The First (And The Most Logical) Thing To Do When You Start Email Automation

Before we get into email automation and how you can get started with it, let’s understand that emails fall under two broad categories.

1. Broadcast Emails – Where someone manually hits the “SEND” button to broadcast the email manually
2. Triggered Emails – When an action (or inaction) and/or behavior of your list members initiates an email message

Email automation is the process of setting up the right triggers with the right messages so that they can be delivered to the right users at the right time.

Why Automate

Well, the most important benefit, of course, is to eliminate all of the repetitive work that required every time you want to send out an email to your list members. 

Once you automate your messaging system, it pretty much works on auto-pilot.  

Most importantly, the work of nurturing your prospects to convert them into qualified leads and then to customers.

According to a report published by Strategic IC, companies that nurture leads generate 50% more sales at a 33% less cost when compared to non-nurtured prospects. 

Its major benefits include

• Move prospects along your sales funnel, by customizing messages based on their journey
• Improving engagement and conversion rates, by personalizing messages, based on user behavior 
• On-board new clients with minimal effort with an on-boarding sequence
• Improve customer retention, by making tailor-made offers to your existing customers
• Re-engage lost subscribers, by automatically moving inactive users to another list with a sequence designed specifically for the purpose
• Losing customers along the shopping cart? You can use an automated abandoned cart sequence, offering a coupon or an extra freebie to sweeten the deal.

Double The Benefits Of Email Automation With Third Party Data Sources

By connecting Google Analytics with your automation engine, you can send targeted messages to your subscribers, based on 

• their behavior on your website,
• preferences while reading your content, and
• any other activity that they may be engaging in such as
• downloading a white paper; or
• making a purchase.

Overall, email automation can help you build better customer relationships. This results in positive customer experience. And that translates to more profit per customer, higher customer life time value and a scalable marketing program.

PRO Tip: While broadcast emails are useful in some situations, your business predominantly will use automation for the most part.

Where Does Segmentation Fit In Email Automation

And while an automation is running, you will use segmentation to classify your users.

For example, when you’re running a 5 email sequence about the features of your product, and your prospect buys from you after the 2nd email, you would want to eliminate them from the nurturing sequence, and instead, move them to the post-purchase sequence. That’s the power of automation.

Everything works on autopilot while you enjoy the hot summer sun lying on a beach somewhere.

Let’s start with the broad premise of the word SEGMENTATION

It is a broad term, that allows you to classify your audience, based on three fundamental categories:

• Who they are
• What they do
• What they want

The 3rd category actually is an important distinction. When you run an email automation, all of your automation will flow based on this 3rd category.

If the users have denoted preferences for a particular frequency or format of emails, then everything else will flow based on this information. 

Here is a typical hierarchy of how to classify based on MailChimp. Good thing is, they can be ported to other email services as well.

• Audience The enter collection of people who have opted in to receive your emails
• Groups Distinct interest and preferences based classification of list members (either member specified, or internally classified)
• List Fields or Merge Tags: Parameters that can have a unique value for each of the members in your list. For ex, Date of Birth, Date of Joining, Gender, etc. 
• Tags: Multiple random classification assigned to users. Such as when they download multiple eBooks from your resources library, you can assign a unique tag for each eBook. This way you can create segments based on selection of tags and send them relevant emails.
• Segments: A set of rules used to create a tight selection of users, based on their List Field parameters, Group attributes. and can include User actions and Behaviors

Audience

This is your broad level list, and use it very selectively. Because, everything else, like groups, list fields (merge tags), tags, segments etc. are a sub-set of an audience system. If you create multiple audiences, then, you will have to replicate all of the system features across all audiences. And that doesn’t make any sense.

Groups

Groups is a way to categorize audience interests.

Users that are interested in email marketing vs users that are interested in social media advertising vs users that are interested in photoshop design vs users that are interested in copy-writing. These are groups of people and it won’t make sense to send them content that is irrelevant to their interest.

Another interesting use for a group is for users that prefer to receive text based emails or html emails. 

Groups are classified in group category and then the group name. For example, in the above scenario, there will be two group categories.

1st Category will be “Course Interests” and then the group names will be “Social Media”, “Photoshop Design” and so on.

2nd Category will be “Email Format Preferences” and the group names will be “HTML” and “Text Only”

One user can belong in multiple groups within the same category. For example, I may be interested in both, email marketing as well as social media advertising. So, if you run email automation sequences, you can run them for both groups. 

Control Of Groups

Group membership can be controlled directly by the users.You can show them the options to choose one or more preferences in a form.

Groups need to be public in order for your subscribers to manage their preferences.

Another way to be able to add members to the group is by way of hidden fields. And yet another is by using Zapier that we cover extensively in our Email Newsletter Profit Labs Program.

An easy to understand use-case for groups is if you sell multiple products in an eCommerce store. Every time a user buys a product they have never bought before, they can be added to that group specifically.

There is a limit to the number of groups you can have per account. So while it may seem appropriate to classify groups based on country, it is not a good idea. Why? Because there are over 200 countries! You will use all of your quota of available group names in your MailChimp account with just these names. Instead, use the country as an Audience merge field that can either be populated with the user input. You could do it with IP based tracking automatically.

Some examples of a group hierarchy can be 

Category: Internal Communications

Groups: Sales, Marketing, All Staff, Board of Directors, Advisory Board etc.

Category Business Associates

Groups: Clients, Vendors 

Category: Email Format Preferences

Groups: HTML, Text Only 

LIST FIELDS / MERGE TAGS

These are additional data points that you collect about the users, and include them with their data record. Some examples include, sign-up date, date of birth, gender, address, sign-up source and so on. These are completely custom fields that can be used to compile users with similar values. Such as, all users signed up before a certain date, or all users that are over 45 years of age, and males.  

TAGS

Tags are like labels assigned to users and offer an almost limitless ability to classify users and keep your marketing automation organized. Think of tags as a flexible mode of assigning labels to users, without committing them to the overall hierarchy of your list and customer journey.

Tags can either be structured with a comprehensive taxonomy or they can be as lightweight as just adding them at random to a few key subscribers. For example, your business may not receive a lot of written request for unsubscribing from your lists, but sometimes, you do. There is no need to create a specific group or a list field to identify such users. You can simply assign the tag “postal-mail-unsubscribe” to these users.

Tags are particularly useful for triggering automation sequences. 

For example, as soon as a user purchases a product from the 3rd in a series of 6 conversion email sequence, the tag “converted” is applied and this can trigger moving the user to an entirely different post-purchase sequence.

Once you start tagging your contacts, you can also view common tags for your subscribers, to see which tags are more common among a set of users in a particular segment. 

Some examples of tags can include:

SEGMENTS

A way to filter characteristics is Segments. These are the things that you know about them, or can deduce based on a set of logical statements. Some common examples include

• Subscriber Data
• Sign Up Date
• An example of a segment would be users that joined in the last 30 days, AND (OR) that have NOT opened any of our emails
• The Demographic Data You Collect or Append for Them 
• Men, over 30 
• Women with toddlers at home
• Based on Their Behavior
• What campaigns or automation sequences have they opened or clicked on?
• Whether they are new, or engage with you rarely, sometimes or often
• E-Commerce Activity
• Product Purchased If connected to your storefront
• So one could send them an email making a deal sweeter to purchase the next product

Segments Can Be Divided In Two Types

1. Static – Normally, there won’t be any new subscribers being added to a static segment. For example, a segment of users that signed up on a specific promo you ran for Thanksgiving in 2019 – that information is never going to change. So that’s an example of a static segment – Users that signed up for ThanksGiving 2019 Promo
2. Auto-updating Segments – These are used for the most part, as users get added to it based on their action and their behavior – actions could clicking on links in emails or submitting a form, or making a purchase, or behavior could include opening or not opening emails – It helps keeps segments current, so you know you’re reaching your entire audience class.

Special Note About Using Segments And Groups

• In order to segment your users, you DO NOT NEED groups.
• However, groups definitely make segmenting a whole lot more useful and easier to manage.
• You can create a segment with users from multiple groups within the segment, like you may have a group of cat lovers and dog lovers, and you may want to send out an email to a segment of all animal lovers in which case, you will include both groups

Special Note About Using Audiences In Mailchimp

Do not use separate audience until you’re literally running campaigns for two companies not related to each other.

1. You’re paying extra -Same users will have to be in multiple audiences, in case your business entity is one. Within one business, a proper use case to have multiple audiences can be leads, MQL, SQL, Customers, Churned Out Members, particularly, when you know that the audience are mutually exclusive – an audience that’s a lead can’t be a customer at the same time, and one that’s a customer can’t be a churned out member. This is when, you can (And I am not saying you should, but you can) use audiences.
2. Segmentation will need to run twice, on each audience separately. If you have an automation or a form that adds data to the audience fields, you will have to run it twice or may miss it at all when targeting them for a campaign
3. Automation is always based on an audience, and therefore, if you use two audiences, you will have to set up two separate automations 
4. They’ll have to opt-out twice if you keep them in two audiences
5. If you have an audience primarily for “brand new” customers, you will have a hard time managing your reputation because if you get a few extra unsubscribes and even worse, some of them end up complaining, you’re screwed with the reputation of your domain, and MailChimp

I understand email automation is no child's play. It takes a lot of work and smart planning. But it is also clear that in a world more socially distanced, you have no choice but to master email marketing. I'm running a training to tell you the ins and outs of email marketing so you can get 4300% ROI too- https://bit.ly/3ajYqRD