No doubt you’ve already encountered several articles focused on getting ready for the upcoming holiday sales season. While we know there’s plenty of information and tips out there to make the most of this sales season, in this post we want to encourage you to think about how you could automate just a part of that marketing and targeting process.
In case you haven’t yet been sold on the real-life uses for marketing automation, a recent GetResponse post by Dave Chaffey, 10 Opportunities To Use Marketing Automation Across The Customer Lifecycle, is an excellent resource. For example, he details how to use marketing automation for automated prompts with content to encourage engagement, a welcome sequence, abandoned cart engagement, lead scoring, re-activation, and more.
Now, let’s break down how to use a marketing automation workflow to accomplish lead engagement and retargeting with a custom holiday resource.
And hey … if you need any help in identifying key dates or important objectives in a successful Holiday Email Marketing Campaign, make sure that you check out our Holiday Guide, which has all the tips and tricks you will need to begin!
We’re assuming the role of an e-commerce sweets shop, The Chocolate Monster. Through our automated communication plan we’re working to retarget new subscribers and older customers in our database. We’ll work to retarget them into buyers for our holiday sales season with a custom resource – a gift guide. Make sure you check out the video at the end of this post to see how to specifically set up the workflow.
Building the workflow
The workflow begins with the assumption that we’ll be sending an email to our list of new subscribers and previous customers who haven’t recently engaged with our marketing or products. We’ll announce the eBook download in this email to encourage the download. Here’s an example email you could use as inspiration:
The “Download now” CTA links to a custom landing page we’ve created for the eBook download, so next in our workflow we’ve added a link-clicked condition to track those that are clicking the link and reaching the landing page. For those that do, we’re then tracking if they’ve visited the “thank you” page reached after successfully downloading the gift guide.
Once we know they’ve downloaded the guide, we’ll tag them as a lead, wait one day, and then send another message to gauge engagement with the guide and offer access to discounted products, based on their interest in the guide.
If they click on the link to those products, we’ll then immediately send a special discount code. If that message is opened, we’ll tag them as a qualified lead and move them to our sales campaign so a sales representative will be notified and can reach out and help ensure their order is fulfilled.
For the “negative” path – those that never clicked the link in the initial guide message – we’ll wait one day, and send a reminder to those non-clickers. Hopefully that message will gain some more clicks, and we’ll move those clickers into the flow at the lead-tagging stage, just as we did with the initial clickers. Those that do not click the reminder link, we’ll tag as not engaged and move them to a retargeting campaign.
Similarly, those that don’t end up engaging with the discounted products mailing, we’ll tag as not engaged and move into the retargeting campaign.
What does this achieve?
A custom content resource is a compelling reason to reach out to your subscribers during the holiday season, without simply pushing a “buy-buy-buy!” mantra. It’s a subtler way to let your subscribers know you are thinking of them, and want to make the holidays easier. Keeping in mind that everyone is being inundated with sales offers and promos during this time of year, your initial contact with them should be you offering them something, before encouraging them to buy.
This workflow works under that principle and rewards those who positively engage with your resource and show interest with discounts they can use to solve their “holiday gift list” problem. For those who don’t positively interact, you only gently remind them of your offer to help, and then quietly tag and move them into a campaign you’ve set up specifically for leads that you need to later work to re-engage as customers, after the holiday season.
We’re just at the cusp of the holiday season – if you haven’t yet created a custom resource or planned out any materials, it’s not too late! If you start today, you could be ready by Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or any other holiday sales you’re looking to promote.
Create your holiday retargeting workflow today and get ready for a heap of sales!
(Jump to 2:30 in the video for the workflow build.)
Feeling new at this? Don’t worry, you’re not alone out there. Our experts are available 24/7 to help you with your workflows.
Over to you
Have you created any automation workflows yet? Are you planning any holiday sales promos? Let us know more about your sales or automation goals in the comments below!