Introducing Automation Pro

Both business owners and customers alike are more aware than ever before of the noise that exists within the inbox. It’s hard to break through the crowd and make your business and its email campaigns stand out. Not only that, but the consumer is smarter than ever before … armed with more information at their fingertips than they could even know what to do with. The only way to succeed in this email marketing climate is to provide value to each and everyone one of your subscribers. The best way to do that is to make them feel like you understand their needs and that you’re paying attention to what they want from you.

However, executing that idea means wearing several different hats within your business. Sales, marketing and customer support just to name a few. How could one ever find the time to do everything they need to do in their daily jobs … and perfectly craft email campaigns that both deliver on value and makes your subscribers feel as if you’re catering to their individual needs?

Enter Automation Pro.

With Automation Pro, you can create automated customer journeys that allow you to follow up with subscribers based on email engagement, website interaction and more. Map out paths for your contacts to be sent down using a digital canvas. Actions can trigger emails to send, subscribers to move lists, etc., making your marketing more efficient as you convert leads to sales and subscribers to loyal customers.

Building with Automation Pro

Entries

Each automated journey begins with an entry. Entries define how your subscribers will enter the journey. It’s the mouth of the digital funnel you create to execute the goal of an automation. Here are some examples of how you can use entries:

Added To List. A journey that begins with this entry could start with a welcome email, seeing as they were just added to your list. If you’re doing any sort of eCommerce, it can be a campaign designed to convert a new lead to a sale. If your signup form offers a discount for signing up, then tailor the following emails towards inspiring an individual to put those savings to use.

Website Engagement. For a campaign beginning with this entry, your goal is to tailor your marketing towards the subscriber’s interests. If a subscriber has visited your site and reviewed specific goods or services, you can follow up with them based on that information. Say they had their eyes on a new Canon SLR camera. You can follow up with emails that boast the camera’s features, share positive reviews and even upsell with accessories. Learn more about setting up your website to track your subscribers.

Date and Time. Say you have an event planned and want to send emails ready to go based on the date of that events. This entry allows you to send date and time-based campaigns, to make sure you’re building excitement for your events at the correct moment.

Actions & Conditions

Next, you can either add an action or a condition. Actions execute tasks for you. Use conditions to send your subscribers through different paths. This can mean sending follow-up emails based on whether or not an email was opened or moving an email address to a different list following a conversion. It even includes website engagement!

Here are some examples of Actions:

Wait Time. This action allows you to set the pace of a journey. Without this, all of our emails would be triggered at once. As an example, if you wanted to trigger an email based on a previous open or click, you can add in a little bit of a wait time, so the next email isn’t sent right after the last one was opened. This way you have the chance to give a little bit of breathing room for you and your subscriber. You can set wait times to minutes, hours or even months.

Send Email. As it’s named, this action allows you to send an email. Make each one count!

Add to List. Based on how a subscriber is engaging with a specific journey, it may be time to move them to a new list. As an example, if you have a list of leads you’ll want to move them to the paying customer list once they’ve converted.

Remove From List. Continuing the above example, you’ll want to remove a subscriber from a leads list once they have converted.

Here are a few ways to use Conditions:

Is In List. Some steps of your journey may only apply to a certain subset of your subscribers. If you’re a pet shop, you may only want to send a campaign about new cat toys to your subscribers who own a cat, whereas dog owners may feel you don’t understand their needs if they were to receive that campaign.

Website Activity. There are different types of leads. One who has already visited a specific page on your website may even be considered a hot lead. Following up with those should be a priority and this condition makes it easy.

Email Engagement. This condition allows you to follow up with subscribers in your journey based on how they interact with your email campaigns. Say you’ve got a webinar coming up. You can send an initial email to promote the webinar. Those that have registered after the first campaign need not receive more invitations. However, if subscribers didn’t open an email or failed to click the register link, they may require additional reminders.

If / Else. This allows you to really dig deep into the customization of your customer journey. It determines what contributing factors will trigger the next portion of the campaign. This is a combination of the above conditions, which will allow you to send subscribers down specific paths within a journey. For example, if they’re in List A and has engaged with five emails, send email Z. If not, don’t send anything.

Activating Your Journey

You will be ready to activate a journey once you’ve defined the behavior of your entries, actions and conditions. This means each step of the way has been carefully constructed to execute the goal of your automation.

Template Module

Benchmark has created several templates you can choose from which demonstrate various strategies that can be executed with Automation Pro. All you’ll need to do is fill out the details. Click on each entry, action and condition to define their behaviors.

Some of these templates will give you ideas on how to Onboard new subscribers or how to create a journey that will turn subscribers into customers and keep them coming back!