We’re doing it. We’ve been building out automation for a couple of months now, and we’re making great progress. We can’t wait to share the final result with you! Before we do, though, we wanted to share some more information about what automation is, how it works, and a sneak peek at what it’s going to look like.
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What is automation?
Automation is a way to create conditional content and workflows for your audience. Regardless of what industry you’re in, several things are true:
- Each person in your audience has different needs/wants, psychographics, and demographics and therefore, will have a different experience with your business
- Personalization is 100% key in achieving success in marketing now (think: Amazon’s recommendations based on past purchases)
- Timing is everything! Sending the right message to the right people at the right time is what gets people to buy
- Creating hyper-targeted offers for niche segments of your audience is necessary to send your conversion rates and revenue through the roof
The mechanism by which you can create a segmented audience and target each group separately is automation.
How can you make money using it?
Automation helps you move people down your sales funnel based on actions they take. Email is simply the best tool for moving people down your sales funnel automatically.
What does that mean?
We all have a list of email subscribers. If someone signs up for your list on your website, most of the time they aren’t ready to buy, but they were interested enough to hear more from you.
At this point, most businesses make 1 of the 2 biggest mistakes in Email:
#1: They fail to follow up with their subscriber.
#2: They send every subscriber the same email.
You need to build trust with a new subscriber if you want them to buy from you at some point. The more value you give, the more they will trust you, and the more likely they are to buy from you.
Automation helps you do that. And unlike newsletters, where you have to log in and actually write the email every time you want to send, automations are something that you set up one time and they work for you while you are away from your computer.
It’s worth mentioning that according to the Direct Marketing Association, over 75% of email revenue is generated from triggered email, rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns.
Examples of automations
For example, rather than just sending your newsletters to everybody, you can set up a welcome series after someone subscribes. It can look like this:
- Day 1: Send them an email when they subscribe thanking them for subscribing, and tell them about yourself and your brand. Pictures are great for welcome emails. Try to get micro-commitments out of them … follow you on facebook, twitter, etc. If you used a discount offer or a lead magnet to get them to subscribe to your email, send it to them.
- Day 2: Provide them with some type of valuable information. If you have a case study, send that. If you have any popular guides or tips you can give them, send those.
- Day 3: If you have more valuable content, send it to them. Any videos? A tour around your office?
- Day 4: Make them an offer, give them a coupon, offer them a free 30min consultation – whatever applies to your business.
As you can see, this is a VERY different style of email than simply sending a newsletter to your subscribers. It’s proven to work.
Another simple example is abandoned cart emails. IF someone abandons their cart, THEN you want them to receive an email to remind them and perhaps include an incentive offer to complete the purchase.
Or, perhaps you’ve got a list of past donors from your last fundraiser that you want to target. Automation would allow you to set up an email sequence specific to those who donated, while the rest might receive a similar but different sequence.
Ultimately, automation can help you ramp up your marketing strategies and save you TONS of time in the process.
Here are a few other examples of email automation:
- Win-back campaigns
- Split test different types of content/offers or subject lines
- Subscriber engagement
- Lead nurture
- Product interest
How does it work?
Our visual Journey builder will include an easy-to-use canvas style user interface.
Our v1 release will include:
- Triggers: These are the catalyst for starting any automated Journey.
For our first release, the following triggers will be included:
- Users added to List
- User removed from List
- Tag Added
- Tag Removed
- Email Activity – Contacts who Opened
- Email Activity – Contacts who Clicked
- **Actions:**What takes place once a trigger begins an automated Journey. These are the actions we will be including:
- Send Email (with reporting)
- Set Delay
- Add or Remove From List
- Add or Remove Tag
- Update Contact Data Field
- **Conditions:**Are an either/or decision, for example, did or did not open a specific email. Here are the conditions we’ll have for our release:
- Have or don’t have tag
- Are or are not on list
- Contact field equals
- Split Test
- Email activity – Opened
- Email activity – Didn’t open
- Email activity – Were sent
- Email activity – Were not sent
- Email activity – Clicked
There are many, many examples of test uses for automation, but here are some of the most common ones that you can achieve with this release.
We’d love to know what you think about this upcoming feature – tell us in the comments! Are there other features you want us to build? Request them in our Product Roadmap!
