WHEN TO USE AUTOMATION

Marketing automation, as the word suggests, is software that automates all your digital repetitive tasks to help you save time and effort while engaging personally with your customers. A workflow is the framework of a customer’s journey and in this context, helps determine where the automation comes in.

For example, if a customer signs up for your newsletter, an email automatically reaches his inbox thanking him and sharing some more information about your brand that might interest him.

Email automation offers opportunities to customise email content on a large scale and is a sort of mini CRM. Here, you can keep your email lists organised and categorise customers as per their interests, interactions and level of commitment to your brand.

To respond to a customers action with immediate and relevant content is a great way to ensure effective marketing. The mechanism used to understand what content to share with a customer after a specific action is called a trigger.

First, you determine a user’s action – for example, a user signs up for your newsletter

Next, define the rules of the workflow – for example, with each new sign up, the user gets a thank you email and some more information about your brand.

Accordingly, create the marketing content – for example, what will you include in this email about your brand? Perhaps a little about the process of creating products, customer reviews or about some of the aspects that make your brand unique.

WHAT WORKFLOWS TO SETUP?

WELCOME WORKFLOW

When someone signs up on your website, or for your newsletter, an email or a series of emails goes out to them, welcoming them, and expressing gratitude. You can also take this opportunity to tell them more about your brand, as discussed in the example above.

It’s a great way to greet new customers and show them that their interest is appreciated.

FEEDBACK WORKFLOW

It’s crucial to know how your customers feel about you. Feedback forms can help you understand where you are going wrong so you can make changes. Positive feedback is a great way to know if your marketing strategy in on the right track.

Customers also feel engaged with the brand and think that their opinion is important when they’re encouraged to give your brand feedback.

ANONYMOUS USER WORKFLOW

The aim of this workflow is to keep a user on your page for longer so that he can see all that you offer. With individual attention span lowering, it’s essential to ensure that you get your key messaging across before the user switches away from the website.

A good way to do this is through overlays that display interesting information or offers to grab attention. These can appear when the user is moving towards the exit button or is leaving after a short time on the website.

LEAD NURTURING WORKFLOW

The next step after the topic workflow is to bring your customer further down the funnel. Instead of handing the contact to sales right away, the contact might need some convincing or nurturing before they become actual customers. Relationship-building in the form of sharing more information about your products, or your brand values might help to build a solid foundation with your customers.

RENEWAL OR UPCOMING PURCHASE WORKFLOW

By noting a customers purchase cycle, or giving offers during special occasions to create purchase cycles, you can encourage a customer with emails about offers, customer reviews or reminders of their last purchase.

This is particularly relevant to purchases dealing with subscriptions that might be ending but can work well during birthday’s or holidays when the customer is more likely to shop.

RE-ENGAGEMENT WORKFLOW

A re-engagement workflow aims to remind your users about you and your brand if they’ve been inactive or haven’t been opening emails from you.

It’s a good idea to try to find out why this may be the case, and plan what kind of content to send them based on their answer. This can be through a short survey.

An unsubscribe button should be present in each email for a user to easily access if needed so that you aren’t sending emails to a user that will remain unopened.

CART ABANDONMENT WORKFLOW

This is if a customer adds items to his cart, but leaves the site before completing the check-out process. Adding items to cart shows the clear intent that the customer is interested in your product. In this workflow, you can send him an email reminding him of the items in his cart, share other customer’s reviews of the same products, or provide an offer.

TOPIC WORKFLOW

If a user shows interest in a particular topic or area within your website, such as downloading an e-book on a certain topic, you can send him relevant content to that topic.

Create content buckets and based on customer interest, send a series of emails with that content their way to keep them engaged.

Requesting contact information in exchange for downloading data is a good way to understand their demographics and interests too.

UPSELL WORKFLOW

In an upsell workflow, the aim is to convince the customer to purchase more than he is planning to. The strategy is not to get him to spend all his money, but instead, show him products he might be interested in, relating to his current purchase.

An addition to this workflow is to make a list of request customers with similar purchases and send them offers or add ons. You can also send them a thank-you email for their purchase.

INTERNAL SALES REP NOTIFICATION WORKFLOW

This one is for your internal sales rep. Certain areas or pages on a website are more likely to be clicked on than others. By sharing this information with your sales rep, you can help them build their relationship further with customers who visit these pages more often. This way, the sales rep gets to interact with the customer at the right time.