Email Automation for Beginners

Email automation, marketing workflows, drip campaigns or whatever you want to call it are all the same basic thing. They are automatically sent, personalized, and tracked emails shared with your customers or leads. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the options and implementation of these programs and the services that tout it can be very expensive.

In this article I want to help beginners with two things:

• How can I plan effective automations?
• What’s an affordable way to implement?

Planning Out Email Automations

Email automations boil down to three phases which are the

Trigger Event – Emails – Goal

In order to make an effective automation you need to keep all these in perspective at all times. So let’s break down each step.

• Trigger Event – This is the action that initiates the campaign. This is typically a form fill, but it can be visits to certain pages, cart abandonment, etc. It can be pretty much anything you can track while knowing the visitor’s email address. It’s extremely important to consider why this event is worth it to the customer and your emails. If they fill out a form to get access to a helpful PDF, you’ll want to continue that process by sending them more helpful information. If it’s cart abandonment, you can send a reminder.
• Emails – What you say after the trigger event is important. The best thing to do is keep helping the prospect. The more you help the more trust and loyalty you will build. This is about relationship building not making a sale and kicking them out the door.
• Goals – Always have a goal in mind. If they downloaded a PDF from you, you should offer another. When it comes to deciding goals, keep the trigger in mind. Please don’t assume that if they filled out a form for a webinar they want to buy a million dollars worth of stuff. Always be helping. Think of the long term investment in a mutual and helpful relationship.

One Cost Effective Method for Email Automation

There are numerous services that offer email automation as a part of their offerings including, Hubspot and Pardot. However, these choices are massive commitments in both cost and time. At Upright Communications, we have experience with Hubspot and are official Hubspot partners. However, I would strongly recommend using Mailchimp, which is a fraction of the costs and simple to onboard. This service solely focuses on email marketing, but it does have a robust library of integrations. This means it can likely work with your current CRM or other programs. They also have a massive educational database of resources, as well as a bunch of video tutorials.

There are other services out there not mentioned in this article, but I believe Mailchimp is the versatile resource small business owners need. Count on Upright Communications for all things inbound marketing!