Summarize with AI
(note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity of reading.)
Gina Ramsey: I would like to welcome everyone who is in person or who is watching the recording of this. We apologize that it had to be rescheduled last month, but we had a lot of sick people. So, without further ado, I would like to introduce Elizabeth Bertese from Intuit, who is one of our Mailchimp connections; and Coral, the director of digital marketing from Pink Dog Digital. I am Gina Ramsey, the president of Pink Dog Digital, and we’re excited to share this information with you.
So, to kick things off, for those in the room, if someone fills out a contact form on your website today, what happens next? And no, not what should happen, what actually happens. If you could drop your answer into the chat, that would be awesome, just so we can see where our baseline is…
For a lot of small businesses, the follow-up depends on someone remembering, and that’s where automations and systems like Mailchimp change everything.
So, Coral, I’ll start with you. Why is email a good platform for small businesses?
Coral Norman: Sure… I will say the automation piece is what we’re talking about today, and it’s not so much just what happens as soon as somebody fills out that form, but it’s what happens after they filled out the form, after you’ve contacted them back, you’re in conversation. Where do they go from there, where do they go from there, where do they go from there… because there’s a whole lot of ability to have touch points here that are automated, rather than requiring you to remember to reach back out on a day-to-day basis or have those conversations or whatever that looks like. That’s where automation really is going to come in and help you get your business not just kick-started, but really give it the gas that it needs on the back end.
As far as why email is a good platform for small businesses, there are a lot of reasons that we like email over some other platforms… One of the big ones is that you’re meeting people exactly where they are. Everybody is in their inbox pretty much all day – I know that I spend more time in my inbox than pretty much anywhere else; which comes with the territory of my job, but I know a lot of people spend a lot of time in their inbox. So you’re meeting people where they already are and you’re able to deliver that information directly to them rather than relying on an algorithm to deliver it to them – rather than relying on AI to deliver the information.
One of the other big ones that people look at is social. Social is very useful, but as a kind of part to the email piece. The big issue with social is that it’s constantly changing. They’re always adding platforms. The algorithm changes every day. You never know what you’re going to get. So while social media is useful, it helps to have something else where you’re going to be directly in front of your customer, no matter what.
SEO and websites. Websites are critical. We talk about it a lot, but search rankings fluctuate on websites. You’re going to have months where you are at the top of the game. You’re number one, and then suddenly they’re going to do an algorithm change and you’re at number 11, or they’re going to introduce AI. And suddenly nobody’s clicking on websites anyway. So, everything changes and you’re seeing those things fluctuate as well.
Another piece here is ads. Ads get very expensive. Email has the highest return on investment of just about any other platform for advertising, because you are directly in there and email is relatively cheap as far as both platforms go. And you’re able to put the information together and get it sent out, which is another reason that it tends to be really great for small businesses. It gives you direct access, so you have a captive audience right there. And as long as you are curating your email list well from people who you know are interested in what you’re doing and not buying email lists, you’re going to have an audience that’s ready for you, that is ready-made for you, and is going to be ready to receive the information that you’re sending out.
So those are the main reasons that you’re going to find that email marketing works well. The top reason, for small businesses, because your budgets are limited, is that it’s fairly inexpensive. The time to write the email and put a cadence together is considerably lower than writing a full blog article. Updating the email list doesn’t take a ton of time. Then, when you’re doing automations, while it does require updates and changes, it’s a lot of set-it-and-forget-it. Where you’re able to set up the automation and then put people through the automations regularly so that you’re having a touch point with all 500 people on your list, instead of having to reach out individually to those 500 people or hoping that the algorithm is going to show them your information.
So, that was a lot of information to say email marketing is a great place mostly because the return on investment is really good, especially for small businesses.
Elizabeth, do you have anything to add?
Elizabeth Bertese: Yeah, I think that’s a great summary. The other thing I would say that we love about email is your ability to change what’s in the email based on what users are interested in. We’ll get into that a little bit later, but email allows for great personalization and customization and direct control, as Coral mentioned, over what you’re giving your users or your customers at the right time. And you don’t have to rely on an algorithm to try to do that for you.
GR: Yeah, a hundred percent. Okay. So we’re talking a little bit about automations today. Can you talk me through automations? What is it? What does it do? What does it mean? How does it work?
CN: Yeah, I can lead off on this one. So when we talk about automation, what most people are going to default to right now is AI, because AI is such a big part of what everybody is doing. And we talk about AI here a lot because it is something that you kind of have to adapt into your marketing plans, regardless of what you’re doing, because it is so prevalent. I mean, we’ve definitely adopted and adapted to it, and we’ll continue to talk about it and how we work. But, in this case, it’s less AI and more about creating a scheduled cadence or multiple scheduled cadences that are able to go out to your email list and your different segments in the email list – Elizabeth will talk a little bit more about segmentation in a while.
(The emails are) going to the right people at the right times, so it allows you to create emails that are going out when you need them to go out. You receive automated emails every single day. Anytime you’re getting emails specifically from… if you think about signing up for an email list from Ulta or something like that. If you’re going to Ulta, you’re buying makeup, maybe it’s your first time there. They say, “Hey, can you input your email address?” You put your email address in, and then typically what you’re going to get from them is something like a welcome cadence. That’s going to be, “Hey, welcome to Ulta. Here’s a 20% off coupon. Please use it next time you come in” so that they’re going to try to bring you in. Then they’re going to follow up that cadence with probably two, three, four more emails that are a series of welcome emails. And from there, they’re also going to give you some other automation options that they’re looking at where it’s, “Hey, this person bought this particular brand. Maybe let’s drop them into a specific spot so that they can get emails that have to do with this brand and brands that are similar because that’s a good place that they may be able to purchase.” So, they’re going to customize that and personalize it a little bit.
What the automations do is… you build these in the back end. Then we say, “we want this email to go out at this time to this person.” And you keep track of what all of your automations look like, so that you know that you’re sending it out to the right person at the right time. You want to respond to what they’re actually doing, rather than just sending out emails that are off the cuff or just, you know, a random email here or there. You want to be responding to what the person does.
So, in a service-based business, this is going to look a little bit more like… Janet, for example, if you’re doing move management for somebody, the emails that they’re going to get follow ups on are going to be related to your organization. Organizing services after that, because they’ve done move management already. You’ve moved them in now. Maybe they need to get organized as they’ve moved in. So then you drop them into a cadence that is talking about that, and it automates that and sends those out maybe three weeks after they’ve moved in. And then another two weeks, something like that, so that you’re presenting a cadence that works directly for them. So these may be triggered by filling out a form. They may be triggered by timely follow up… like I just mentioned, with getting somebody into move management and then organization. And it might be behavior-driven based upon what the person, what you want them to do next and the call to action you want to give them.
Elizabeth, do you have anything to add on?
EB: I loved everything you said there. The thing that I think is really the crux of automation is: what makes automation such a valuable tool for your business is exactly that. They’re responding to your audience at the time that your audience is expressing interest in your business. They’re filling out a form, they’re opening an email, they’re clicking the link in your email, they’re looking at a page on your website. And the automation will see that trigger and send whatever you decide the appropriate follow up is so that you can strike while the iron is hot and make sure that you’re reaching out to the folks in your audience when they’re reaching out to you, implicitly or explicitly.
GR: So, we’re talking about triggers, follow up, behavior-driven messaging, sequences related to a specific thing… Coral used Janet as an example: she may set up a sequence when somebody signs up for a move to move them through the process of what’s happening to the move, correct?
EB: Exactly, yeah. And in that case, let’s use that as an example. Perhaps there’s a form that she has set up on her website. Her audience can fill out that form expressing interest in a move, signing up for a move. Then she can say, based on the cadence that’s typical of a move, she could immediately send an email saying, “Thanks for signing up, here’s more information, click here if you want to schedule.”
Then she could send a follow up five days later with a reminder and then she could send a follow up, just as Coral said, maybe a month later saying, “we hope your move went smoothly, let us know how we can help you with the next phase,” whatever that might look like for her business. And it really allows you to stay engaged with your audience in a way that makes sense for them that feels natural, warm, and like you’re communicating with them with really high relevance… which, of course, is really important.
GR: Great. I have so many questions for both of you, so if I get ahead of myself, please just bear with me.
A lot of people send out newsletters. We send newsletters out frequently and people say, “That’s enough. I don’t want to overshare with my clients or the people on my list.” Talk to me about the difference between a sequence, a newsletter, why one is important, why the other one is important. What’s better about one and are there any downfalls or any problems with one or the other?
CN: I think it’s always good to have both. I think that it’s important to know that there is a lot of value to having both of these for a couple of different reasons. Our newsletter is going to our full list every time because we want to touch base with everybody and just give them the information. That’s the one that’s going out once a month. And it’s going out to say, “here’s what’s going on at Pink Dog. Here’s what’s going on in the digital marketing world. Here’s just some information for you. Here’s our favorite tool that we’re using right now.” So we’re sending that out to our whole list, that they’re able to see all of that.
Then, on the other side of that, this is where the value of automations comes in and making sure that you’re automating for your specific audience and specific segment. Because this way you’re not inundating your whole list with a thousand different emails that may not apply to them. Instead, you’ve got people dropped into the different lists that they need to be in, the different segments they need to be in, so that they’re receiving the automations that are relevant to them. They’re actually interested in getting it. And instead of receiving a bunch of emails that aren’t relevant and having them click unsubscribe, they’re seeing things that have something to do with how they’ve already interacted with you, so that they want to see those emails in their inboxes.
That sequence is based on a trigger and it’s based on behavior. The newsletter is giving us a chance just to touch base, stay relevant, make sure that they know we’re in their inbox and then giving us potentially that trigger to set up a new automation for somebody. If they’ve seen an email of ours, they really liked something in the newsletter, reached out about it. “Hey, we know that now we can put them in the right place to make sure they’re receiving the right information that they need.” The sequences are going to help build trust. They’re going to give people the information they need to make good decisions. And the newsletters are giving you a real touch point with either previous clients or prospects or current clients, whatever that looks like.
EB: Yeah, I totally agree. I think both are important, just as Coral said. Newsletters are a way for you to tell your brand story and talk about what may be happening in your business that’s relevant that week, that month, seasonally… whatever cadence is right for you. And automations really complement that, if you set them up correctly to make sure that, again, you’re engaging with folks in those in-between times at the times that they’re trying to engage with you.
We do hear a lot that folks are concerned about over-communicating or sending too many emails, and that’s totally heard. I think it’s good to be mindful of that, for sure. And that’s something you can really solve for with segmentation within flows. You can make sure that you’re filtering out folks who maybe aren’t engaging with your email content. For example, if you don’t want to continue to send emails if somebody has not opened any of your last ones. We’ll get into an example a bit later. But I think there’s ways that you can gracefully solve for this and really make the most of both tools.
GR: That’s a great segue… we’re super excited to have Elizabeth with us today to talk a little bit about how these automation tools actually work. So I will kick this over to you and try and keep my mouth shut.
EB: Awesome. Okay. No need to keep your mouth shut! Feel free to jump in and ask questions.
CN: I’m going to jump in real quick on that note. If anybody has any questions specifically for Elizabeth or for Gina or myself, please feel free to drop them in the chat. Most of you know us pretty well. We don’t like to be talking heads. We like to have the conversation. So please feel free to drop any questions in the chat as we go, or any comments, and we’re happy to engage with that as well.
EB: So, we are in Mailchimp. As you can see, this is a demo account. It doesn’t have a ton of real data, but it has enough that we can talk through it and show y’all some of the features that we have here that we’ve been prefacing a bit so far.
The first thing I want to show you is circling back to the beginning of this conversation. What happens when someone signs up to your list? What’s the first thing that should happen when someone joins your audience for the first time? And my answer is that they should get an automatic welcome email. They should get it right away. The second they reach out to you, you should have a response for them. And the way to do that is to set up an automation. There are a few ways you can set up an automation.
The first thing I’m going to show you is what we call a flow template. This just gives you a starting point. It will set up the framework of the automation for you and you can change it, fill in details, et cetera. I’m going to choose this one, welcome new contacts, because that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to send a welcome email to my contacts when they join my audience for the first time.
What’s happening here is my content is being generated. This will vary a bit based on your industry and things like that. But what you can see is that just by clicking on that template, I have a preview here of what the automation logic is. The first step here is the trigger “signs up.” The second step here is the action, the only action in this template: “Send an email”. And here’s a preview of the email on the side. This email has been generated for me. Of course, I can edit it. I can make any changes that I want. This is just an example in a demo account. But if I was ready, I could just go ahead and turn it on. And what would happen then is that this automation would be live. Any time someone joins my audience from any source, they would receive this email immediately right away. I mean, of course, a few minute delays, everything processes through, but it won’t come a week later. It won’t come 24 hours later. It will come right when they’re reaching out to me, which is really cool.
The other way you can do automations is to build from scratch. So, you can see that this automation was created as a draft here. So I can always come back to it and pick up where I left off if I want to. But I want to show you all how to build from scratch, which is a really awesome way to make automations powerful because you can do so much customization. So I’m going to name this flow. “Welcome my contacts”.
And the next thing I’m going to do is choose a trigger. This will take me to my trigger selection modal. This is where you’re choosing the event that will enter your contacts into the flow. So “signs up for email” is when someone joins my email audience for the first time. But there are many, many other triggers I could choose from for different cases. For example, “abandoned cart”. If you’re an e-commerce business, “abandoned cart” is super powerful. “Product back in stock” is very powerful for e-commerce. There are lots of contact activities, tons of triggers…
I’m happy to answer questions about any of those if you guys have them. But for now, I’m going to choose “signs up for email”. Then I’ll see this trigger selection configuration modal. This one’s pretty straightforward. It’s just asking me if I want to include imported contacts or not. I’m going to leave that blank for now. But if I wanted to, of course, I could check that box.
And now I have the beginnings of my flow map. I have this trigger here. And the next thing I need to do is add a step. So I want to add an email because I’m trying to welcome contacts to my audience. So I’m going to drag send email onto my flow map. And it’ll be added here. In this modal, I can now do whatever I want to customize this email to make it work for my business. I set the subject. I can schedule it and make sure that, you know, maybe if it’s important to me that these go out on a specific day of the week or within specific hours, I can do that. Make sure that maybe I only want them to go out during business hours or something like that. I can control that here.
Then I can start designing my email to do that. I click here and I’m taken to our template library. We have many templates you can choose from. If I had created and saved templates in my account already, they would also show up here. I’m going to filter to welcome and choose a template that’s a welcome template to start from. Let’s see. I like the way that this one looks. I’m going to press apply. The email’s pre-populated for me. Of course, I’ll change this content so that it works for my business. I’ll swap out the images. I’ll make everything really personalized. But the idea here is, what do folks want to know when they sign up for my audience for the first time? Maybe I’m sending them a promo code of some kind. Maybe I’m just giving them my brand story. What the content is, of course, is going to be totally personal to your business.
So now I’ll save and return to my journey. And now I have this email here. It’s not totally configured, which is why it’s showing up in red, because I’m not going to go through all the steps of editing all the content. But the email is now on my map. And if I wanted to, again, I could turn this on and it would start sending right away to anyone who joins my audience from that point forward. One of the things that we prefaced, though, is the ability to add segments into your automation to make sure that you’re really targeting folks with the right message at the right time. And there are a couple of different ways you can do that in automations.
The first I want to talk to you about is this filter… so this is what we call a trigger filter. And what this will do is, after a contact triggers into the automation by whatever event I’ve selected – in this case, signing up for my audience – this filter will check if they meet the criteria that I’ve chosen here. And it does this via segments, so I can add a segment to my map. Then anyone who meets that segment will continue through the flow and anyone who doesn’t will be removed. So if, for example, let’s say I want to segment by users who have engaged with my content recently because I want to make sure that I’m really targeting folks who are highly engaged. I don’t want to, you know, oversend to folks who might not be interested. I can say, okay, email interaction opened, let’s say, any of the last five campaigns.
So now this will check if the user that has triggered into my automation interacted with my email in the last five emails that I’ve sent. If yes, they’ll continue through the flow. And if no, they’ll be removed. And that way I’m really getting specific on who I want to continue through this flow and receive this content. For a welcome flow, I probably don’t want to use a trigger filter because anyone who’s signing up for my audience probably relevant to receive this content. So, I’m going to remove this.
The other thing that I can do is branch within the flow. I’m going to drag an “if else” step onto my map here above the email, although I could drag it below the email as well. This does the exact same thing. It opens the segment builder and then it will divide my automation into two separate paths, a yes path and a no path, based on whether or not the contact meets my criteria. So I’m going to do the exact same thing here. I’m going to say maybe my high engaged users are going to get slightly different content. Maybe they’ll get a promo code, or an invite to an event, or something, because I think they’re more likely to convert than my less highly engaged users. Maybe they’ll get something that’s a little bit softer and I want to differentiate my content in that way. I can do the exact same thing. I can do email interaction, opened, any of the last five emails or any campaign sent within a specific time period or specific emails.
There’s tons you can do here. But just for the purposes of expediency in this demo, I’ll just say any of the last five campaigns. I’m going to use this segment and now I have a branch in my map and I can see, okay, everyone on the left side of this branch meets this criteria. They have opened something recently. And so they’ll get this email and everyone who hasn’t will get a different email, and I’ll drag that email onto the map. And that way I can have totally different content to people that are doing different things.
These branching conditions are super powerful for many reasons. We often see folks who are differentiating by language or by geography or by interest. And so there’s tons of ways that you can make sure that you’re sending really relevant content to folks at the right time. Maybe you have two different signup forms and one signup form is for a specific event or for a specific service that you offer. And the other signup form is for something else. You can really be precise with how you’re talking to your audience and what you’re talking to them about.
So that’s a quick overview and happy to answer any questions… go deeper on anything y’all are interested in. But that’s sort of how automations and segmentation interplay to become a really powerful way for you to engage with your audience.
GR: I have a question.
EB: Great!
GR: This is kind of segueing into one of our other topics coming down the pipe. But I know that Mailchimp offers SMS marketing. Can any of these automations work in conjunction with the SMS?
EB: Totally. I’m so glad you asked. Yes. Our automations are omnichannel. So any channel, SMS or email, or if you want to do things externally, you can send a webhook. That’s getting pretty advanced. But yeah, you can drag SMS steps onto the map in the exact same way… as you do email. You set the send times that you want. You write the content in the SMS builder. And those SMS messages will go out exactly as emails, according to the path and the logic that you’ve laid out for them in this automation. So we do encourage SMS as a great tool in conjunction with automations.
GR: Excellent. One of the other questions I get a lot is the difference between tags and segments. What’s the difference, and how do you use them to make sure that you’re automating properly and kind of, you know, putting everybody into the right paths?
EB: Yeah, that’s such a good question. And they are very similar and they interplay with each other. A lot of confusion, which is totally understandable. So basically, tags are a static thing that you apply, like a static piece of data that you apply to your contacts if you want to group them in a specific way. So I can add a tag action to my automation, for example, to automatically tag people when they reach a certain criteria. So if this were a signup for a specific form, I could have a tag step here that would say, okay, tag users who came in through this signup form because they indicated they were interested in my moving services. And so I could have the tag be moving spelled correctly, hopefully. Then I could add that. And now this automation will add a tag to folks after they trigger and before they continue through the rest of the journey.
Tags are really valuable for audience management and keeping track of things and how they interplay with automations. For example, a really common trigger in automations is tag added. So if you add a tag to someone, they’ll automatically trigger into an automation. It’s a tool that lets you manage your audience really precisely. You can add a tag to one individual contact if you want, and then you can have them trigger into an automation. So it allows for a really deep level of precision. But again, it’s just adding that piece of data to the contact so you can keep track of them, group them, find them, filter them according to whatever tag logic you’re interested in.
Segments are a little bit different in that they’re like dynamic reflections of your audience at that time, according to the data we have about them. So, we talked about email engagement. If you have integrations, there’s tons of integration data that’s available on segmentation and those segments dynamically change. So, as we get more information about a contact, which segments they fall in and out of might change. Or as that contact engages with your business, where they fall in those segments might change.
So, segments are really dynamic reflections like snapshots of your audience and how certain criteria apply to your audience. And tags are more like static data that you apply so that you can keep track of specific cohorts as you see fit.
I get that question a lot. They’re related. You can use tags within segments, which is a whole thing. So.
GR: Well, and I was going to say in multiple tags.
EB: Yes, you can. Exactly.
GR: Okay. So can you give us some rock star examples of automations that you’re seeing out there in the market right now?
EB: Yeah, definitely. I love when folks set up welcome automations. That is my, maybe not so hot take, is that everyone should have a welcome automation from your audience. You should welcome them. It’s relevant for you, but there are so many other kind of like longer tail, super powerful automations that are possible.
My current favorite, I think is “back in stock.” If you are a digital sales business, we have a new trigger that we launched a couple of months ago for back in stock. You can publish a back in stock form onto your website. So, users can express interest in a product that’s out of stock, and then you can turn on a back in stock automation. And when a user fills out that form, we keep track of it. And when your product comes back in stock to a certain threshold that you set, like maybe five units or 10 units or whatever makes sense for your business, we’ll automatically trigger everyone that signed up for stock alerts on that product into the automation. So that the second that you have stock available to sell, the users who have told you they want that, they’re really interested in that, will get an alert for it. And the conversion numbers that we see from that is really amazing. And it’s super relevant. It really, again, lets you connect with your audience in a way that they’re asking you for, that they’re looking for. So that’s what I’m super excited about.
We also have a couple of new triggers that are using something that we launched recently as well called predictive analytics. We have one that is, a contact is predicted to make a purchase. So when our proprietary algorithms predict that someone is likely to buy in the next 30 days or 15 days or whatever you’ve set, you can automatically trigger an automation and send them a little nudge and be like, hey, here are products that we think are relevant for you, or here are our new products. And it’s really great because again, it allows folks to kind of close that sales cycle gap and ensure that they’re reaching out to their users when their users are ready for them. So yeah, there’s lots of exciting automations. Again, I love a welcome automation. Everyone should have one, but there’s so much more.
GR: I love that!
We’ve talked a lot about business-to-consumer automations. We have a lot of business-to-business clients that aren’t necessarily selling products, but are selling services. Can you talk through some successful automations in the B2B space and in the service-based (sphere), as opposed to product-based?
EB: Yeah, great question. Definitely. So we actually have a Wix bookings integration as well. If you’re a services business that uses Wix bookings, you can set up an automation that will trigger when a contact makes a booking with you. It can be something as simple as a booking confirmation, but it could also be something like you’ve signed up for whatever particular service. Maybe it’s a hair styling service: here are things you need to know ahead of your appointment, come with your hair dry, whatever; whatever reminders are relevant for the service you’re offering. I think those are really, really powerful.
I also think that any business, whether it’s B2B, B2C, services, products, should be using audience engagement triggers. So if, for example, you’re sending newsletters and you have a link in the newsletter to your website, you can set up an automation when someone clicks that link. They’re expressing interest in the content that you’re sending them. Maybe you say, everyone who’s clicked this link, send them a follow up being like, hey, we saw you were interested. We’d love to chat more about how our business can work with yours. So tons of ways to engage. Again, things like somebody visiting your website, abandonment of… well, carts are perhaps a little more product-based, but even services have cart abandonment, browse abandonment functionality. So, yeah, there’s tons of B2B and services based automations that are super powerful, too.
GR: I love the idea of if they click a link, because I’m thinking about our stuff, you know, Pink Dog stuff. We send out a monthly newsletter and each newsletter has a subject for subjects in it. And if they click on that particular subject, a follow up automation to say, hey, I saw you were interested in our email marketing program. Would you like to schedule an appointment with Gina? Those are such easy lifts to try and close sales without actual physical outreach by someone. I think those are great both in the B2B and the B2C space. And I think we will be employing those as soon as humanly possible.
EB: I love to hear it. I’m so glad. Yep.
GR: Coral, what do you have to add here?
C: Yeah. My other major question is talking a little bit about the predictive analytics and analytics in general. Can you talk a little bit about the performance reporting for automations and how that works?
EB: Definitely. I’m so glad you asked. So in this account – again, just a test account, it doesn’t have tons and tons of data, but a little bit that we can look at. For every automation, there will be an automation report. Then, for every touch point within that automation, whether it’s an email or an SMS, there will be a corresponding email report or SMS report. So when you have an automation set up, you’ll see it in your automations page here.
Of course, these are the two we just created, but I also have a back in stock automation. And you can see some really quick data about the automation right from this page. So I know that eight people have started this automation. All eight completed it. So there is zero in progress. But it can be helpful to see who’s in progress if you have like automations with multiple steps or delays in them and things like that. To see the report, I’ll just click this View Report CTA. And I’m taken to this automation report page. I can see how long it’s been active, how many people have completed it. I’ll also see some reporting about performance in terms of revenue orders, et cetera. This is a test account without a real audience. So these numbers are zero. But of course, for your business, they would not be zero.
I can also see engagement metrics by channel. So, you know, open rates for my emails, click rates for my SMS messages, et cetera. Then again, I can see the channel specific touch point reports if I want more details on either of those. So for my email, I can click here. If I click this view report button here, I’ll be taken to the email report for this email, which gives me even more detail about how this email performed, whether it bounced, whether it caused unsubscribes, tons more information about how this email performed, links that are clicked, etc.
We do have really great reporting capabilities. We’re also constantly adding more reporting capabilities. It’s a really exciting area of the product right now. So that’s just a quick overview of the reporting that we have for automations.
One of the big objections I get to automations is, I don’t want to bomb my people with too many emails or what if they do something and then they get an email that doesn’t make sense to, you know, they’ve already scheduled an appointment or, you know, whatever.
GR: How do you address email fatigue from people; avoid email fatigue to ensure that the message is getting there?
EB: Yeah, that’s such an important question. And I think that that’s really where you can employ the segmentation logic that we talked about. If you wanted to make sure that your automation didn’t send to somebody who had already received an email from you in the last 24 hours, for example, you can set that as a filter at the top level of the automation and just say filter out anyone who has already received content from me recently. And I think that’s a really smart way to do it. And the other thing is you can also apply filters to your bulk email. So if you wanted to make sure that you were not sending your newsletter to everyone, you could do it that way as well. Although, of course, newsletters are really important for your brand. I think mostly they should go to your whole list. But yeah, I would use segmentation either as a trigger filter or perhaps in those if-else steps, if I just wanted to tailor the content to make sure that users are getting relevant information, but they’re not getting five emails from me in one day.
You can do some really interesting (things) like wait for trigger functionality. If I go really quickly back into our draft automation, you’ll see that we have on the left a lot of things that we didn’t talk about which are super interesting. One of them is a wait for trigger. So if you want to wait to do something in the automation until the user takes an action, you can pull this into the map. Then you can say, okay, wait until the contact texts the keyword, for example. Like if you want to wait until somebody in your SMS program says, yes, tell me more about this service, you can do that. And so that they’ll trigger into the automation and then we’ll wait for their go ahead before proceeding and sending them more information. Or you can wait until they buy a product, if you wanted to review a product in your store or until they click an email link or open an email, for example. So yeah, there are ways to make sure that your automation is triggering and queuing folks, but then it’s waiting to do something until they have done some action to express their interest.
GR: Coral, before we turn it over to the audience, do you have any final questions and/or words of wisdom?
CN: Yeah, I think, so my final question for Elizabeth, before I move into any words of wisdom, is: what makes this manageable specifically for small teams? Because most of our clients are very small service-based businesses with not a ton of time. So how is Mailchimp specifically, but also automations; how can it be made manageable for small businesses and small teams?
EB: Yeah, that’s such an important question. I think that the answer for automations overall is that automations should be saving you time. Once you set an automation up, you shouldn’t have to revisit it very frequently. Of course, you should check in on the reports, make sure it’s doing what you expect. But, really, you should be able to set it up, have confidence in the content that you’re sending, and then not have to manually do that task anymore. So if you are manually going through and sending welcome emails today to everyone who signed up in the last week, for example, that’s something you won’t have to do anymore. So there’s a little bit of upfront investment in time, but you’ve probably already got the welcome email content. You probably just need to configure it with a trigger, which hopefully is not too overwhelming of a task. But I understand that automations are a little scary.
I have some empathy for our folks who are intimidated by that. I totally understand. But yeah, they should be saving you time overall. And for Mailchimp specifically, we have, again, flow templates that are a really good starting point. If this journey map is overwhelming, seems like a ton of work, I totally understand that. And that’s why we have these flow templates where you can say, okay, what do I want to do? I want to welcome folks. And this will have that automation created for you. You can swap out the email and you can just turn it on. And that’s true for many different use cases in this flow template library. So it gives you a starting point. But yeah, automations are a little bit of investment upfront. But ultimately, they’re a great tool to save your business, your team, or yourself time.
CN: Awesome. Thank you.
GR: Do we have any questions in the room?
CN: From Janet, “This is mind blowing information. I had no idea all of this is possible in Mailchimp. Question is, we already have a Mailchimp account, but only use it to send out a monthly newsletter. Does Mailchimp have customer support to help create these automations and flow maps?”
EB: Great question. Yes, Mailchimp does have customer support. The level of onboarding support that you get is in accordance with your plan. So it will vary a bit. But yes, we do have customer support. We also have great help content. If you don’t know where to get started, there are help articles that can definitely be there to guide you as well.
CN: Shameless plug on our end. We can also help with that.
EB: Of course.
GR: That’s exactly why we use the exact same wording.
EB: Yeah. Who are more than capable, I’m sure, of getting everyone up and running.
GR: Yeah. So for everybody, we are a Mailchimp shop. We work with Mailchimp on a variety of projects and our team has been educated and certified in a number of these automations and other things. So if this is something you’re interested in and it’s too overwhelming because it already gave me a headache, I encourage you to talk to whoever your representative is at our company to see if we can help you with this. And we’ll be setting up automations about it. So there you go.
GR: Any other questions in the room?
All right. Any final words of wisdom from Coral or Elizabeth?
CN: I will say if there’s one sequence that you build, there’s one takeaway from this webinar: build your welcome sequence, start there, and then work your way from there. And figure out what’s important to your clients, your prospects, etc., and go from there.
But I think my major takeaway is, if there’s one thing you do today to improve your automations and improve your marketing through email, it is to create that welcome sequence.
EB: Yep. Totally agree. Plus one to that. I think automations are a great tool. They’re an underutilized tool. They, again, reach your customers when your customers want you to be reaching them. So definitely set up your welcome automation. And Coral and Gina, thank you so much.
GR: Thank you. We appreciate it. If there are no final questions coming from the audience, I want to thank you all for being here. I want to thank Elizabeth for presenting. I think that she was invaluable. Thank you for Coral for getting everything teed up and adding your expertise to it.
If you have questions or would, you know, like to talk further about adding automations to your marketing plan, feel free to reach out. If you have any comments about the presentation here today or recommendations, suggestions for additional information, we are doing these webinars once a month and we would like to give you the information that you want, not the information that we think you want. As always, there’s an open door to our organization. And I personally want to thank you for attending and I look forward to seeing you next month!
