4.3 Building an E-mail Campaign Pt. 1

In the last episode, we walked you through most of the fundamentals of how to build an e-mail, connect it to a list, test it out, and have it ready to go live. Now that you kinda know your basics, let’s take it up a notch. Let’s move on to drip e-mails.

Let's do a quick recap on a topic essential for this episode - lead magnets. We talked about how lead magnets are tools or resources that a brand will offer users coming to the website in exchange for their e-mails.

If you check out the website, you will notice this ebook that we’re offering so we can get e-mail addresses. Well, that's exactly what a lead magnet is. And this lead magnet is going to be the starting point for our drip campaign where users coming in to the ebook list will be added to a drip campaign and then sent an e-mail every week.

We’ve gone ahead and connected the e-book lead magnet to a list on AC as you can see right here. Now, in order for us to learn how to set-up a drip campaign, you want to head over to the automation section on the right here. But before we get there, let's take a minute to talk about automation in general.

Automation, as the word suggests, is setting up a task so that it gets done automatically by the system. And AC has it's very own system to automate e-mail tasks.

To get started, click on automation on the left and then on create an automation. You'll see a whole bunch of different automation types to choose from but let's not complicate things and just start from scratch. You are now taken to this add a start trigger screen. Let's take a moment here to understand this.

Think of automation systems as Robots. Imagine you have a robot at home that opens the door for you. You have to program the robot to open the door every time the doorbell rings. So you set-up the doorbell to be a trigger for the robot. In the same way, e-mail automations need triggers. There are a bunch of situations that you can create as triggers for an automation like when someone subscribes to a list, fills a form, opens a specific e-mail, and so on. 

For now, let's use Subscribes to a list and select our e-book list right here. You'll see another screen asking you to add a new action. Let's close this window for a second.

What you now see on your screen is the automation workflow system. Think of it like a road that you are building with different milestones. The trigger that you just created will be the starting point of the journey. In a way, the drip campaign is a journey you are going to take the user on from the first milestone of giving the ebook to sending all the remaining e-mails every week.

‍

Let's name this automation: Drip Campaign.

Here is a look at the drip campaign we will be setting up here. Think of each of these e-mails as a milestone you want to build on the journey.The first milestone is the welcome e-mail.

To set it up, click on this plus button which will take you to this screen to add action. This step helps you decide what you want to do with this user once they have reached this part of the journey and AC allows you to do more than just e-mails but since this is an e-mail marketing course let’s just send an e-mail.  Go ahead and click create an e-mail.

You want to give this e-mail name so that you can identify it as a milestone later. Let's call this e-mail 'Drip 1: Ebook'. That's because this e-mail is actually meant to give the user the ebook, that's what they are here for. Now from here, you know the drill. We covered it in the last episode so we won’t repeat ourselves. We're gonna set that e-mail up real quick, hang tight.

And we have our first milestone set-up. Now, if we were to turn this automation on right now by clicking on this Active button right here, whenever someone signs up for the ebook on the website, they would be added to this journey and would instantly get the Drip 1: Ebook e-mail.

‍

Now that we see how this works, let's continue building our journey. It's possible for us to go and set-up the next e-mail as the next milestone right here. But what do you think would happen now? 

Anyone coming on this journey would get these 2 e-mails back to back, because there is nothing telling AC to wait before going to the next e-mail milestone. So what we will actually do is create a milestone where the user has to wait.
To do that, hit that + button again, conditions and workflows and then wait. You'll get 2 options, one asking if you want to wait for a specific period of time or for specific conditions.
The first one is simpler where you tell AC to make the user wait for a few hours, days or weeks.
The second option is more robust where you can make the user wait for a specific day or the week or date of the month.
‍

For now, let's just go with the simpler option and hit wait for a specific period of time and enter 7 days. Now our journey is beginning to take shape. Whenever someone starts on this journey, they will reach the first milestone and get that first e-mail, they will then reach the second milestone where they will have to wait for 7 days.

Let's go ahead and create the next milestone, which is a value e-mail with a checklist that the person can use. Again, we can go ahead and create a wait milestone for 7 days after this e-mail as well. Well, now your journey is really coming through.

Now, since the drip campaign essentially involves sending out one e-mail every week, we can go and set-up all the e-mails to have a 7-day wait milestone in between them. 

There you go! Now your drip journey is complete. Whenever someone signs up for that ebook, they are going to get added to this journey and will go through each milestone. Because of the 7 day waits we’ve added at each step, they will get one e-mail every week.

And that's how you set up a drip automation on Active Campaign.