Seven workflow components every email marketer should use

As customization becomes more prominent in email marketing, modern email marketers need to be able to reach out to every contact at the right time. This is only possible with automation systems like workflows, which categorize your contacts based on certain criteria and perform targeted actions.

No matter the industry, workflows are extremely effective in many ways. They help bring in new contacts, retain trust, and keep your brand relevant. Workflows even help in reconnecting with inactive contacts.

We at Zoho Campaigns are celebrating seven years in the sphere of email marketing. On this occasion, we’re releasing some new features in our workflow system.

With Zoho Campaigns, you can now design workflows with the drag and drop function. This feature will ease your work during time constraints and allow you to customize workflows keeping each contact in mind.

Without much ado, let’s take a look at seven workflow components that can improve your email marketing.

A/B Testing: Find best solution

Your contacts vary in their tastes and preferences. However, as an email marketer, you’ll have to understand their psyche and design a campaign that suits everybody.

Let’s say you run an online store and have decided to put a CTA that leads to a landing page. While you believe a CTA placed at the bottom will work wonders, your colleagues want it at the top.

In situations like these, you can use A/B Testing to send out two versions of the same campaign—one with a CTA at the top, one with it at the bottom—to a test group from your list. Once the winning version is selected, it will be sent to the rest of the contacts by default until the workflow is made inactive.

Reminder Loop: Keep your brand relevant by initiating opens and clicks

Every contact receiving your email will respond to it differently. Some will surely click through specific links, while others might not even open your email. This is quite common in email marketing.

For instance, say you were running a special promotion for the holiday season and wanted your contacts to know about it. Your campaign contained a link to the landing page with offers and special discounts. You would want to design specific workflow paths for each type of engagement.

This is where Reminder Loop comes in handy. It allows you to go through the reports and remind impassive contacts about the holiday promotion through reminder emails in order to increase user engagement.

Internal Notification Mail: Keep your sales team updated

Marketing and sales are the two tracks that run parallel towards customer conversion and ensuring a stable ROI. Because of this, you should integrate your email marketing platform with a CRM system.

For example, say your business has considerable competition in the market, so you branched it into separate marketing and sales teams.

With Internal Notification Mail you can now share any developments about your contacts with your CRM owners as well. This will allow both units to adopt a contact management model that’s both cost- and time-effective.

Form Submission: Get new contacts using forms

Sign-up forms and pop-up forms are often the entry points for contacts and the best way for you to collect their information. Using a form-based trigger, you can now initiate effective workflows.

You can very conveniently place a form on your landing page that is accessible via a link in your campaign. Then all you need to do is wait for the interested people to visit it.

This can help you as an email marketer know and understand your contacts better. Based on this information, you can design successful email campaigns that will gain ground with a diverse group of contacts.

Merge: Combine your workflows

Just as the name suggests, the merge component in the process enables you to combine two different contact paths into one. So how can that be useful?

Well, take this case for example, you have initiated a workflow for new contacts via “On List Entry,” thus every time a contact enters the selected list, a workflow is triggered after which contacts are sent a welcome email. Based on their engagement, you want to create three separate paths for four responses using “conditions.”

For the two conditions (let’s say link and specific link), you have one path, whereas “open” and “unopen” lead to two separate ways. This is where you can use Merge to combine the paths of the two selected responses. It allows you to design a more flexible workflow.

CRM Action: Create conversions

With CRM Action, you can now push your nurtured contacts into the desired phase of your CRM system. You can do this with contacts at different levels of the workflow. As an email marketer, you will know how prospective or doubtful each contact is. Based on their engagement, you can now export their records to the CRM system.

You can create a task in your CRM account for contacts who are not inclined towards your brand or contacts with negligible user engagement. As for potential contacts, you can create deals by pushing their details to the CRM.

Add to or Subtract from List: Reshape your lists with list actions

Similar to the CRM action, you can use workflows to decide how and when to add and remove contacts from your lists. Suppose you run an online tutorial website with different classes.Your subscribers enrol in different courses with varied levels. Doing so they are also bound to download relevant content and take part in relevant events for eg, webinars.

Some of your contacts might progress from one level to the next level, or say some are unhappy with the course and want to withdraw, you can keep a track of that by analysing their engagement with the previous contents and events. In these cases, your workflow can be designed with a clear end of action to remove their names from selected lists.

In the same way we can add names of contacts in a list. We can do so with those contacts who have consistently downloaded content from previous emails. This can be put at the end of the workflow as an end action.

Conclusion

So try out these new workflow updates and let us know if they ease your day-to-day email marketing activities.

-Susmit Sen