- The number of channels consumers engage with
is almost endless and to further complicate matters,
consumers jumped between channels
without much rhyme or reason
and I'm sure you and I can relate.
One minute, we're watching a YouTube video.
The next, we're looking at a text message and then an email
and then we're scrolling through Instagram,
off the Google, and you get the idea.
And you know the adage.
Marketing is all about sending the right message
at the right time in just the right channel.
It's just that with people jumping across platforms so much,
that window of opportunity has now shrunk down
to be almost instantaneous.
So to truly increase the success rate
of our marketing efforts, we'll need to automate.
Imagine being able to personalize messages
based on the consumer, manage abandonment recapture,
report on revenue, automatically segment customers,
and deploy content across social platforms automatically.
Now, automation not only gets the right message
through at the right time, but it also frees up
valuable time that was eaten up
by you having to manually do these repetitive tasks.
Now, at the core, the building blocks of automation
are sequences and triggers.
A sequence is the order of all the steps
your automation should follow.
Say, sending an email, updating Salesforce,
kicking off a survey, and so on.
And a trigger is what tells that sequence
that it's time to start.
Say an order is received, a customer requests a refund,
or a certain amount of time has passed.
Now, it's a little easier to look at this in context.
So, let's say we sell socks through our online store.
An example automation sequence might look like this.
We ship an order via UPS,
we send an email, letting them know the order has arrived,
we send another email requesting they leave a review.
Now, this sequence isn't really helpful without triggers.
We don't want all of those events to happen simultaneously.
So let's look at the triggers
that we've outline in this automation.
So the customer places the order,
which triggers the shipment.
The tracking data then shows an order arrives,
which triggers the email, and then we could wait three days,
which would then trigger an email asking for that review.
You can then layer in some forks in the road.
Let's say we ask for that review,
but the customer doesn't open the email.
Well, that can be another trigger to send a follow-up
or perhaps they opened the email,
but they don't fill out the review.
Well, that, too, can trigger an alternative email
or maybe they do fill out the survey,
yet another trigger option.
Now, this is just one tiny example in a massive sea
of automation, but regardless of how complex
and sophisticated your automation gets, at the core,
it'll always be a sequence that follows a trigger.
Now, if you're ready to expand your skillset and automation,
I encourage you to take a look
at the course Marketing Tools: Automation.