What marketing automation means for a Perth business, the email and SMS flows to build first, what it costs, and when it is not worth setting up yet.
Marketing automation sounds bigger than it is. For most Perth businesses it comes down to a handful of emails and texts that send themselves when a customer does something: joins your list, leaves a checkout, buys, or goes quiet. This is how we think about it: what it covers, which flows to build first, what it costs, and when it is not worth setting up yet.
A campaign is a message you choose to send, once, to a group of people. An automation, or flow, is a message that sends on its own because of something one person did. You build it once and it keeps running whether or not anyone is at a desk that day.
For a small or mid-sized business, most of that is email automation, with SMS added where timing matters. It runs from one platform that knows who your customers are and what they have done. We build ours in Klaviyo. You can see how we run email marketing and automation in Perth on our email page.
Most businesses do not need twenty automations. They need four or five that work, built in this order.
Sent when someone joins your list. It is the most opened email most businesses will ever send, and it sets up everything after it: who you are, what you sell and what to do next.
Sent when someone starts a checkout, a booking or a quote form and does not finish. These people were already most of the way there, so a reminder is often all it takes.
Sent after a sale or a finished job. It confirms the decision, answers the questions people usually ask next, and is the natural place for a review request or a second order.
Sent when a customer has gone quiet for longer than your normal buying cycle. It either brings them back or tells you they have moved on, which keeps your list clean.
For service businesses with a longer sales cycle, a short sequence that follows up an enquiry over days or weeks, so a lead does not go cold while you are on another job.
Fridgy is a Western Australian drinkware brand that sells through its own Shopify store. Its email runs in Klaviyo as a mix of scheduled campaigns and automated flows.
There is no cost per send, so the automated half is the highest margin thing the store does. The rest of the picture is in the Fridgy case study.
There are two costs, the same as with ads.
The build is front-loaded. Most of the work is in the first few weeks, and after that the flows need checking and improving, not rebuilding. Our retainers are rolling with no lock-in, and we agree the scope before anything is built.
SMS is for the moments where timing matters more than detail: a booking reminder, a cart that is about to expire, a sale that ends tonight. It works best planned alongside email, so nobody gets the same message twice. In Australia you need consent before you send a marketing text or email, every message has to say who it is from, and every message needs a working way to unsubscribe. More on how we handle it on our SMS marketing page.
Email automation is the biggest part of it for most businesses. Marketing automation is the wider term, and it also covers SMS, lead follow-up and the segments that decide who gets what.
Not always. An online store can run everything from its email platform connected to the store. A service business with a sales process usually benefits from a CRM, so enquiries, quotes and follow-ups sit in one place.
The one that connects properly to where your sales happen. For Shopify stores that is usually Klaviyo, which is what we build in. If you are choosing a store platform as well, our guide to Webflow, WordPress or Shopify covers that decision.
The first flows can be live within a few weeks. We review what is already in the account before building anything new, then put the welcome, abandoned checkout, post-purchase and win-back flows in before any regular campaigns.
