Marketing automation

October 24, 2026

Marketing automation is the use of software to send emails and messages, score leads and pass them to sales based on preset conditions, instead of doing each step by hand. A marketer builds the process once, and the system runs it for every customer who meets the conditions.

What is marketing automation?

Microsoft describes marketing automation as using software to take over repetitive tasks such as sending emails, posting on social media and launching ad campaigns. The sets of instructions that tell the software what to do are called workflows (Microsoft Dynamics 365, What is marketing automation, accessed October 2026).

A workflow usually has three parts:

Trigger: a customer fills in a form, abandons a cart, or has not bought again in 30 days.
Action: send an email, send a Zalo message, add points to a lead, create a call task for sales.
Branch: if the customer opens the email, send the next piece of content; if not, switch channels.

The input data usually comes from a CRM or a CDP. In Vietnam, the most common sending channels are email marketing and Zalo messages through ZNS (Zalo is a Vietnamese messaging app).

Lead nurturing and lead scoring

These are the two jobs marketing automation does most in industries with long buying cycles, such as real estate, education, insurance and B2B.

Lead nurturing: sending a sequence of content to leads who are not ready to buy yet, for example a price list, an intro video or an event invitation.
Lead scoring: adding points for behavior such as opening an email or viewing the pricing page. Microsoft recommends also setting a lead qualification threshold so sales does not waste time on weak leads.

Illustrative example (hypothetical)

An English language center gets 1,000 leads a month at a CPL of VND 80,000, or VND 80 million in ad spend. Sales only has time to call the 400 newest leads. The other 600 used to be ignored.

The center builds a sequence of 4 emails and 1 ZNS message for those 600 leads. If 3% (18 people) sign up for a trial class, sales gets 18 more quality calls without spending another dong on ads. The same VND 80 million now covers follow-up for all 1,000 leads instead of 400.

Rules to keep in mind when sending automatically

Automation does not exempt you from the law. Vietnam’s Decree 91/2020/ND-CP bars each advertiser from sending more than 3 promotional emails to one email address, or 3 promotional text messages to one phone number, within 24 hours, unless there is a different agreement with the recipient. Promotional text messages may only be sent between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. (Decree 91/2020/ND-CP, Article 13, August 2020).

A customer who lands in three workflows at once (abandoned cart, birthday, sale) could get 4 emails in a single day. Set one frequency cap across all workflows. For Gmail, anyone sending more than 5,000 emails a day must offer one-click unsubscribe on marketing emails (Google, Email sender guidelines, accessed October 2026).