Make a new start by stopping your marketing automation campaign in time
Am I hearing you right? Stopping a campaign? Indeed. Let’s illustrate our statement by an example. Imagine that Pinterest sends the following welcome campaign to her new subscribers:
Day 1: Welcome!
Day 2: Here some nice boards to follow
Day 3: Create your first board!
Day 4: How to share your board with other Pinteresters?
And now imagine that that same Pinterester has followed nice boards, has created his first board and has shared his board with the audience all on day 1? Then all of a sudden your whole campaign becomes irrelevant. Even more, you create a negative user experience. The last thing a marketer wants is to blunder in front of his contacts. In this article you discover how you can take into account the behaviour of new subscribers and how you can put your marketing campaign to a stop in time.
Marketing automation is the way to reduce the load of the e-marketer. It represents all the campaigns that are triggered by the actions of your recipient. Where following up the contacts used to require a lot of manual work, it’s now a fully automatic process. Outlining your scenario once and the contacts will automatically seep through the different steps. Moreover, it’s a great way to create engagement with your receivers.
One tip: let the users lead the way of your campaign. See the first newsletter as the root of your marketing campaign, but make sure you provide sufficient branches so that every user can walk his own path.
It all comes down to drawing up a good scenario for your workflows. Of course this requires a little brainwork. Run over the different ways the campaign can go up in advance and implement those different directions in your workflows. In many cases the triggered contacts go through a predetermined schedule, regardless of what the contact does in the meantime. It’s best that you keep your first email very general, but keep in mind that the content of the campaign might not always correspond with the information that your recipient needs. Don’t make the mistake by thinking that the information in your workflow is always useful to each addressee.
You add the different paths to the workflows via the if/else condition blocks in the Flexmail application. When you create a campaign, implement the if/else condition block which assures you that the campaign will stop in time so that only the relevant persons receive your campaign. Actually you anticipate with a checklist: has a contact opened the campaign already after my first email message? Is he member of a group by now? Has he subscribed via the opt-in form on the website in the meantime?
Here we illustrate a couple of traps.
- You are publisher of a magazine and you have set up a workflow to yearly remind your contacts that their membership is expiring. You have created a series of messages to make sure that your contact continues his membership. Pay attention that when a contact has already renewed his subscription after your first reminder, that he doesn’t receive the whole series of messages. Implement a field in your database that indicates that the membership has been renewed and make sure that the campaign stops in time for those contacts. Update the data of your contact in the database automatically if necessary.
- Another one to ponder on: are you planning an event and some contacts didn’t subscribe yet? Then you can send them a series of reminders emails to make sure they still participate. Did the contact decide to subscribe after your first email message? Then incorporate a stop in your workflow via the if/else condition blocks so that you don’t send those contacts irrelevant information.
Setting up an automated scenario can be a godsend for your team, but do make sure you put enough thought into creating a scenario that is perfectly tailored to the needs and journey of your different audiences. It’s the only way to create an optimal user experience.