Today we’re going to talk about email marketing automation. So this is going to finish up our week of email marketing. Last Monday, we talked about email marketing as a discipline, the software you’re going to need. On Tuesday we talked about lead generation and lead magnets. Wednesday we talked about email copy. Yesterday we talked about sequencing. And then today we’re going to talk about automation.
All of those things come into play and it all is very formulaic in how you end up rolling that stuff out. These are the following things that you need to do.
- First: you need to have the software
- Second: you need to have leads
- Third: you need to have a copy
- Fourth: you need to put that copy together inside sequences or campaigns, depending on what software you’re going to choose
- Fifth: you need to trigger that email to go out
There is a method to this madness, which is this helps you grow your business online. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. That’s why we do what we do.
There are three places that I’m going to take you through today.
- The first is our CRM software called Axis. I’m going to show you how to trigger workflows, trigger campaigns inside Axis using that.
- The second that we’re going to go, is we’re going to go into Ontraport. I’m going to show you rules-based triggers the run in email marketing automation so that you can start to get some ideas about how to set that up in your business.
- The third-place we’re going to go is a piece of software called Zapier. Inside Zapier I’m going to show you how I have set it up. If somebody hits a landing page and they are in my CRM, then I can see inside Slack that they are on that page.
It’s funny because I kind of have a running feed of if I know your email address and stuff and you hit an important page on the website. I see it in Slack, the whole team sees it in Slack. If it happens a couple of times throughout a couple of days, I mean, there are times where I’ll pick up the phone and say, “Hey look, I mean, you keep coming back to the same website. Is there anything I can do to help?”
It’s creepy to a degree, but we are also an email marketing automation – or marketing automation company at least.
At the same time, I’m like, “Eh.” It’s kind of a gray area, but it’s kind of what we do. In terms of looking at it on a macro level, if you have a high-end physical product company. You’re doing eCommerce sales and somebody comes back on Tuesday and then they come on Wednesday and then they come on Thursday and then they come on Friday. They’re thinking about that decision. They’re thinking about: Do you think you should pick up the phone and call them? Absolutely. It would be awesome. And now you can do that using automation.
Different Ways of Email Automation
There are lots of different ways you can cut it up and stack it up. But I’m going to show you some of the stuff that we do and then we’ll go from there.
1. DFY CRM Software: Axis
The first place that I think we’re going to go, we’re going to go over into Axis. Axis is our CRM. We built it from scratch. This is Zapier now. So Zapier is the place we’re going.
Inside Axis, I’m just going to kind of walk around Axis a little bit and just show it off a little. This is a fully-featured CRM. It’s an email marketing workflow, email marketing CRM. It doesn’t do a lot of the high-end sales pipeline stuff. But it does a lot of email marketing automation, trigger-based marketing, that kind of stuff. We have our main dashboard.
Dashboard and Marketplace
This is just a test account, but we have a dashboard and a marketplace. Inside the marketplace, you can add different apps so we can integrate it with Zapier and Twillio and there’s the email copy app, which used to be Scriptly, and then we have the CRM. We have analytics that used to be Statly. And then we have the page builder and we’re adding all of our apps into this.
Contacts
Underneath the CRM piece, we have our CRM. This is our main dashboard. If we go down into contacts though, you see that we have some contacts in here and each of those contacts, if we get into a customer record, so we’re just going to go here, we’re going to go into this customer record and then we can actually call from right inside the platform and also send a text message from right inside the platform.
That’s important for the automation piece, for the email marketing automation. We have the first name, last name, all of the major information. If we have their address, it’ll show a map. We can sort based on the company. Put them in email automation and tag them and then add attachments to their account. So if we have documents or photos or whatever that we want to attach to their account, then we can do that there.
Forms
Then we have forms and the forms are all drag and drop. So every record inside the customer record there, you can drag it into the field of play and it will add it, it’ll stack it up. And then as soon as somebody enters the information in that form field, it gets saved to the CRM and then triggers automation.
Messages
The next step is the messages. So there are two different kinds of messages you can send out of Axis. You can send a text message. We can drop a text message in the email marketing automation campaign the same way that we would drop an email in. Somebody opts in, they get a text message and an email at the same shot. Or if we want to just send a text message, we can do that.
There are no third-party integrations. It’s all just native to the software because the third-party stuff sucks to set up and it sucks to support. And there was one time our client called me and we had his integration set up in Infusionsoft, which is now Keep, and he called me and it was a Saturday at nine o’clock and he’s like, “This is super urgent.” He’s like, “I need to send a text message out to my list.” And I was like, “Okay.” Sit down and have the text for the text message.
It takes me an hour and 15 minutes to set up this text message because it isn’t just selecting people and sending a text message. It is creating a campaign that has a timestamp that has a text message to send through this third party platform to Twillio and then add everybody in and sit there and wait to make sure it fires and then watch it fire and then then it’s done.
That’s a whole lot of shit for nothing. What we ended up doing was just doing a native integration inside Axis for that. In the message center, you have emails, you have texts. Now where it all comes together, where all the email marketing automation comes together is here in the campaign, the campaign viewer. So if we’re looking at the report fulfillment piece here, we’re going to go into the campaign and now we have entry points and these are our triggers.
The triggers are all of the ways that this email marketing automation sequence is going to end up firing off. The trigger is the report form, it’s like a form being filled out, so one of these forms. Or it is a tag being added. So we can add any form we want or we can add any tag we want as an entry point, as a trigger.
If that entry point fires, then the rest of this stuff ends up playing out, the rest of this campaign automation. Now underneath the campaign automation, this is all the stuff that’s going to end up happening when these entry points end up firing. So here we have emails, emails are yellow and text messages are green. And then we have our delays. So what we do is we stack up emails and text messages or just emails or just text messages based on how often they want to go out.
If we want to drop a delay in here, then we do that. So this delay is going to be for let’s say four hours. It’s going to be zero-days, four hours. We hit save and then this … So the email is going to go out first and then the text message is going to go out second. So four hours later and then 24 hours after that email and text files at the same time.
That’s how you would end up setting automation inside Axis. It’s powerful when you start getting some pretty complex workflows down. How we end up doing it, how we set up all of our clients is, what we’ll do is we’ll put together a lead magnet promo sequence or a webinar promo sequence. They go through the webinars, the webinar promo sequence, and then they complete that sequence and then they kick over into the webinar replay sequence. They just bounce from one sequence to another sequence. And how you do that is you can drag these tags down at the bottom.
After somebody completes this campaign automation, they then bounce to the next sequence. So it ends up being nice that way just from an automation standpoint. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can queue up your email marketing automation, your email messages and text messages based on them filling out a form or a tag being applied to their account.
You can do all that stuff inside Zapier, which means you can integrate a lot of the tools. Does anybody have any questions on this side? Because I’m going to flip over into Ontraport and show you something else that’s kind of cool, which is URL-based triggers. All right, it looks like we’re good. Okay, cool.
2. Ontraport
Ontraport is a different CRM. We still use Ontraport a lot because Ontraport has order forms and Axis does not have order forms yet. You want to trigger something when somebody buys, you want to trigger an onboarding sequence. But this is Ontraport.
I’ve been with Ontraport for seven or eight years. Great piece of software. It just that a lot of our clients don’t need it, which is why we built Axis. Inside Ontraport, I’m underneath our message list here, so all of the messages that we have sent. And how I work it is, so I have these sequences that are built and the sequences are the same thing as these campaigns. Not these campaigns but … so a sequence, a campaign, same thing, different day. I have sequences for anything you can imagine.
If we go up to like just some of them done for your sequences. Let’s see. So if somebody does something then they end up getting added into one of these sequences. So here you can see there’s a funnel factor autoresponder, 1400 emails have been sent. There are 1400 people in this email marketing automation sequence at the moment. 4,300 emails sent.
Each of those ends up going and there’s the fulfillment email and then there’s some promo stuff in there. But the ones I want to talk about specifically are here, this page visit abandonment sequence. So let me see if I can make this any bigger. Does it go bigger? Yeah, it does. Okay, cool. So here we have page visit abandonment. We’re going to talk about this one. Yeah. This page visit abandonment Facebook ads promo. I’ve reworked this one a couple of times. The same with the sales funnel one.
But in here, this Facebook ads promo sequence, basically what happens is, is when somebody goes to doneforyou.com … I love setting up this kind of automation for clients. It’s just, I don’t want to talk about their stuff. So it’s not great to talk about them as an example especially publicly like this. So not this page, this ad management, Facebook advertising ad management page.
Basically what happens is whenever somebody goes to this page and we know who they are, they’ve already opted into a lead magnet or they have been to the website of CRM or something, then what happens is, is … Or they’ve chatted in here, there’s a rule that fires to kick off or end the email marketing automation.
If you go down here to rules, well the rule that fires is this one, Facebook BSL, remove promo sequence. Yep. Right here. This rule fires and what it does is it says that when somebody visits the sales page. When somebody visits this page, then what they’re going to do is we’re going to add them to the abandonment sequence. Take them off of all promo emails. When contact is added to the page visit abandonment sequence and they are subscribed to the promo sequence, then remove them from the promo sequence. What that does is it triggers the next step.
When somebody hits this page and gets added to this promo sequence, remove them from the other sequence. So if you think about it like an if-then sentence. If they do this, then this happens. And if they don’t, then that thing doesn’t happen. So in the same breath, there’s another rule that fires at the same time.
Facebook Ads View Automation
This is the other rule that works in conjunction with it. Here we have this trigger in the email marketing automation campaign. The contact visits Facebook advertising. Right there, services, Facebook advertising. Contact visits Facebook advertising or contact visits Facebook advertising, FB simple, which is not a split test that is in play anymore. I’m just going to delete it.
I’m always testing different stuff. If they visit this page and the contact is not subscribed to the abandonment sequence, then subscribe them to the abandonment sequence. What we’re doing there is we don’t want to overwrite somebody who’s already in the abandonment sequence.
If they’re already in the abandonment sequence, we don’t want to start them back from the beginning. That’s why we run this little condition and then we add them to be abandonment sequence from there. The other thing it does is this segues over into … I did make a change. So I’m going to save this guy.
3. Zapier
This segues over into Zapier. So check this out. I’m going to log into Zapier and Zapier has the integration with Slack. So watch. Oops. There it is. So DFY VSL page visits, that’s the private folder I’m looking for. Do you guys like this stuff? Are you into it? It gets a little bit complicated. You’ve got to think about it a little bit more than just a passing thought. I mean, this kind of automation tends to get pretty deep, the email marketing automation.
Facebook ads, page visit. So if we look at this zap, what you’re going to find is that … So when a tag is added in Ontraport, the tag is going to be DFY page view, Facebook ads, then we are going to send a message to Slack. And that message is going to be on deck, Facebook ads, sales page, visitor. And then the different information from Ontraport.
What it’s doing is when the URL fires that the person is in, then they get added to a tag, they get added to a sequence. And that sequence then tells Slack, tells Zapier which tells Slack that to send us a message. So it ends up working out nice from an email marketing automation front. It is pretty technical. So setting it up is kind of a chore. I’m happy to go through and look at how we can apply some of this email marketing automation to your company.
At the end of the day, what happens is you get a nice workflow. It takes a couple of hours to set up, takes a little bit of time to set up. But when you do it, then you end up having this workflow where the lead comes in, and then things just start triggering.
The lead comes in, they buy something, they don’t buy something, then they get sent into this email sequence or that email sequence based on what they’re doing. Based on what they’re doing or what they are doing or have done or whatever. Slack is telling you where they’re coming from or what they’re doing on your website. It is feeding you all the information on them, whether it’s phone number or email address or whatever. And then all of a sudden you’re just kind of rocking. So before you know it, you got all kinds of deal flow happening, all kinds of things happening that are moving people towards your business.
It’s interesting. I don’t have Slack on this computer, my live streaming computer. But at the end of the day, I mean, somebody comes in from an ad, they opt-in, you have their email address at that point. Then they hit a website or they hit a page, a sales page or whatever. They hit the sales page, they’re clicking around the homepage. They go to some other important key view page. Then a notification pops up inside Slack and says, “Hey, this person’s on this page.”.
The first time it’s like, “Okay, they’re just kind of checking it out.” It’s so funny though when the email marketing automation fires and it’s like, “Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing.” And you can see them open up all of your sales pages to look at all of your different services.
NOTE: Click here to learn about putting together sales funnels that are entirely automated!
You can see how long they were on that page. Or you can log into a drift and start a message with them, or you can call them on the phone if you have their phone number. There are so many different ways to do it from an inbound marketing sense that it’s like … When it works, it works. It matches everything up and you’re off and running. So that is how you trigger actions based on intent.
The other thing I wanted to talk about is just buyer intent in general. So the person who clicks an ad and doesn’t opt-in, obviously they’re less qualified than the person who opts in. The person who opts in and then visits the sales page is more qualified than the person who doesn’t. And then, of course, the person who buys something is the most qualified of all. So it’s important to think about those stages when you’re building out your email marketing automation campaigns.
Stage one, they’re just learning about you. They’re just getting to know you, they’re just really getting started. They might not even have a real good idea of what they’re doing yet. Then the opt-in gives them a little bit more information about you. It lets them discover a little bit more about you and what you do, what you stand for. And then when you move them closer to being a buyer or when they buy something, they’re invested in what it is you’re doing. They’re invested in bettering themselves and getting that transformation that they are looking for. So it’s a nice journey. It’s a nice process. And you want to set up your email marketing automation to adapt to that.
You have your cold traffic folks and then they get warmer and warmer and warmer. So when you’re setting up your email marketing automation campaigns, you need your promo sequences, you need your fulfillment sequences, you need your abandonment sequence. It doesn’t even have to be shopping cart abandonment, but they go to this page, and then they don’t take the action that you want them to take, well then you should send them emails and say, “Okay. You were on this page. What happened?” Maybe it was a tech issue. I just had that this morning. Somebody sent an email and said, “I tried closing this page down, it wouldn’t close.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. Sorry. I’ll X out of it and I’ll fix it later.” Do you know what I mean? Unfortunately, it’s just how it works.
But in setting up email marketing automation, just start slow, start small, write some email copy, put it together into campaigns and then ask yourself, what is the best way to trigger these campaigns? Is it a tag? Is it a URL page visit or whatever?
For Questions and Guide
If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start. Book a time with my team and we will get some ideas. Go through, talk about your business, talk about what you’re selling, all that stuff, and put together an action plan for you. Whether it’s paid traffic or funnels or automation or whatever. Just see how it works. Or send me a message on Facebook. That works too.
Next week, so I’m a little up in the air about what we’re going to learn next week. I’m half thinking it’s going to be Facebook ads, like going through and doing a video views campaign.
For those of you watching, if you want to just chime in, that’d be awesome. But the options are creating digital products one by one and having a session on every kind of digital product or doing Facebook ads, so Facebook video ad campaigns. That’s my thought. It’s going to be one or the other. So if you have an idea of what you want to learn, go to doneforyou.com/GSD and let me know. I’ll talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.
