chaos for good measure (because yes, I’ve fixed a lead routing issue mid-tantrum before breakfast).

If you’ve ever said, “There has to be a better way,” this episode is for you.

Transcript

Welcome back to Kids, Chaos, and Killer Campaigns, the podcast for marketers who know what it's like to build an email nurture workflow while also building a pillow fort.

Because we all know life doesn't stop when you hit publish.

I'm mom of two girls and a digital marketer who's lived through both toddler tantrums over the wrong colored cereal bowl in the morning and the complete chaos of a CRM migration.

Today, we're diving into something that has changed the game for me and tons of other small marketing teams that I've worked with. Marketing automation that actually works and scales.

I'm not talking about complicated 87 step funnels that need full stack development teams to maintain.

I'm talking about real life, sanity saving automations that help you get more done faster. All while keeping your workflows clean, your team aligned, and your leads moving through the funnel.

First, let's talk about welcome emails or nurture sequences that feel personal but run themselves. I remember the first week we were potty training my youngest.

We spent a long weekend working hard to set up a good foundation for her, and the week after, well, it was a wild ride. Accidents, constant potty reminders, and a ton of outfit changes. Meanwhile, we had floods of new leads coming in from a campaign that we had just launched.

I knew there was zero chance our sales team was going to be able to follow up with each of these leads individually, and that is why I was so glad I'd already set up a simple email nurture flow before we launched the campaign.

Before launch, I built a simple email nurture sequence in HubSpot that triggered when someone downloaded our lead magnet.

The first email was a simple thank you with the content they downloaded attached and a quick what to expect message.

The second email gave them a new, helpful resource that hit right on their pain point.

And the third email was a simple invitation inviting them to connect with someone on our sales team to help solve their problem.

These emails felt personal because they were built with care and written by a human, not a robot.

They also bought our team time. Time to qualify the leads and let our system enrichment learn more about them and determine the right steps for them. All while I was cleaning up potty training messes.

Quick mom email hack, you don't need intense 10-part sequences to get started. Start with three quality emails and build from there.

The next must have automation is automated lead routing to ensure no one falls through the crack.

Remember the days when we wrote everything down in a paper planner? School events, pediatrician appointments, deadlines, client calls, It was scribbled into one overstuffed notebook that never left our side. That planner was our lifeline.

Well, just like we've upgraded from paper planners to digital calendars with color-coded appointment reminders, our CRM deserves that same glow-up.

And one step is automated lead routing. In HubSpot, I built a workflow that automatically assigns new leads to the correct sales reps based on things like geography, lead source, and specific data, including industry and company size.

Each contact gets routed to the correct sales rep instantly. No manual assigning, no inbox chaos, and no chance of letting leads slip through the cracks.

Our automation sends a notification instantly to the correct sales reps they know to follow

We've even built an extra step that fires off a book here to connect email from the sales rep if personal outreach isn't able to happen within two hours from receipt of the lead. This helps us ensure that our hot leads are connected with quickly, even on those crazy busy days when our reps are in back-to-back meetings.

If you want to take this automation one step further, scheduling

You know when you go to a website and you fill out a form and then it automatically pops up a calendar to book time with a rep? That's the next step to this automated lead If you can get your leads directly to the correct calendar to book a meeting, you're gonna see a major increase in meeting conversions because people love to have control and we're all a right now mentality. So when we're thinking about the form, we wanna book the meeting right now.

Another great automation is lead scoring that makes your sales team say thank you. While I was reviewing conversion metrics and content performance one afternoon, I noticed a pattern. who were actively engaging with our website and our emails, visiting pricing pages, downloading case studies, clicking through our nurture emails, but they weren't actively reaching out to sales and

Even worse, sales wasn't actively reaching out to them.

That awareness gap was costing us opportunities. So I built a lead scoring model in HubSpot to help close it.

We set up lead scoring rules based on things like email engagement, opens, clicks, replies, website activity on our high intent pages, pages like our solutions pages, pricing pages, or case studies, and form submissions like webinar signups or gated content downloads.

Once a contact hits our specified threshold, HubSpot automatically notifies the sales team and also drops that contact into a follow-up sequence. No more guesswork, no more cold outreach when warm leads are right in front of us. This really helps our team to prioritize who they're reaching out to on a weekly basis and have warm conversations instead of really trying to fight those cold leads.

Mom marketer tip of the day, even starting with a basic scoring system, say 0 to 100 based on email opens or page views, gives your team instant clarity on who's ready for a conversation.

Now, prospects aren't my only focus, so we've also built out client renewal reminders without needing a calendar invite.

This year, I almost missed re-enrollment for my daughter's dance class because it turns out relying on just mom memory and email newsletters is actually a very risky strategy.

That close call and barely getting her into the class time that we needed reminded me just how easy it is to let those important things slip through the cracks. And it's no different with our client renewals.

To avoid scramble in our business, we now automate those renewal reminders, both for our internal team and for our clients.

My HubSpot workflow tip, build a custom property in HubSpot that includes that renewal date. And then build 90, 60, and 30 day reminder workflows that will let your internal team know that the renewal is coming up and will shoot a note to the client to remind them the renewal is coming up as well.

This setup helps keep our renewals proactive and not reactive. It saves everyone from that dreaded, wait, that expired last week moment, keeps our clients happier, and it keeps our client-facing team much less

Getting the leads is just one step in the funnel. Prospect handoff automation is an absolute must have.

I ran track in high school, specifically the 4x1 relay, and if you've ever run a relay,

know one thing that matters just as much as speed is the handoff. You practice it over and over because even the fastest runners can lose a race if their handoff is sloppy.

The same concept applies to moving a prospect from marketing to sales to client onboarding. No matter how strong your team is, a messy handoff can not only cost you momentum, it can cost you the deal.

So here's how we've cleaned it up in HubSpot.

We use a change in lead stage to trigger notification and internal task assignments.

We have a pop-up form that's triggered when a deal is changed to close won

That includes key context that our onboarding team

Notes, links, client expectations, which is then automatically added to the deal and also shared with the assigned onboarding specialist so there's no hiccups and no delays.

Once the deal is marked closed won an onboarding email sequence also kicks off, preventing those delays and eliminating confusion.

This is a baton pass that your team can actually count on. It's practiced, polished, and designed not to drop.

Now, last but not least is data hygiene workflow automations because clean data is a love language and it happens to be mine.

let me paint a picture for you from my early mom days. My youngest was still night nursing, and one night she woke up around 4am. As I stumbled out of bed, half asleep so that I could go make her a bottle, I turned the corner out of our kitchen and wham! Stepped on a minefield of Legos that my oldest had left out.

One lodged right into the arch of my foot. I tripped. I cut my toe open. Might have said a few curse words. Nearly dropped the bottle and honestly wanted to just scream. I was mad at my daughter, but mostly mad at myself because I knew we should have picked up the mess before bedtime no matter how tired we all were.

That's exactly what messy data in your CRM feels like. You don't always notice until you trip over it.

Bad data slows you down. It clutters your workflows and breaks the very system you rely on to scale.

And when your team is already small or stretched thin, that friction adds up fast.

We use HubSpot automation to keep things clean behind the scenes, like a digital housekeeping service.

We use auto formatting for name fields because nothing says automated email like broken capitalization in your hi message.

We also flag junk domains, things like test at test.com or abcd at abc.com so that they don't skew lead scoring or our email performance.

We also set deduplication alerts so our reps aren't calling on the same contact twice or confusing follow-up efforts because of duplicate contact records.

and standardizing our life cycle stages helps to make sure our reporting and segmentation stay consistent.

Now, you may ask, why does this matter? It matters because bad data leads

embarrassing mistakes and personalization. You definitely don't want to send an email with hi to the wrong name entirely.

It can also lead to misinformed decision making. When reports are skewed by duplicates or dummy leads, you don't have clear insights to what's really going on in your pipeline.

Poor data can lead to missed follow-ups when contacts slip through the cracks because of stage inconsistencies or ownership issues. And honestly, can damage deliverability if your email lists are filled with fake or outdated emails.

data hygiene automations aren't just nice to have. They're foundational.

because you can't build high performing campaigns on a foundation of messy data.

just like you can't effectively make a 2 a.m. on top of a Lego minefield.

So let's recap those simple automation wins. have welcome and nurture email sequences, automated lead routing and automated lead scoring, automated client renewal reminders, a seamless handoff process that you can automate just like a perfect baton handoff in the four by one relay, and must have data hygiene and data cleanup workflows.

You don't need a huge team or a giant tech stack to get started. Just smart, intentional automation built around what you actually need.

So today's challenge, pick one simple automation that would save you 30 minutes each week and go build it. Even if it's just step one of the process, it's great to start somewhere.

And remember, like motherhood, marketing automation is messy, iterative, and always evolving.

you're doing amazing, whether you're cleaning up your email list or cleaning some crayon off the wall.

Thank you so much for checking out today's podcast. I'd love to hear the topics you want to hear discussed. So please drop them in the comments or shoot me a line on LinkedIn. I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast and leave it a review. And please share today's episode with a marketer who you think would benefit from some simple automation tips. I'd love to connect on LinkedIn to stay in touch through this journey. My LinkedIn will be dropped in the show notes so you can just click there.

and shoot me a connect request.

Next week, we're gonna be talking about the mom marketer guilt trap. How to overcome it and feel confident.

In the meantime, enjoy the kids, enjoy the chaos, and I'm wishing you all killer campaigns.