How To Use Automation To Boost Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Keep the gears running on your email and social media marketing programs while you focus on your creative efforts!
I don’t know about you, but I’m a big fan of automation as a way of managing my busy life. So one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to digital marketing is how little marketers actually take advantage of automation. It’s a simple and effective way to stay engaged with their target audience(s), and it involves little maintenance once it’s set up. Win-win!
Email marketing
I would say that email automations are the most overlooked by many.
Creating an email program is more than just listbuilding and update/newsletter creation. Email automations are a great way to keep connected with your members, and can be done rather easily with most email marketing programs including Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Among the automations I recommend creating are:
Welcome series: A quick 1-2 email series for people joining your email list that provides a bit more information about your business or organization. It’s also a great place to offer a discount on products/services.
Lapsed members: If someone hasn’t opened your emails in a while (say 6-9 months), you can have an email automatically sent to them in the hopes of re-engaging them.
Fundraising: Perhaps your organization has an evergreen fundraising campaign that it sends out to members every X months. Why not automate it?
It’s also important to take advantage of your leads from all avenues.
Say, for example, you’re hosting a virtual event and tickets for said event are being distributed via Eventbrite. You are then using Mailchimp as your email marketing program to communicate with both prospects and confirmed attendees.
This is where an automation tool like Zapier comes in. Zapier is a bridging software transferring data between two programs.
So for this example, I would set up a “Zap” would sent an individual’s data to Mailchimp and add them to my “confirmed” segment once they’ve registered for my event. This way, they are no longer receiving emails for prospects and only receiving updates for attendees.
Social media
Not everyone has the time or resources to hire a social media manager. That’s why it’s super important to set up a social media management program for scheduling and posting your tweets and Facebook posts days or even weeks in advance.
Among my favorites are:
Hootsuite - Probably the tool I use the most with my clients, Hootsuite is a well-rounded scheduling and rapid response system for social media. Its free version even works with up to three networks, although it doesn’t provide any reporting features.
Sprout Social - A paid service targeted toward social media and marketing professionals, complete with top-notch reporting features and targetable posting options.
Tweetdeck - A Twitter product, this Twitter-only feature allows for scheduling and more robust list creation/rapid response than its competitors. It’s also free.
Bottom line, the more you automate your basic digital marketing efforts, the more efficient and effective your campaigns will be.
Let PRC help you with your email and social media marketing needs! Contact us today for more information or to request a proposal!