4.4 Building an E-mail Campaign Pt. 2

Welcome to the final episode in this chapter where we’ve been walking through how to set up e-mail marketing on a tool like Active Campaign. We’ve gone over how to set up the different levels of e-mail marketing. We’ve talked about basic e-mails, drip e-mails and in this episode we’ll talk about personalised e-mails. 

But what about sales e-mails? No, we’re not cost cutting we just don’t really need to dedicate an entire episode to sales e-mails. 

Just take your sales e-mails and place them in your drip sequence based on your plan. 

Okay moving on to personalised e-mails. 

Well, this episode will take you from being a good e-mail marketer to being a ninja e-mail marketer. What you will learn today will easily set-you apart from any competition out there. It's the secret sauce to e-mail marketing and most people haven’t even figured out this part as yet. 

What does that really mean? Well, to understand this better, let's take a look at the drip campaign we built in the last episode. When you look at the journey of this workflow, it's quite straight forward right? You are putting your e-mail list on this journey where they will get an e-mail every week. Now technically, that is the journey you want them to take but in reality, everyone on your e-mail is not going to behave the same way.

What if half your audience doesn't even open the first e-mail? And if you still go on to send them the second e-mail, they won't really know why they’re even getting this e-mail because technically they asked for an ebook which they haven't even opened yet.

What if some of your users are opening your e-mails but not clicking on anything. For example in e-mail 2, the goal is for the user to open the e-mail and download the checklist. But if your users don't click on the download link in this e-mail, will you just move onto the next e-mail?

The answer is obviously no. You don't want to keep sending users down your workflow journey irrespective of how they are behaving. Infact, what you want to do is create a journey based on HOW they react. And that is what personalisation is all about.

So what are some ways you can personalise e-mails on AC? Well, technically there are a dozen ways you can do that, but let's look at some of the most basic ways to personalise e-mails.

1. You could use the person's first name in the subject line or body of the e-mail.
2. If a person hasn't opened an e-mail, instead of just sending them the next e-mail you can resent the first e-mail but with a different subject line. It's possible they missed the first e-mail or the subject line didn’t really catch their attention. 
3. If a person has opened an e-mail but not clicked on the link, you could send them another e-mail with a fresh subject line and the same e-mail content.
4. You could put markers on users that you think are important like the ones clicking on a lot of your e-mail links or those that are truly engaging with your sales e-mails.

Let's tackle this one at a time.

The best way to personalise an e-mail is to address the person by their first name. The way you do that is by simply adding %FIRSTNAME% in your subject line or e-mail body text and it will appear as their name when they receive the e-mail.

Let's tweak the first e-mail of this drip to add the first name.

Just click on the e-mail and then on edit. Now instead of Hi, let's add %FIRSTNAME%. Now to change the subject line, we go to the gear icon on the right and see the subject line right here. We are going to add %FIRSTNAME% before the subject line. And bam! When the user gets this email, they will see their name show up

Let's save this e-mail and go back to our workflow.

Now onto the next challenge, how do we send the same e-mail to a person who hasn't opened the previous e-mail? Let's say we want to do that with the first e-mail right here.

The most important thing is to check and see if the person has opened the e-mail or not. To do that, we are going to click on this + here after the 7 day wait. Now you want to go to Conditions and Workflow on the left and click on If/Else. Here you have to set-up the condition to check if the person has opened the e-mail or not.

Click on Select a condition, ‘actions’ and then on ‘has opened’. Now on the right you click and find e-mail 1. There it is.

You will see that your workflow looks different now. So what is happening here? You are basically telling the workflow to check if the person has opened the e-mail or not. This creates a sort of fork in the journey of the user. If the person has opened the e-mail, they will go down the yes route and if they have not opened the e-mail, they will go down the no route. 

Now the second step is to resend the first e-mail to everyone that did not open it the first time. How you do that is you click on the + here, go to sending options and then click on send an e-mail. You then find e-mail 1 in the e-mail list and then select copy and edit from the drop down here. What this will do is clone e-mail one right here. Now remember, we don't really want to change the email body but only the subject line. So you go to the gear icon on the top right and change the e-mail line here. Save and exit and there you go!

You have created your first behaviour based personalised e-mail.

Now if you want to check if the person has clicked on a link in your e-mail or not, you can do the exact same thing. Let's take this e-mail for example - we know that everyone who comes here has opened the first e-mail because we checked them here. But we don't really know if they opened the e-mail link or not. To check that, we click the + button here, go to conditions and workflow and hit If/Else. Now like the previous step, we click on Select a condition and Actions. But instead of clicking on has opened, we hit has clicked on a link. We then select the e-mail we want to test and then the link we want to see if they have opened or not.

Now your workflow looks even more different now, doesn’t it? What we are doing is, at this point we check if the person has opened that first e-mail and if they have, we then check if they have clicked on the link inside the e-mail here. Now if you want to set-up a different e-mail for everyone that opened but didn't click the link, you follow the same steps and create an e-mail.

Let's go and turn this entire drip into a personalised workflow.

Now, that's a well planned personalised workflow. If you understand what is happening here, you are actually taking the users on a journey based on their behaviour.

We have even set-up a Milestone here that adds a tag to anyone who has opened 2 or 3 sales e-mails. This will help identify who your most interested users are so that you can send them personalised sales e-mails whenever you want.

And there you go! That's all you need to get started on creating personalised e-mails. Now while this is just scratching the surface of what you can do with workflows, it's definitely a starting point for you to build upon.