You're Doing It Wrong What to Automate in Marketing - and What You Should Still Write Yourself

Automate This First: The 80/20 of Emails, Workflows, and Lead Scoring

Start with the few automations that actually move the needle: welcome and onboarding sequences, cart abandonment, trial-to-paid nudges, renewal reminders, and basic lead scoring rules. Think of this as the marketing 80/20 — automate the 20 percent of touches that drive 80 percent of revenue and engagement. Keep workflows simple, measurable, and tied to one clear metric like activation rate or conversion velocity. Avoid mega-scripts that try to do everything.

Map the customer journey in a spreadsheet or on a whiteboard, then pick one high-impact workflow to automate this week. Instrument it with concrete metrics: open and click rates, event completions, and conversion lift. Build lead scoring from behavior signals (product events, demo requests) plus firmographic filters and assign weighted points. Set a conservative MQL threshold, route leads to CRM when reached, and add a cooling period so prospects do not get spammed.

Keep creative control over the human moments. High-empathy outreach, complex proposals, long sales emails, and brand-defining narratives need manual craft. Use templates in automations but write bespoke subject lines and body copy for your top decile of leads. Test variants, analyze real replies, and fold winning language back into automation templates so humans and machines learn from each other and the best messaging spreads.

Ready to run a quick experiment? Pick one trigger, build a three step sequence, and A/B test a clear CTA for seven days to measure lift. For tools, examples, and a low friction way to get started, boost your Twitter account for free then use that momentum to iterate on email copy, segmentation, and scoring rules.

Do Not Automate This: Brand Voice, Thought Leadership, and High-Stakes Copy

There are lines you don't cross when building a brand: the ones between copy that can be churned out by a bot and copy that needs a beating human heart. Your voice, your point of view, and any message that could make or break trust deserve humans in the driver's seat. Automate the grunt work; don't outsource the instincts that make people choose you.

Start by turning intuition into process, not automation. Build a living style guide with concrete examples: sentences that are “you” and sentences that aren't. Create a voice bank of do's and don'ts, require a human champion for any campaign that touches pricing, reputation, or crisis communications, and mandate a two-step review for long-form thought leadership—research accuracy first, narrative second.

• 💁 Tone: Lock down what “sassy,” “scholarly,” or “reassuring” actually sounds like with sample lines and forbidden phrases.
• 🤖 Automation: Use it for drafts, outlines, or data pulls—but always tag outputs as “human edit required.”
• 🚀 Guardrails: Define stakes-based approval: anything customer-facing or press-adjacent must pass an executive or editor sign-off.

Thought leadership and high-stakes copy are competitive advantages because they're hard to scale. Treat them as investments: schedule editorial sprints, commission original research, and measure influence (not just impressions). When you do lean on tech, use it to amplify human insight—A/B the human-crafted headline, not the idea. The result: work that feels alive, not algorithmically polite.

AI + You: When to Co-Write and When to Get Out of the Robot's Way

Think of AI as a brilliant intern: fast, obedient, slightly literal. Use it to crank out research summaries, map content frameworks, and spin dozens of headline options so you can choose the winners. Reserve full authorship for anything that needs identity, warmth, or legal care. The real power is in collaboration — a human plus machine duet that scales production without flattening personality.

Start with a simple division of labor that you can repeat. Use the machine for volume, human for soul. A compact checklist helps teams decide quickly:

• 🤖 Draft: AI generates outlines, variants, and first-pass copy to escape the blinking cursor.
• 🚀 Polish: Human edits tone, injects anecdotes, and tightens brand language.
• 💁 Decide: Humans own final calls on empathy, controversy, and legal statements.

Operationalize the duet with a loop: prompt clearly, ask for structured outputs, label what needs testing, then iterate. For example, ask AI for five subject lines plus two emotive lead sentences, run an A/B test, then rewrite the winning variant by hand to align with brand cadence. Keep prompts short, granular, and repeatable so teammates can reuse effective templates.

Practical rule of thumb: automate the repetitive, co-write the tactical, and always gate content that requires heart or accountability. Build a short list of items that are never handed off to AI alone, and treat the tool as a first draft collaborator rather than the author. Use this approach and the machine will do the heavy lifting while you keep the soul of the brand alive.

Swipe These Templates: Subject Lines, Nurture Nudges, and CTAs That Convert

Want copy that actually converts instead of gathering digital dust? Here are plug-and-play lines you can drop into sequences, plus a tiny rulebook: automate repetitive, measurable moves (send time, A/B tests, segmentation), and keep the storytelling, objections-handling, and risky offers handcrafted by humans.

Curiosity: "Quick question about [X]?" Benefit: "Save 2 hours on [task] with this trick" Social Proof: "How [Brand] grew 3x in 90 days" Urgency: "Seat closing tomorrow: grab yours?" Personal: "[Name], one idea for [company]" Teaser: "A tiny win for your [metric] — 60s read"

Reminder: "Still thinking about [offer]?" Micro-commit: "Try it for 7 days — no card needed" Resource: "Guide: 5 steps to better [result]" Question: "What would help you decide?" Follow-up: "Per our last note, quick update" Exit: "If now is not the time, want a lighter cadence?" Automate timing and trigger logic for these, but write the ones aimed at objections by hand.

CTAs that actually move people tend to be specific, low-friction, and honest: "Claim your audit," "See a 2-min demo," "Reserve one spot," "Send the checklist." Automate experiments around which CTA wins, but craft the headline and the first sentence yourself. Copy the templates above, A/B test them automatically, and keep the human edits where empathy and nuance matter.

The Sanity Check: A 7-Question Test Before You Hit 'Automate'

Automating feels like a magic wand until the wand starts casting the wrong spell on your brand. Before flipping the switch, run a quick sanity sweep that keeps automation honest and human-friendly. This is not about fear of tools, it is about respect for moments that need a brain and a voice. Treat automation like an intern: fantastic at grunt work, terrible at nuance.

1. Is this task repetitive and rules based?; 2. Does it scale linearly with volume?; 3. Will a clear decision tree cover 90 percent of cases?; 4. Is brand voice not critical in each interaction?; 5. Can errors be detected and rolled back automatically?; 6. Are legal and compliance risks minimal?; 7. Is there a human escalation path for the oddball exceptions?

If you answered yes to five or more, automation is a go with guardrails. Three to four yes answers means try a hybrid: automate data handling and timing, but keep message copy and sensitive replies human. Fewer than three yes answers means keep hands on keys. Example: schedule and personalize send windows automatically, but have humans craft subject lines and react to negative sentiment.

Make a tiny preflight routine: set one KPI, run a 2 week A B test, log every exception, and schedule a human review daily for the first month. Add an obvious kill switch and document who owns it. Do this and automation becomes a growth partner instead of a brand liability. Now take a breath, run the seven checks, and automate like a grownup.