Email Marketing Automation

I don't it is a shiny thing - rather it is something that is being talked about and embraced more readily because existing email marketing tools are now making this easier for everyday businesses to use.

I see it as having more flexibility to respond to customer actions and give people what they want or need when they take and action to trigger that response.

I use autopilot for this process and in the last 12 months I have been slowing extending and extending how I use automations from customer actions and triggers.

Thanks for your feedback.

I see that Autopilot does everything from sending email to running the automations so it's a "one stop shop" solution.

What about users of services such as AWeber, GetResponse and MailChimp, the more "traditional" services, if you will. Are you using automation in your email marketing? It's certainly painful to move your lists to a new provider so has this been a barrier to you getting involved in more automation, even though you could likely benefit?

Thanks again in advance for any feedback.

I love a good chat about email marketing.

In my opinion, email marketing automation is something that most, if not all email marketers dream of, but most will suffer to get to due to lack of 'know how' or the classic case of man power.

ActiveCampaign and AutoPilot are two very unique tools in which they have much better analytics than most (and they stay up to date with the data). We use GetVero in Warrior, and they're decent with setting up behavioural campaigns and segmentation.

I think for most people, migrating from one ESP to another is more than just the challenge of moving lists, customers, segments, triggers, autoresponders, email funnels etc.. it's a whole new learning curve of UI, understanding a different set of restrictions and unfortunately, effort + time to result is a relatively lengthy process to see the benefits. For this reason, people are more than likely focused on other areas that they know/feel greater gains can be found (CRO on a landing page for instance).

@Marcus a question: Do you think AI can help automate A/B testing? Such as on subject lines? A/B testing on subject lines are always time consuming for Email marketers

Automated split testing.. I'm not sure how that would go actually. I think if you were to feed tests that you wanted to trial (subject lines, CTA colors, length of copy) into a system, that spits out the process, results and analytics for you - that would be an entirely new thing.

If you haven't already, there's a cool tool called Headlinr which takes a keyword and places it into multiple subject lines (for email and content). It's handy to have for a while but not something I'd idolise forever with. I'm also a fan of inboxdb.com - free web directory some crazy kid built of marketing emails.

AI definitely has it's place in email marketing, but machine learning as a whole is more realistic.

Say for instance, you're using liquid and you have specific customer data (name, location, average email open time etc...).

Companies like Sendlane have this thing called Optimised Timing, which bases the send on when the person opened the last email. Combining this with personalisation of name, triggering relevance to your audience if you tag a location or length of copy based on how long someone has kept your email open for (ReturnPath does this with a tracking GIF) is pretty powerful and it takes time to learn how to do all of this. It's a bit of a tricky situation with the optimised timing though, for instance I might have had just a spur of the moment to procrastinate with my inbox while I'm in the loo (that's a 'crappy' situation, pun intended).

If we're talking about AI doing something like, split testing two subject lines to 10% of your audience, waiting X time, pick the winner based on the data, then send winner to the other 90% of your audience, it's a good start. There's still a lot to process as far as understanding the gravity of unsubscribes, open to click-through rate, success of CTA's, engagement etc.. What I mean by the gravity of unsubscribes is understanding if that's fresh-eyed subscribers that have been deterred, or are they more mature subscribers who have gone through the habit of opening your emails.

i think Email Marketing Automation is the new must-have of every email marketers.

Cause there's a lot of time involved in segmenting and nurturing, and it can be automated, the users can be segmented on their interested, the prospects who opted in for wasting time early deleted.

You really don't need ALL the automation: maybe this particular aspect makes people afraid of using this new feature.

But this happens when you didn't make a PLAN before, and you get mess after with all of options.

The leader for average marketer for automation are ActiveCampaign and Drip, but most of the AR now is rapidly implement them.

Infusionsoft is very high priced and for experienced marketers.

BUT ActiveCampaign pay attention that it has a rule against affiliate marketers: after a debate, the CEO clalrified that it's referred only for direct linking, solo ads, and aggressive practice.

SendLane on the contrary has no policy against anything cause it's made by marketers for marketers BUT the automation is very poor.

ONLY ACTIVECAMPAIGN (and maybe Drip, not tested), has the function 'Go To': it's quite useful cause it allows after a split to re-conduct the leads to the main branch. As an example: if the contact do not open the email A send the email B but after it continue as if it has opened, with the main automation.
This function saves you a lot of time in building one automation instead of lots of them, for every split.

So in my opinion automations in email marketing is essential, it's like when it appeared the time-based autoresponder campaigns, it's a must-have.

Once you use automation you will never come back to time-based sequences (day one, day 2, etc).

My advice is use it step by step, not get mess into it, has clear in mind what is the purpose of the sequence, the list, and dot use too may features.

Email automation is really not complex at all. I use it for segmenting when customers buy more than one product in my funnel. Good tool