Marketing automation allows you to perform an automatic action based on certain criteria, for example how your subscribers interact with your campaign or profile data on the subscriber themselves. This guide will demonstrate how this works when the trigger is a subscriber’s birthday.

You can have the system perform an automatic action around or on the date of a subscriber’s birthday, this can happen on the day or a set amount of time before or after their special day. The available actions are:

• Send another email campaign to the subscriber.
• Send an SMS to the subscriber.
• Send a notification to a specified email address.
• Add the subscriber to a list in Collect.

To do any of these things you will need to have the subscriber’s birthday on file in the Sign-Up.to system. You will also need to have already prepared any follow up content in the Create section of your account, i.e. email or SMS campaigns.

The process in detail is as follows:

Go to the Marketing Automation tools, within the Send section of your account.

Click on the Create a new rule button.

Choose ‘When it’s the subscriber’s birthday’ from the list.

Clicking Next will take you to a screen which allows you to set your desired action to be carried out on the appropriate date.

• The first option is to ‘Send a notification to…’, with you specifying the email address to be notified in the box on the right. This triggered action could be useful for letting a salesperson know that the subscriber has a birthday coming up. They might want to call and offer a promotion or discount.

• The second option allows you to send the subscriber an email. Simply browse for the relevant campaign on the right.This action could be could be used simply to wish your subscriber a happy birthday, alternatively you might want to send them a voucher or promote an event they could attend and celebrate at.

• The next option allows you to send an SMS to a subscriber. Browse on the right for the SMS campaign you’d like to send and set the appropriate time for them to receive the message by using the options at the bottom of the box. Setting a time here is more important for SMS than email, as people might not want to receive a text at midnight (which is the default setting!).Please note, using this action will cost the standard amount in SMS credits (as specified when creating the campaign) and relies on you having a subscriber’s mobile number in the system. If there are not enough SMS credits in the account or you have no number associated with your subscriber, then no action will be taken.As with email, this action could be a nice way to wish your subscriber a happy birthday. But you could go further and give them some kind of voucher to simply be brought in on the day and shown on their phone.

• The final option allows you to add the subscriber to a list, and choose the list within Collect that the subscriber will sit in.

Once you have set up your rule, you will need to name it and save it.

Your new rule will now appear in the list on the Marketing Automation page. You can see a summary of the rule by clicking on the arrow icon to the right of the rule name.

From here you are also able to edit any part of the rule, for example the action to be taken, the subsequent campaign to be sent or the timed delay.

You are able to disable the rule at any time by clicking Pause (it can easily be resumed), or you can remove it altogether by clicking Delete. A rule will remain active until it is either paused or deleted.

 

Posted on 1 February, 2012 at 3:00 pm.

Written by Leanne Beale