In our last blog we took a look at what email marketing is and how ActiveCampaign can help you create a simple flow of emails to help convert your leads into paying customers. This time, we want to go explore the options around email marketing a little bit more.
Email marketing automation is the step organisations take when moving between email marketing and fully automated marketing, which will be the topic of another blog. It helps you build on the foundation of the email marketing you have in place by utilising more of the automation features ActiveCampaign has to offer and adding some personalisation to your emails. It could include the use of Tags and Custom Fields, or it might move a contact from one list to another.
Who might use email marketing automation?
If you are a business owner or professional who has been using email marketing already, but you know that you are probably not quite ready to jump into a full blown automated marketing strategy, then this will probably be where you will sit most comfortably as it gives you more power and greater capabilities within your email marketing.
So let’s look at a couple of ways you could use it.
Last time we used the example of a small business who provides their prospective clients with access to some free PDFs when they sign up to the mailing list. Let’s continue with this example and add a few more steps to the automation.
The business owner would like to be able to pull out a list of any contact who has shown interest in their products by signing up to receive the PDFs, so that they can follow up with them at a later date or see what strategy brought them the greatest return. They therefore decide to add a Tag to the contact, so that they can easily identify these leads.
Knowing that it can be helpful to know how recently a contact signed up to access the PDFs when in conversation with them, the business owner also decides to add a custom date field to the contact’s record and uses the automation to populate this field on the date the lead signs up.
Now the business owner can pull out segmentations of their leads to analyse their conversion ratios and the sales team can have more meaningful conversations with their potential clients, being able to see at a glance how long ago they signed up.
Immediately the communication with prospective clients can be that much more personal and the business can more easily focus its time and money on the most relevant leads.
But wait, there’s more…
As your business continues to grow you may move beyond the simple email marketing automations we have discussed here. You may need to be able to manage your sales processes more effectively, or want to reduce time staff spend on repetitive tasks. ActiveCampaign offers a host of automation rules, and we will discuss a few of these in a bit more detail next time.
In the meantime, if you need some help with your email marketing or are looking to move towards a more automated way of working, we would love to hear from you. Call us on 01889 280010 or send us an email to hello@zephi.co.uk.
