5 Examples of Marketing Automation in Action

If you’ve ever struggled with finding leads, and warming them up, then an automated lead generation and nurturing campaign will help lift the burden.

The purposes of an automated lead generation campaign are to:

1. Grab details off of new leads (via subscription)
2. Build a relationship with said leads
3. And nurture them into easy-to-convert clients.

The simplest example of a lead generation (and nurturing) marketing campaign – as it pertains to email marketing, specifically – is a series of educational communications.

A newsletter, or educational digest, with valuable content that subscribers have access to for free, in a timely manner, will garner you plenty of new workable contacts.

There are a few important characteristics of a lead gen nurturing campaign that you should keep in mind, in order to get the best results:

1. Your subscription form should be grabbing the data you need.
   You want to collect data that sheds some light on your leads. But also, you want to keep your subscription form short (lest you scare away potential subscribers). Get creative.
2. Your campaign needs to make a unique promise.
   What valuable content will you be supplying? Don’t make a promise you won’t keep. Your emails need to deliver to warm up your leads.
3. You need a strong CTA in every comm you send.
   What’s the end goal here? Make sure your leads have an opportunity to convert, every single instance they receive communication from you.

How is this automated?

You can set up the whole sequence of communications ahead of time, and have new subscribers enter the flow from beginning to end.

For example: Email #1 will go out to any new subscribers, and each subsequent email is sent to whoever received the last email, so on and so forth.

A welcome campaign is about starting off your brand’s relationship with a new contact on the right foot.

This email is often auto triggered by a subscription, or the adding of a new contact, and is received in a timely manner.

The content doesn’t have to say much at all besides ‘Welcome!’ – but it’s a good chance to point your contact in the direction of any information that would be useful to them. For example, if you have an upcoming event, or an important update, a Welcome email is a great chance to catch up your new contacts.

How much of your contact list is dead in the water?

Chances are, if you’ve been collecting contacts for at least a few years, a large chunk of them are disengaged.

Whilst most marketing automation platforms will stop sending to hard bounced email addresses (bad destination inboxes), there’s nothing to stop emails from being sent to contacts who simply never open them.

A Wake The Dead campaign serves a couple purposes in relation to this:

1. To re-engage disengaged subscribers
2. To confirm who is truly disengaged

A Wake The Dead campaign should include a few emails.

• One should be a last attempt to pique the interest of disengaged contacts.
  For example, a special offer, or a piece of high value content.
• Another email should simply ask if the contact wishes to remain a subscriber – with the option for them to confirm yes, or no.
• The last email should be a goodbye, sprinkled with plenty of mother-in-law guilt.
  For example, “We’ve got the message. We are sad to see you go! You have been removed from our contact list”. Obviously, even the last email should give the contact a chance to stay subscribed.

This is easily automated as long as you have your emails ready.

Simply send to all disengaged contacts, and if any of those contacts open email 1, or 2, they’re now considered engaged. For contacts that open none of the emails, you can confirm them as disengaged, and clean them out of your lists

Transactional campaigns send specific emails to contacts based on the behaviour undertaken on your site, or previous email communications.

For example, you might have a ‘purchase reminder’ email that’s auto-triggered by abandoned shopping carts on your site.

Another example is leveraging the behaviour of your contacts to send them information relevant to them. For example, perhaps you sent an email with multiple service or product options, and had a contact click on just one of them. You can auto-trigger a second email to send out to that contact that drills down into the specific service or product they clicked on.

Transactional campaigns allow you to automate custom marketing emails that are sent to your contacts in a relevant way, increasing your chances of high yielding results.

There are a bunch of emails that need to go out to your contacts running up to an event, during an event, and after it.

Why send these manually when you could automate the whole process?

Event email campaigns should include the following:

• Save the date (first invite)
• Official Invite
• Reminder to register
• Reminder to attend
• Thank you for coming

You can set these emails up ahead of time, and automate them so they go out to the right groups, at the right time.

For example, invites can be sent to your entire contact list, but reminders to attend will only be relevant to registrants.

Utilising a marketing automation platform will save you time, and resources, in the long run.

Automated campaign flows can even be cloned and updated for repeat usage for months, if not years.

Setting up proper triggers, and proper targets, will not only save you from constant manual work, it’ll also deliver you better results.

Marketing automation gives you access to the benefits of timely, relevant communication. Automating your campaigns means that none of your contacts will fall through the cracks, and they’ll each receive the nurturing care they individually require.

If you haven’t automated any of your marketing workflows – what are you waiting for?

It’s time to catch up. It’s time to get automated.