The Campaigner. AUTOMATION Playbook

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1 The Campaigner AUTOMATION Playbook

2 It s Time to Up Your Game with Automation According to a recent study covered by BtoB Magazine1, the average marketer s open rate defined as one open per recipient is roughly 19.7%. Marketers in the highest quartile enjoy rates nearly twice as high, at 35.7%. But the news here for marketers is still troubling: Among those subscribers and prospects on your own lists, only about 2 in 10 are opening your messages (and not quite 6 in 10 even if you re among the highest-performing marketers). What s going on? Don t Fumble with an Interested Prospect Use Automation to Cross the Goal Line We can t simply chalk up these discouraging rates to recipients not recognizing the senders. The study further reveals2 that average spam complaints are a mere.07% and unsubscribe rates are just.25% on average and these numbers are even better for higher-performing marketers. Recipients of marketing s opt in to these lists presumably to hear from marketers. So why do so few recipients open the messages? One reason is that most marketing s are blasted to lists with little if any thought given to when they re sent, to whom, and if the particular message will resonate with a particular recipient. marketers can significantly improve the effectiveness of their campaigns by implementing Automation, which lets marketers: Send customized messages to prospects when they react to specific triggers. Create workflows that set in motion a series of automated actions for prospects who demonstrate specific interest at a specific moment. Learn more about each prospect over time, to continually create more relevant, anticipated and lucrative campaigns. Improve the experience for prospects by providing timely and relevant information when they want it building loyalty and improving ROI. 1

3 Stop Blasting Hail Mary s! You know the Hail Mary pass in football the quarterback s desperate throw across the field, usually toward the end of a game, hoping a teammate will catch it and score. No target. No strategy. Just throw it into the end zone and hope for the best. Many -marketing campaigns are implemented in much the same way. Let s call them Mary s. With an Mary, a marketer drafts a sales message as quickly as possible, blasts it to every address on the list, and hopes a small percentage click through and buy. What marketers forget when they take this approach, though, is the value they ve built in earning the trust and permission from each address on their list trust and permission that will dwindle with each message that prospects finds irrelevant, badly timed or otherwise mistakenly sent to them. With Campaigner, you can quickly and cost-effectively put Automation tools and practices into place that make each message more relevant and customized for each prospect by allowing prospects to demonstrate their interest in specific areas of your business, and then generating automated responses and actions to satisfy their specific needs. 2

4 Campaigner Helps You Send the Right Message to the Right Recipient at the Right Time. Campaigner gives marketers an easy-to-use Automation toolkit that can help you dramatically improve the quality of your campaigns with triggers, autoresponders, workflows and reporting. Triggers Yes, you could spend yourself into bankruptcy on a Super Bowl ad that will reach tens of millions and be ignored by almost all of them. Or you could send your message to Jim in Cincinnati and Jordan in Denver (and a few hundred just like them around the country) because they re very interested in your offering and asked for more details. Why Triggers are the Simple and Smart Play to Start with: Triggers let you easily send a customized when a prospect performs a specific action clicking a link, completing a form, or checking a box requesting more information. Implementing trigger-based campaigns lets you give a prospect exactly the right information to make a purchase decision or otherwise further engage with your business when they ask for it. A trigger lets your prospect feel as though they re receiving attention from your business when they want it great for building loyalty even if your responses are automated and don t require any work from you or your team. Your triggers can also be time-based so if a prospect goes quiet for a period after showing initial interest, you can initiate a trigger after a week, a month or any time you wish to send a relevant follow-up message. Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence. VINCE LOMBARDI 3

5 Autoresponders Key to any business is the ability to be responsive to give customers the human touch we all crave when doing business with any firm. But what if your list contains 50,000 names or 5,000,000? You can t give each one attention or information whenever they ask. That s where autoresponders can be invaluable. How Autoresponders Help You Put Points on the Board: Autoresponders are essentially pre-packaged workflows that help you send the right messages to the right subscribers at the right time and scale easily as your list grows, requiring no additional work from you. You can create an autoresponder sequence that makes sense for you and your prospects time-based (a recurring weekly , for example) or trigger-based (a thank-you, for example, or a promotion after a related purchase.) Autoresponders created for specific types of subscribers will help you deepen your relationship with those subscribers by sending more targeted, relevant messages that they have shown an interest in receiving. In life, as in football, you won t go far unless you know where the goalposts are. ARNOLD H. GLASOW 4

6 Workflows Now you re ready to pull together all of the tools in your Automation toolkit to build a fully automated workflow that includes a sequence of s, perhaps other content (like downloadable white papers or even video messages), and rules to set it all in place. Campaigner s workflows let you build a highly customized relationship with each prospect from introduction to purchase, and well beyond. How to Use Workflows to Win Big: A workflow lets you think proactively, building a sequence of s and if/then rules based on your prospects specific actions rather than simply reacting to each reply, form submission or request for information with a manual response. You can also learn from your prospects behavior, to continually refine and improve your workflows. You can use workflows to build ongoing value for your prospects and earn their trust and loyalty by creating content at the outset and sending it to them at regular intervals or when they ask for it. Either way, a workflow lets you stay in contact with prospects and always be responsive no matter how big your list becomes, or how busy you get. Your workflow can be as detailed and customized as you need it to be tracking every movement of a prospect as they interact with your or websites and using that information to enhance the relationship for both your prospect and you. You can, for example, automatically send a discount offer to a prospect who has abandoned their shopping cart on your site. You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat. PAUL BROWN 5

7 Just a Few Great Workflows You Can Use to Score More Business: New Customer Welcome Workflow triggered by first purchase You can create a series of welcome s for a lead or subscriber who has just made their first purchase. This is a great way to build on your relationship by giving your new customer useful information at just the right time and a reason to continue engaging with your business. This Welcome series can also include training on your product or service, if relevant which your new customer will see as extremely valuable and timely. What better message to send than that your business is there to help your new customer get the most of your offerings right away! Event Workflow triggered by registration or attendance at your event Whether you host seminars, exhibit at trade shows or run live webinars (another great marketing tool!), you can create an workflow to automate communication with prospects and leads who attend (or even just sign up to attend) these events. You can create a series of content-rich messages, for example, for prospects who have attended one of your webinars with content specific to the webinar s topic. This is a great way to deepen engagement with the information-hungry segment of your market which webinar attendees are by definition with just the type of information they ve already shown an interest in receiving. Re-engagement Workflow triggered by a period of inactivity from a lead Reopen the lines of communication with leads or prospects you haven t heard from in, say, three months, or a year whatever timeframe you specify. You can use this series of s, for example, to send time-sensitive discount offers, or new content, or something else of value to your inactive leads. People get busy, distracted. Why not set an automated series of s to remind those on your list who ve gone quiet why they engaged with your business in the first place? 6

8 Reporting Go ahead be a Monday-Morning Quarterback. With Campaigner, your Automation toolkit includes the ability to track, monitor and analyze the results of your s in real-time, so you can immediately learn what s working in a campaign and what needs work for next time. How Campaigner s Reporting Tools Use Big Data to Help You Hit Big Numbers: Campaigner s reporting lets you tap into the Big Data behind your campaigns how many times a given recipient opens your message, what time of day they re most likely to read it, etc. to give you a much richer picture of how your campaigns are working and how you can improve them.implementing trigger-based campaigns lets you give a prospect exactly the right information to make a purchase decision or otherwise further engage with your business when they ask for it. Review and compare your campaigns over time to see which campaigns perform the best, and why. Your reports give you an extraordinary window into exactly what your subscribers are doing with your messages second by second, for every prospect. You ll learn who s opening your messages, how many times, what time of day, on which device, which links they re clicking (and not clicking) so you can continually refine and improve your campaigns. 1BtoB: open rates average 19.7% last year 13/ / -open-rates-average-19-7-last-year 2Silverpop: Marketing Benchmark Study 7