You know, every week we used to publish three blogs and blast send them out to our audience. What a lot of work for not much return. Now, we’ve found a way to automate our most time-consuming recurring campaigns and build a workflow that makes the most out of our content. Want to know our secret? Well, we’re going to share it with you.
We use marketing automation.
In this blog, we’re also going to share HOW we use marketing automation to get the results we so often talk about.
First: the starting point
When you’re looking at implementing marketing automation, take your regular newsletter like we did, as you can see in the picture below. It’s the easiest place to start when it comes to using a marketing automation platform for the first time. Now, while it might seem time-consuming and daunting to batch plan your monthly or quarterly content in one go – if you’re anything like our marketing team you’ll find it will save you a lot of time in the long-term.
Then, split your planning into these key areas:
- Data
- Content
- Purpose
- Other considerations
DATA
Who are you targeting? What do they already know and what do they need to know? From a practical standpoint, what type of lists are you using for your campaign? If it’s static, consider switching to a refresh list to maximise the longevity of your content.
Setting your audience to refresh will also mean any new subscribers entering the group will start from the beginning of your workflow. This is one of the key ways to maximise your content to its full potential!
CONTENT
Plan your campaign content to be as non-specific as possible. By that we mean, don’t include events or date-related pieces that could expire further down the line. Instead, create content that will be timely and relevant for the length of your campaign. We recommend planning a quarter’s worth when you get started. For us, a maximum of three articles a week worked best in terms of engagement, but you might find your audience works differently. Split test and see before you build!
Then, make sure your content strategy works for your audience. Test what works. For example, we tested newsletter, graphic-led, e-shot and Outlook-style emails and found that the latter performed best. Therefore we make all our emails look as though they come from a personal account.
PURPOSE
What are you trying to achieve with this campaign? If this is your weekly newsletter is it to engage customers? Provide education? Drive people to your website? Make sure your CTAs in the email reflect the aim of your campaign or you won’t see the results you want!
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
For the workflow itself, you’ll need to add an exit. Consider whether your subscribers will naturally exit the content flow at the end of your campaign stream or if certain interactions will remove them (i.e. they fill out a form or call their account manager).
You’ll also need to add in wait periods between the campaigns. We suggest you use your usual frequency here.
If you want to maximise this workflow to its full potential, keep adding campaigns! Anytime you upload new content to your website, create a new campaign and add it to your workflow. This way, you can constantly engage your refreshing audience with content that you know meets your call to actions.
Ready to get started? Take a look at the 5 other workflows you could be using or get in contact with your account manager about setting up some specialist product training.
