5 key automations for your Marketing Automation Platform Active Campaign

We define Marketing Automation as the use of software or technology to perform automated marketing actions. This field of marketing allows us to automate manual processes in order to improve results, our strategies’ efficiency and the control over them.

When we speak about process automation, we are referring to a wide range of processes: from marketing processes (email, push notifications or SMS) to sales processes (customer journey throughout the entire sales funnel, segmentation according to specific characteristics, etc.), passing through transactional processes (post-purchase appreciation messages, sending requested general information, etc.) There is a wide variety of possibilities for marketing automation, and their success will depend on a comprehensive analysis of the needs and objectives presented in each project.

Marketing Automation tools

A great number of tools in the market allow this type of actions: Acoustic (formerly Watson Campaign Automation), Active Campaign, Sendinblue, Integromat, among others.

In this post, we will analyse the possibilities offered by Active Campaign, the marketing automation platform leader in sales worldwide.

Key features of Active Campaign

The platform offers many more; however, these are its main features:

• Email marketing.
• Marketing Automation.
• Lead scoring.
• Site Messaging.
• SMS Marketing.
• CRM.

Automations that must not be missing in your platform

As we have previously stated, the possibilities of marketing automation are endless. Below, from Integra, we would like to talk about FIVE key automations that any company could use in their Active Campaign platform.

Welcome campaign.

Sending a welcome email when a user subscribes to a newsletter. According to their behaviour, we can keep impacting with other communications to get more information about their interests. To define this automation, we would make this flow chart.

If the contact has interacted with the welcome email, we send them a qualification email to gather more information about their preferences. If they haven’t made any action, we end the automation.

Engagement analysis.

With this journey, we know a user’s level of interaction with the campaigns sent through the platform. This way we know how active the user is and we can establish actions for active and inactive users.

Before creating this automation, we must generate a field that will update after each interaction.

Birthday campaign.

Campaign including a discount coupon to congratulate the user’s birthday. It is a good way to reward users for their loyalty and have a reason to interact with them again. Furthermore, it promotes repetitive purchases as well as incentivizing compulsive consumption with a special discount.

Like in the previous case, to carry out this automation, we must create a custom field that includes the date of birth of the contact.

Newsletter.

We send a campaign to our database and, according to the user behaviour, we segment and impact with other qualification emails. In relation to the links clicked inside the campaign, we can add one tag or another, establishing a segmentation that will allow us to know our database better and perform future actions.

To carry out this automation, we must configure the site tracking within the platform’s basic configuration.

Sales tracking. CRM.

When a user fills a form, the data gets to Active Campaign and, automatically, a deal is registered inside the opportunity funnel. Within this funnel, we find all open deals to make it possible to track their state, as well as the actions taken to convert that deal into a sale. It works as a CRM with basic monitoring features.

This journey allows reducing manual work from the sales team and qualifying the opportunities based on a series of previously set variables.

Prior to developing this automation, we need to create the sales funnel and have a Plus, Professional or Enterprise license.

Conclusions

The main advantages of marketing automations are directly related to:

• Improving user experience.
• Global vision of the user’s behaviour.
• Optimizing processes (sales, marketing and transactional).
• Enhancing engagement and brand image.
• Increasing conversion ratio.

We have shown some examples of automations that allow us to take advantage of these, though there is still a wide range of possibilities. Integra’s experience as a Certified Active Campaign Consultant made us realise the previous stage, definition, is essential to delimit projects, analyse the scope and take the first steps to establish the proper marketing automation strategy.