Find out everything you need to know about Marketing Automation and using Active Campaign, the perfect email marketing software to manage your business email contacts.
How many emails do you receive each day?
Have you ever thought that all those communications are not handwritten from time to time but are created first and scheduled to be sent?
Or was it inserted into flows that are sent automatically?
That’s right; it’s about marketing automation.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is an expression that identifies all those processes that allow you to automate semi-repetitive marketing activities.
An example is sending emails to your readers or contacts acquired through lead generation.
Marketing automation could be the automatic sending of the welcome email to the people who subscribe to your newsletter.
Or they are sending a sequence of emails to people who have shown interest in a product or service.
Automating all these processes is essential for two reasons:
- You can save hours of work by devoting to other activities that require manual labor;
- It’s the only way to make your business scalable. If you had to take care of every marketing activity in person, you probably wouldn’t be able to manage everything and waste precious time.
Significantly when your business is growing, marketing automation proves to be the best tool to help you manage your contacts and customers.
Now that you understand marketing automation let’s talk about the marketing automation tool par excellence: email marketing.
5 Benefits Of Using An Email Marketing Platform
The email marketing platform is the tool that allows you to send your emails automatically and massively to your contact list.
In 2020, it is now essential to have such software to manage email addresses.
You can’t think of sending your sales communications to your customers via Gmail, Outlook or any traditional email medium.
They are practical tools in personal communication between two people but are dangerous in commercial touch.
By sending commercial attachments, sales links, or sales emails through these tools, you risk ending your emails in the recipients’ SPAM box and seeing your account blocked for dangerous activity.
Better not to. Rely on a professional tool.
This is already a big selling point, but let’s see 5 more benefits of using a professional email marketing platform.
Creating Email Flows
You can create sequences and streams of emails sent when specific actions are taken.
Subscription to the newsletter, for example, can start a previously created email flow.
Even the purchase of a product or the compilation of any contact form on the site are actions that can trigger automatic email flows.
Creating email sequences allows you to save a lot of work and build a relationship of trust with the person who receives them.
If the person receives a series of emails from you after downloading content from the site, in which they are accompanied to use the content, they will undoubtedly feel “pampered”, and you will make a good impression.
Remember that building a relationship of trust with your contacts is the basis for selling online
Automation In Sending Emails
You can schedule your emails and send them on the day and time you prefer.
This feature helps you organize your email sendings since you can create your emails all at once, decide when to send them and then forget about them.
The software will work for you.
Mass Sending Of Emails
In addition to scheduling and automation, you can send your emails to numerous contact lists, even up to 10,000 people simultaneously.
If you’ve prepared a sales email to introduce your product, you can send your email to a broad audience and have a better chance of people buying it.
If you are thinking of buying an email database as it used to be, we do not recommend that you do so.
Most of the time, they are off-target contacts with your business.
You would end up sending a communication that nobody cares about.
Instead, our suggestion is to collect contacts through your site or blog with a contact form and cultivate a relationship with them in this way.
Lists Segmented Based On User Actions
Your contacts are not all the same: some will be more interested in one content and those in another, those who have already purchased a product and those who have only downloaded a pdf found on your site.
You have to behave differently for each person because they are at a different stage of the buying journey.
You can divide your contacts into different lists and send personalized messages to each list.
Statistics On Reader Behavior
Here is the last advantage, perhaps the most important.
An email marketing software gives you the ability to analyze your users’ behavior.
Do you want to know how many people have read your email, how many have clicked, where they come from or who has unsubscribed?
You can do it safely.
Indeed, based on the data collected, you should optimize your future email campaigns and create messages more in line with your audience’s interests.
Data allows you to lead your business scientifically, without making decisions based on instinct and hoping from time to time that you have taken the right path.
Which Email Marketing Platform To Choose?
Now that we’ve seen the benefits of using an email marketing platform let’s see what we have at our disposal to get started.
There are many platforms, each with its characteristics and prices (above all).
Free Email Marketing Platforms
There are free ones (with some limits), such as Mailchimp and Sendinblue.
The Mailchimp Free account allows you to have up to 2,000 contacts in your database and send unlimited emails to these contacts.
The Free Sendinblue account, on the other hand, allows you an unlimited number of contacts but places a limit on daily mailings.
You can’t do A / B testing for both, and the automation is minimal.
Paid Email Marketing Platforms
The other email marketing platforms that we will see now offer paid accounts only, but with the possibility of doing a 14-day trial to test the features before purchasing.
These include Aweber, Mailup, GetResponse and Active Campaign.
The latter is the one that we also use every day and that we also recommend you start email marketing.
We have chosen it precisely for its quality/price ratio.
We want to give you all the information you need to get to know her better.
What Is An Active Campaign?
Active Campaign is an email marketing automation platform that allows you to:
- Create email flows,
- Automate mailings,
- Track the behavior of your contacts on the site,
- Manage your communications through the CRM.
It includes all the features we’ve just seen at a lower price than alternative platforms.
Let’s go and analyze them specifically.
What Are The Features Of Active Campaign?
Let’s see what the most used features of Active Campaign are and how many things can be done with this software.
Marketing Automation
As we have already said, marketing automation includes all those activities that can be automated to speed up daily work.
Active Campaign allows you to create preset email sequences and define the number of emails you want to send and the day and time to send them.
Once automation is activated, you can forget about it: Active Campaign will work for you day and night.
So you no longer have to worry about preparing emails to welcome and accompany new subscribers.
Lead Generation
You will need to have contacts send them to send your emails.
In technical jargon, this process is called lead generation, which means generation of contacts in Italian.
With Active Campaign, you can also take care of this phase: you can create contact forms to be inserted directly within WordPress.
You can associate a list with each contact form so that people who subscribe to the newsletter form will be included in the newsletter list, and so on.
CRM, Customer Relationship Management
CRM is contact management software that records all contacts’ actions and gives you information about them.
For example, personal information, how many times they have been contacted, where is your relationship with them, etc.
CRM is essential if you have a structured business that deals with dozens of customers every month.
With software of this type, you no longer risk losing your communications with them along the way, having everything in one place.
Active Campaign also has this functionality.
Its CRM records all the actions carried out by your readers, so you can have a complete overview of the contacts who interact the most, those who are less involved and act accordingly.
Customer Segmentation With Lists And Tags
Earlier, we talked about segmented lists of users.
Active Campaign allows you to segment your contacts even more through tags, which are labels you can assign to them to get to know them even better.
For example, suppose you have a newsletter list to send your communications every week. In that case, you can assign an “article-x-read” tag every time a person reads the article after opening the email.
It is a surefire way to send even more personalized communications to your contacts because you can know their tastes and develop a relationship of trust with them.
A/B Test
A/B tests are the key to creating more and more performing emails.
What does it mean to do an A/B test?
It means creating two versions of an email, where you’ll only change one item, and sending the first version to one half of the audience and the other version to the remaining half.
A / B testing is essential for optimizing your messages and understanding what your audience prefers.
Will he like subject A or B of the email? This image of another?
With Active Campaign, you can learn all of these things and create more effective emails.
You can also find out the best time of day to send communications by testing the sending time.
Behavior Data And Statistics
Once you’ve sent your emails, it’s time to analyze the stats.
Active Campaign gives you a variety of insights into your readers’ behavior, such as:
- The open email rate,
- The number of clicks,
- unsubscriptions,
- Emails not sent due to server problems,
- The geographical location,
- The device used.
All this information needs to be analyzed to understand your audience better.
If you find that the open rate is low on average, you can decide to test a different object and see if it works better.
Same thing with clicks: if you see that the number of clicks is low, it could be a problem with the content or even just the position of your link in the text.
Also Read: How Is B2B Marketing Automation Evolving?
