SMART MARKETING: UNLOCKING THE POWER OF AUTOMATION A Q&A Session with WhatCounts

SMART MARKETING: UNLOCKING THE POWER OF AUTOMATION A Q&A Session with WhatCounts

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 4 Welcome to the Email Automation Q&A 5 What is Smart Marketing? 5 What is email automation? 5 Is it true that email marketing automation is impersonal? 5 Is email marketing automation the sloppy way to do things? 6 Email marketing automation is difficult to implement, right? 6 Pulling Content 7 From where does the automatically-generated information come? 7 Will automation work with my company website and blog to create content? 7 Can I automatically pull content using RSS and API (Application Programming Interface) feeds? 8 How do API and RSS feeds work with automation? 8 What is an Auto FTP? 9 Do You GET It? 10 What tools do I use for email automation? 10 What is SmartGET? 10 What is CacheGET? 10 What is XSLT GET? 11 How do I make sure my automated emails stay personal? 15 How do I get started? 15 Creating Tags 16 Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 2

What is the key to making email automation work for your company? 16 Are tags important when creating automated emails? 16 What types of tags can I add to my emails? 16 What are Subscriber Data Tags? 17 What are Custom Field Tags? 17 What are social tags? 18 Smart Scheduling and Deployment 19 What types of things can I schedule? 19 How do I schedule an automated email deployment? 19 What do I do when I get to the Campaign Deployment screen? 20 In what formats am I able to send emails? 21 How do I set up automation for an email? 21 How do I know the automated email was actually sent at the right day and time? 22 How do I tell the system to exclude some people who may be on my list? 22 Is there a way I can see all the automated campaigns I have scheduled? 23 Smart Reporting 24 What s reporting got to do with Smart Marketing? 24 Is scheduling an automated report as simple as it looks? 24 Preparation 25 What does my website need to look like? 25 What should my data look like? 25 How often do I have to update my content? 25 How do I decide from what sources to pull and how to set up my automation? 26 Key Takeaways 27 About Us 28 Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 3

INTRODUCTION Do you want the emails you send to be personalized? Of course you do! Organizations that personalize their emails see a 72 percent improvement in open rates and an 81 percent increase click-through rates (Marketing Sherpa). When emails are personalized, people are more likely to respond and take action. Smart Marketing and personalization are the keys to driving your email campaigns. We re here to help you through every step of your automation journey and this ebook is the first step to get you on your way. You ll learn about what email automation is, why you need to be using it, and how to execute it for success with your email marketing goals. In this ebook, we ll be answering top questions asked about email automation with explanations and examples. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 4

WELCOME TO THE EMAIL AUTOMATION Q&A You may have seen our new Smart Marketing video and are wondering what it s all about. Or maybe you read our recent ebook about Personalization. You have questions and we have answers that s why you re reading this ebook. In this ebook, you get to interview us about the how-tos, the what-abouts, the pros, the cons, the down-and-dirty of automation in email marketing. Let s jump right in! WHAT IS SMART MARKETING? Here at WhatCounts, we believe Smart Marketing equals personalization. It is the combination of the right data, a content strategy and last but not least automation. Many marketers think these three items work separately from each other. However, these three puzzle pieces fit together to create a framework for Smart Marketing for your company. WHAT IS EMAIL AUTOMATION? Simply put, email automation is a two-part system. The first part is pulling information off a chosen webpage, database or XML feed and then populating an email with that information. The second part is taking that populated email, or any other email, and scheduling it to send regularly. IS IT TRUE THAT EMAIL MARKETING AUTOMATION IS IMPERSONAL? Of course not! Instead, it is an efficient way to drive segmentation, produce system-generated data, and bring your customers the content they want to see. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 5

IS EMAIL MARKETING AUTOMATION THE SLOPPY WAY TO DO THINGS? Just because you are doing a lot less busy work to get a lot more return on your investment doesn t mean automation is the lazy person s alternative to email marketing. Once you ve set up automation parameters, you can sit back and let it do the hard work for you. Of course, you should definitely continue to monitor your emails to make sure everything is working as intended. Sending email is a constant process of strategizing, planning, testing, deploying, and refining. Automation is simply a tool you can use to help you send the most relevant, dynamic messages to your customers. EMAIL MARKETING AUTOMATION IS DIFFICULT TO IMPLEMENT, RIGHT? Wrong again. Email automation is a tool, and once you ve learned what that tool can do for you and how simple it is to use, you ll never want to send emails without it. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 6

PULLING CONTENT FROM WHERE DOES THE AUTOMATICALLY-GENERATED INFORMATION COME? Email automation pulls information from various sources on the Internet, including data-driven blogs. It can also pull information off of RSS feeds and API feeds. You decide what information you want in the automated email you are creating, and then you choose from which sources to pull that information. Here s a snapshot of the WhatCounts RSS feed and blog that information could be pulled from to populate an email: WILL AUTOMATION WORK WITH MY COMPANY WEBSITE AND BLOG TO CREATE CONTENT? Yes. Your website and blog are full of information about who your company is, what your brand is, and how the products and services you offer can meet the needs of subscribers. After it has been set up, the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine takes the content from your website and blog and uses it to populate an email. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 7

CAN I AUTOMATICALLY PULL CONTENT USING RSS AND API (APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACE) FEEDS? In the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine, you can easily leverage an API or RSS feed to pull information. Get in touch with our technical services team for more information and help setting up RSS and API feeds for automation. HOW DO API AND RSS FEEDS WORK WITH AUTOMATION? You can use an API to get information from a library to mash up with your information. Linking your email automation to RSS feeds that regularly update with the exact content you are looking for is also another way to go. In fact, you could set up different RSS feeds for different types of scheduled emails you want to send. For example, you could send an email every Tuesday for cooking news and pull information to populate that email from an RSS feed that follows a cooking magazine and two cooking blogs. You could also schedule an email to go out every Thursday about cooking deals, and you could pull the information for that email from an RSS feed that pulls information from grocery stores and kitchen supply chains. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 8

WHAT IS AN AUTO FTP? An Auto FTP allows you to schedule file transfers of data elements between WhatCounts and your company, i.e. WhatCounts can transfer data to you and you can transfer data to WhatCounts. Auto FTP lets you transfer data elements to or from WhatCounts on a schedule daily, weekly, monthly whatever works best for you. Scheduling what and when data is transferred is an important part of email automation. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 9

DO YOU GET IT? What we mean is, do you know how to automatically grab content off the Internet and populate it into a marketing email? Take a moment and dream: You have dynamic content sitting on your website, on your blog, and on various other web pages where you publish your content. Then someone pulls the information from those pages and creates a compelling, relevant email from them to send out to one of the Smart Segments into which you have organized your subscribers. This isn t a dream, marketing friends; it s a reality! WhatCounts has several ways it can pull content from the Internet and populate an out-of-this-world email with that information. Let us show you how one of our clients has made this dream a reality and inspire you to do the same! (See page 11 for a client example). WHAT TOOLS DO I USE FOR EMAIL AUTOMATION? WhatCounts has built a series of GET tags that enable automation for our clients. This includes SmartGET, XSLT GETand CacheGET. WHAT IS SMARTGET? SmartGET is a simple scheduled email pull that is set up to grab content from specific online pages and create an email. For example, you could set up SmartGET to pull content from your company blog every Wednesday and populate an email with that content. That email would be pulled, created, and stored in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine until you are ready to send it out to the segmentation list of your choice. WHAT IS CACHEGET? CacheGET works with the WhatCounts Client Hosted Broadcaster to pull data in the same way SmartGET does. CacheGET differs from SmartGET slightly; it allows you to pull in content that is dependent on subscriber data. It will make a call once per unique subscriber value inside the Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 10

CacheGET tag. The Broadcaster is an on-premise, super-fast appliance in the form of SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform for clients who send a high volume of email. WHAT IS XSLTGET? XSLTGET is the most advanced tag in the GET suite. It takes data from a structured data source, such as an API that returns XML data or an RSS Feed and applies logic and formatting to that data so it appears perfectly in your email template. A WhatCounts client that uses this automated content pulling feature is SweetJack, a daily deals company. SweetJack sends hundreds of emails containing discounts and deals each day. Let s take a peek at a SweetJack email and what types of information are pulled for this multi-part campaign. Then, we ll break down each part to zero in on the various pieces of content being pulled in. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 11

Let s start at the bottom and work our way up the email. This piece of content is coded to pull from the Jack365 category on SweetJack s blog and links to SweetJack s Facebook page. This is an example of pulling content that is already present on another web page, in this case, SweetJack s blog. This piece of the SweetJack automated multi-part email is hardcoded into the HTML. This part always stays the same, always linking to the same pages on the SweetJack website. This is an item SweetJack wants to consistently market to their customers, and if anything changes with this item, the information can be updated directly on the SweetJack website pages that directly correlate to these products and services. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 12

Remember how we talked about pulling content from your company blog? SweetJack does this in their daily deals email. As you can see, the automation is coded to pull in the title and description of the most recent blog post from the specified SweetJack blog URL. Main deals like the one above are populated from an XML feed via XSLTGET. This feature allows subscribers to get different deals based on location. One of the places SweetJack pulls content from is its CMS, NimbleCommerce, as well as its CRM, Zoho. Thus, the deal at the top of the page is pulled from data stored in NimbleCommerce. Keep this option in mind as you consider how you would populate a multi-part, automated email. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 13

Below is a breakdown of how the SweetJack daily deals email works. The template is stored in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine, which receives data and the email schedule, as well as daily deal data from NimbleCommerce, SweetJack s CMS. Subscriber data also gets fed into the template. Deal & Email Schedule ZohoCRM Deal Data (Pricing, Creative) Template NimbleCommerce Subscriber Data WhatCounts Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 14

HOW DO I MAKE SURE MY AUTOMATED EMAILS STAY PERSONAL? In order for emails to be personal, you must remember to include dynamic content. The GET suite from WhatCounts can certainly pull almost any content you want and translate it into a plain-text, HTML or multipart-mime email. However, we can t change the content once it is inside of the email. If your blog post has a typo in the title, then that typo is going to be pulled into the automated email and there s nothing we re going to be able to do about it. This is why starting with smart content is so important! Of course, you should definitely still continue to Q/A your emails to make sure no errors get through. Not only should you send tests of your emails to yourself, you should also ask internal stakeholders to review the emails. Other people will be able to pinpoint errors you may have missed, and will be able offer suggestions you haven t considered. HOW DO I GET STARTED? If you re a client of WhatCounts, you can contact your Technical Account Manager to discuss the process of setting up one of the GET tags. Want to be a part of the Smart Marketing buzz? Then contact support@whatcounts.com to see how we can help you get started. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 15

CREATING TAGS WHAT IS THE KEY TO MAKING EMAIL AUTOMATION WORK FOR YOUR COMPANY? It s creating up-to-date content on the pages that are a part of the automation process. The information on the website from which you automatically pull content needs to be relevant and important to your subscribers. ARE TAGS IMPORTANT WHEN CREATING AUTOMATED EMAILS? One way you can create dynamic emails to be used in your email marketing is by using tags. Since there should be different tags for every email, there should be different tags for the content that is automatically pulled for those emails. For every email sent, the tags included should be unique, personalized and different from other ones. The WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine includes a feature to add tags during the email creation process. WHAT TYPES OF TAGS CAN I ADD TO MY EMAILS? You have the ability to add standard tags to your emails, as well as social tags. Below are the options available for standard tags, including display message, subscriber link, preference site, built-in data, subscriber data and custom fields. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 16

WHAT ARE SUBSCRIBER DATA TAGS? Subscriber Data Tags allow you to enter automated, personalized features into your email based on the data you have gathered and stored. For example, you could personalize your email by including the recipient s name in the greeting of the email. In the body of the email, you write Dear. Then, you insert the first name field from the Subscriber Data Tags dropdown menu. WHAT ARE CUSTOM FIELD TAGS? Custom Field Tags should be looked at as creative options for building your smart, personalized email. If you can dream up a tag, this is where you create it. Let s say you wanted to include your company s address in the email. Create an area inside your email that you want this information to go. Next, go to the Custom Field Tags dropdown menu and choose from_address. To insert the tag, copy and paste the tag you are given where you want it to go in the email. If you don t know how to do this, we can help you set up all of your custom fields in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 17

WHAT ARE SOCIAL TAGS? The WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine fully supports social sharing. In other words, you can embed links to your preferred social media sites into your email template. These social media icons appear in your email, and recipients are able to share the content of the email on their favorite social networking sites. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 18

SMART SCHEDULING AND DEPLOYMENT Scheduling is a familiar word to everyone. Whip out that mobile device, Outlook calendar or (for a few of us) the good old paper day planner or wall calendar. Just like you have automatically scheduled budget meetings on Tuesdays, you can automatically schedule the freshest news, deals, discounts or other nifty information from your company to go out at on whatever day you want on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. Create an email template one time, schedule it, and then sit back and relax. WHAT TYPES OF THINGS CAN I SCHEDULE? Using the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine, you can schedule email deployment campaigns, campaign reports, event reports, custom reports, domain reports and bounce reports. Whew! That s a lot you can get done through automation. Using the calendar application in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine, you can choose what relevant items you would like automated. It is simply a matter of clicking on the day you would like the chosen item to be sent, and then choosing the item from the dropdown menu. HOW DO I SCHEDULE AN AUTOMATED EMAIL DEPLOYMENT? It s easy! When you are in the WhatCounts system, find the Tasks tab, and click on Calendar. To the right, you can see what this page will look like, as well as what the drop-down menu looks like. In this menu, choose Campaign Deployment. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 19

You will be sent to a screen that looks like this: WHAT DO I DO WHEN I GET TO THE CAMPAIGN DEPLOYMENT SCREEN? Have no fear! You re not on your own when you reach the Campaign Deployment screen. Instead, it acts as a guide, walking you through the moving parts of scheduling your email. First, you must choose what type of email you re sending. You can schedule to send social media updates only, an A/B test or a normal email. The Normal mailing type is the one you should choose for scheduling a regular email campaign. Next, choose the list you wish to send the scheduled email to and the template you wish to send to that list. For example, you may choose Master List and the template called Weekly Newsletter. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 20

You may also choose to send your scheduled email to a certain segmentation you have saved in the system. If you would like to send to the entire list you have chosen, then choose All subscribers. IN WHAT FORMATS AM I ABLE TO SEND EMAILS? Emails are able to be sent in four different formats; however, Multipart MIME is recommended because it delivers the email in both Text and HTML versions. HOW DO I SET UP AUTOMATION FOR AN EMAIL? When you set up an email campaign, you can choose on which date and at what time you want it to be sent out. Then you can choose whether you want it to be repeated every day, week or month. If you choose to send an email out each week, you can choose the day you would like it automatically sent out. This works together to make your Smart Segments work properly. For example, you may have segmented a list that only includes new subscribers every week. You could choose this list to send to every Friday, and the email would thank each subscriber for his or her opt-in and provide a deal or special offer from the company. Instead of you having to create and send a new email every week, you can automate one to be sent out to this specific segment. This is just one example of how automation and Smart Segments work together to help you create Smart Marketing. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 21

This is what scheduling an automated email like the one described on the previous page looks like in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine. HOW DO I KNOW THE AUTOMATED EMAIL WAS ACTUALLY SENT AT THE RIGHT DAY AND TIME? You can opt-in to receive notification emails when the system has sent your automated emails. HOW DO I TELL THE SYSTEM TO EXCLUDE SOME PEOPLE WHO MAY BE ON MY LIST? Suppose your competitor subscribes to your emails and their email address gets put into the weekly new subscribers list. You decide there is no way you are going to welcome your competitor or give them the weekly discount. There is a way to exclude, or suppress, certain email addresses in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine. On the campaign deployment setup screen, select Advanced Settings. A menu will open up, and you can choose the suppression list of your choice. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 22

IS THERE A WAY I CAN SEE ALL THE AUTOMATED CAMPAIGNS I HAVE SCHEDULED? Once you schedule an automated campaign event, it is then added to the campaign calendar. Here you can view all the campaigns you have scheduled per month, as well as the campaigns you have scheduled per day. This viewing option allows you to see what automated campaigns you have scheduled on each day before you create another automated campaign. In other words, it lets you intelligently plan out each email campaign to hit your segments at the right times. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 23

SMART REPORTING WHAT S REPORTING GOT TO DO WITH SMART MARKETING? Just like email campaigns, reporting can be scheduled. Wouldn t it be nice if once a week, you received an email notification letting you know the report is ready for pick up in the reports folder? You can set up an automated pull of the information you want reported on through the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine. We can also work with you to set up custom reports, and your Services Account Manager (SAM) can walk you through specific recommendations and insights to help you get better ROI assurance from your email program. Contact your SAM today to schedule a meeting. IS SCHEDULING AN AUTOMATED REPORT AS SIMPLE AS IT LOOKS? It sure is. Scheduling an automated report is a similar process to scheduling a campaign deployment. First, choose how many event days you want the report to include. If you d like to receive notifications about the weekly new subscriber emails, then you would choose events for the last 6 days. To have this email sent to you every week, choose Repeat Weekly and then select the day that best works for you to see the report. If you want, you can also opt-in to receive an email when the system has automatically sent the report to you. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 24

PREPARATION We all know a good offense is the best defense. Translated into marketing language, that means prepare, prepare, prepare! Email automation may not work for your company if it is not ready to use the technology and systems associated with automation. WHAT DOES MY WEBSITE NEED TO LOOK LIKE? Your website, blog, or any other source you plan to use to automatically pull information for your emails should be data-driven. WHAT SHOULD MY DATA LOOK LIKE? Glad you asked: It needs to be clean. If we use a merge tag to pull first name information for the greeting of your email, and you have some last names mixed into your first name data, things will get hairy. Make sure your data is cleaned up and in the right spots so it can easily and correctly be pulled. Of course, we have an expert Data Services team to help you map, organize, and integrate your data with WhatCounts. Email dataservices@whatcounts.com to learn more. HOW OFTEN DO I HAVE TO UPDATE MY CONTENT? It is imperative your content be updated and relevant if you want your automated emails to have those same qualities. The automation can only pull the information on your company s website; once the information is pulled, automation cannot change that content. There are no edits, no revisions, no adds or take aways. Write well and write often. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 25

HOW DO I DECIDE FROM WHAT SOURCES TO PULL AND HOW TO SET UP MY AUTOMATION? You ve just heard about a lot of choices you have when it comes to email automation, from different ways to pull information, to cleaning data, to scheduling. Now you need to sit down and analyze your goals and how you can reach them with email automation. What specifically can you do with automation that is going to market your products, services and brand better? Consider brainstorming a content map. You can keep it simple by asking yourself: What content does my company generate? Where is this content stored, i.e. in a CMS system, website, blog? Is this content available as an RSS or XML feed? Knowing the answers to these questions is the first step in automating your content. You ve got to crawl before you walk, and you ve got to know the basics about your content before you can automate it. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 26

KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. Automating your emails will help you send smarter, more personalized messages when combined with Smart Data and Smart Segments. 2. You can use one of the GET tags - SmartGET, CacheGET or XSLT GET to pull dynamic, original content off websites, blogs and Customer Management Systems. 3. RSS, API and FTP feeds are also ways you can pull content. 4. Once your email has been created, you can easily add standard and social tags to add a touch of personalization, and to entice your recipients to share the email on their social networks. 5. Automatically scheduling and deploying emails is a straightforward process in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine. 6. Preparing to automate content for email marketing is a matter of knowing where your content is stored and how it can be accessed to best suit your needs. Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 27

ABOUT US WhatCounts provides data management, software, and services to marketing professionals seeking to deliver smart personalized digital messages to their target audiences. Each day our team partners with over 800 customers to leverage email, social media, mobile devices, and the web to drive revenue. We believe that smart marketing equals personalization which requires marketers to have the right data, a content strategy and automation. Using smart technology, some of our customers are seeing email marketing ROI as high as $200 returned for every $1 invested. We re headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with offices in Seattle, Sydney, Baltimore, and other regional locations. Learn more at www.whatcounts.com. WHATCOUNTS, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Telephone: 404.995.8600 Suite 900 Toll Free: 866.804.0076 Atlanta, GA 30326 Fax: 404.995.8611 www.whatcounts.com Email: sales@whatcounts.com ATLANTA BALTIMORE CHICAGO SEATTLE SYDNEY WASHINGTON DC Copyright 2013 WhatCounts, Inc. 3630 Peachtree Rd. Toll Free: 1.866.804.0076 28