3 Email Automations You Should Build Before Sending Another Email Newsletter
This is part 3 of our Salesforce Marketing series. We’re talking about what great Marketing looks like in 2021, and how you can use Salesforce products like Marketing Cloud and Pardot to grow your business. Read Part 2 here.
Email newsletters have been around for almost half a century (yes, really!).
While email newsletters can provide value for many organization’s subscriber lists, much has changed in the email world since 1978. One of the biggest tools that has revolutionized email marketing is automation.
While implementing email automation can be complex, its definition is simple. Email automation sends email messages automatically when a subscriber performs an activity or meets a set of criteria.
Okay, so why are we talking about email automation?
If you’re sending out email newsletters regularly, but aren’t taking advantage of email automation, there may be some low-hanging fruit for you to take hold of and increase your marketing ROI.
Have you ever clicked submit on a web form and nothing happened. Well, maybe something happened, but the screen didn’t change. And when you fill out a form like this, you’re left wondering: “Did it go through? I hope so!” Needless to say, this creates a horrible user experience.
There are a few simple things you can do to create a positive user experience for users filling out forms.
- Good: display a confirmation message.
- Better: redirect submitters to a thank you page with a confirmation message. Google Analytics goal tracking is easier to setup to track completions when you funnel users from a form page URL to a thank you page URL, as opposed to keeping the user on the same page and setting up something fancy using Google Tag Manager.
- Best: redirect submitters to a thank you page, as well as sending them an auto responder email.
- Bonus Points:
- Personalize the autoresponder email message with the submitter’s first name.
- Set the autoresponder to send from the Salesforce record owner’s email address with an email signature matching the user’s manual email signature.
- Include expectations about response time, and include a phone number and meeting booking link if the submitter needs to contact you.
Lead nurturing is the automated process of sending personalized and relevant content to prospects and customers at every stage of their buying journeys. – Pardot
If you’re looking for an example of a Lead Nurturing campaign, head on over to Part 2 of our Salesforce Marketing series.
Here are some great questions to ask to configure a successful lead nurturing campaign:
- Which part of the Sales Funnel do I want to target with this campaign?
- How long is our Sales cycle?
- What are the criteria in Salesforce or my marketing automation software that should start the lead nurturing campaign?
- What information do our leads need to be educated with to entice them to continue moving down the Sales Funnel?
- What actions by the prospects indicate the drip campaign has been successful?
- What data points in Salesforce or my marketing automation software indicate the drip campaign has been successful?
- How are we going to report on this campaign over time?
- What is our plan to use reporting data to inform adjustments to this campaign?
Once you know the answers to these questions, you are well on your way to setting up a nurturing campaign to give your leads the information they need at the right time to help them ultimately choose to purchase from you.
Do you have new customers onboarding regularly? Do you have a process to onboard them? Do new customers present the same issues and ask similar questions all the time? Does your NPS score increase when you create great expectations with your clients up front?
If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, you’ve got a great case to create a customer onboarding drip campaign.
What is customer onboarding?
Customer onboarding is the process of helping new customers become familiar and comfortable with how you do things as a company.
Great customer onboarding focuses on creating clear expectations on how the working relationship should progress, and how situations will be handled if what you’re working on together doesn’t go according to plan.
Determine where the most low-hanging fruit is.
Where is your team spending the most time when customers aren’t onboarded properly? What issues happen? What type of projects or products happen the most that have easy opportunities to streamline? What do you need to communicate up front with your customers to give them a world-class experience?
Tell them how you’re different.
Tell your customers about the unique nuances of how your company approaches work. Have you told them this already? Don’t worry, tell them again. Humans need to have information communicated to them many times before it influences their actions (EG: the marketing rule of 7).
Answer their questions before they ask.
Ask your account executives and project teams what questions new customers ask the most, and include those in an email message.
Have all these automation campaigns setup?
Bravo! You are well on your way to marketing success. But before you begin creating another email newsletter to send to your list, here are a few items to review:
- Are you reviewing your email automation campaigns and making updates to them regularly?
- Is there data in your email database to indicate if a smaller group of your whole list could benefit from a newsletter about a specific product or service?
- Have you given yourself a high five? You deserve it!
Next Steps
We’ll be continuing to talk about how to grow your company with Salesforce’s Marketing suite. If you found this valuable, subscribe to email updates to ensure that you don’t miss a post.
If you’re looking to setup email automations in Pardot, Marketing Cloud, or Salesforce, we can help. Fill out this form to start the conversation.
