Email Marketing

Marketing automation is especially useful when it comes to email marketing efforts. Here at ShortStack, an automation can be set up to automatically send submitted data to an email marketing list. This allows you to segment and target users based off of the Campaigns in which they’ve participated, and there’s no need to manually export and import data from one service to another.

Another aspect of email marketing automation is using email marketing services in conjunction with analytics services such as Mixpanel. Specific emails, crafted by your team, are sent to users/clients when they meet specific thresholds. For instance, someone who creates a new account on your platform will be sent an automated email welcoming them.

One of ShortStack’s customer success expert Jessica’s favorite things to do is talk to our users directly to help them brainstorm Campaign goals and then put ideas into practice. Automating emails helps her to do this, as she can create the emails she wants to send to different segments of our users. In return, she’s able to redirect that saved energy to other efforts.

“Automating email marketing allows us to make our interactions timely so we’re in sync with our users’ activity on the platform,” she says.

For example, Jessica likes to connect personally with new ShortStack users and help review their Campaigns. Our email automation will send out an initial email to the new user, and they can respond directly to Jessica, who will work with them one-on-one from then on out. To do this, we use ShortStack as the data collection point, by creating a landing page with a form. Here’s the flow of this automation: An email thanking the user and offering them a free shirt is automatically sent. The user clicks on the link and enters the form to get a shirt. Our office manager Tara gets a notification that someone has entered the form, and ships the shirt to the address specified.

Using automation, we can also send out emails that are very specific to the Campaigns users are working on, and we can send them specific resources to aid in the building and promotion of their Campaign. For example, a user who is working on a sweepstakes Campaign might get an email that includes our guide on how to select a compelling prize. A user who is about to publish a photo-vote contest might get our guide on best practices for promoting Campaigns.

One of our ongoing efforts is to email users who have been with us for one year or more. We offer them a free t-shirt and other swag, and use their reply to kickstart conversations about what their ongoing needs are, and perhaps even use the opportunity to extend special offers. So even though much of our first touch communication with new users is automated, it allows us to have real interactions with our users without having to “cold” email.

Content Scheduling

Content scheduling tools such as PostPlanner and Buffer arose to help marketers better plan and promote their content, especially on social media. It’s easy to forget that post planning is an early form of marketing automation since it has become such a necessary part of a marketer’s workday.

Content scheduling allows content marketers to create content, and schedule the content to be posted and shared on designated dates/times.

In ShortStack, a Campaign featuring blocks of content (which we call Widgets) can be set to automatically show or hide on designated dates and times, using the Widget Visibility Settings. For example, a Deal of the Day Campaign could be created using this feature; each day, a new deal connected to a form would automatically display at the beginning of the day, and then hide at the end of the day. This allows marketers to run Campaigns like this without having to manually adjust the settings.

Our content director, Dana, uses both PostPlanner and Buffer to help keep ShortStack’s social media platforms active with new and relevant content. “These sorts of tools make it much easier to find content that relevant for our users and followers,” she says. “And it’s a huge time saver.” Dana also uses If This Then That (IFTTT) to automatically promote our own blog posts on social networks. (More on IFTTT later in this guide.)

Action-Gating

In 2014, Facebook changed their policy to disallow Like-Gating. That is, brands could no longer require users to “like” a Facebook Page to access additional content, such as a contest or other giveaway. Facebook’s current policy is to allow a Like-Gate ONLY if there is a very clear option for the user to skip it.

As such, marketers decided to focus their efforts on Action-Gating instead.

Action-Gating is when you ask users to do something (such as vote or share a piece of information about themselves) to get something (such as an extra entry into a contest or access to a promotion) from your brand.

One major benefit of this feature is that marketing campaigns don’t need to be run exclusively on Facebook in order to use it because Action-Gating is not Facebook specific.

Action-Gating uses the “if this, then that” functionality to drive automation. It helps to think of the process like this: “if this (trigger) happens, then that (action) will follow.” There’s even a service dedicated entirely for this, named after the function itself, called IFTTT (pronounced “ift”), which is used to create cross-platform actions. For instance, you can set up IFTTT so that every time you pin an image on your business’s Pinterest, the image is uploaded to your Twitter. This tool can be handy for marketers who want to set up custom, automated tasks. As noted above, we use IFTTT to push our blog posts out to our various social networks without having to do so manually.

Many marketing tools -- including ShortStack -- now have “if this, than that” functions built into their platforms. Within ShortStack, the Action Widget is the tool available to set up various automated functions. It’s a powerful feature that makes automation much more intuitive for marketers, while also making for more interesting, interactive Campaigns for users. Within the Action Widget, triggers cause actions and “events” to happen. The Action Widget can be used to make events happen, but also to control the experience of the user and how information is displayed to them.