Start using Marketing Automation
The best way to use the tool is to open it in a new tab, so you have PRO in one tab and Marketing Automation in another tab. This is so you can easily access both tools when creating flows, emails and so on.
First thing you need to do is to connect the tool to your PRO account. You do this by generating an API-key in PRO, copy that key (make sure you don’t get a blank space at the end!) and enter it in Marketing Automation > Settings.
In settings tab, you can easily revoke a connection, add a secondary PRO connection and edit settings for your existing connections.
The settings tab is also where you can set your company name.
Performance tab
In this tab you will see all statistics for your flows. Opt-Outs will show as stopped contacts. Lead quality is generally inpopulated
Activities tab
This is where you will find and create all your flows. When you create a new automation flow you can either choose a flow type from the list or create a custom flow.
The most popular flows are
● Welcome flow
● Birthday flow
● Specific date flow
Some flows requires settings to be done in PRO. For example, to use the birthday flow you need to have a birthday field in your Demographic Data. When you select a flow to create you will enter the Canvas .
Canvas
The canvas is where you create your flow and activate/pause/stop it. You can also see statistics for each node in the flow.
Set up your flow
When you enter the Welcome Subscribers flow you start out with three nodes:
Added subscribers - In this node you can select a mailing list, set filters and add demographic data fields.
TimeFrame - Set a timeframe in which the email will be sent. You can set both time and day (If you don’t want to send emails at night and on weekends).
Send Email - Select an email to be sent (transactional emails are only visible if you have activated them - see Preconditions).
You can also set decision based on Click or Open. You can set up a flow in different ways. In this case, you might want to take decision based on if the subscriber has:
A. Opened email
B. Not opened email
Opened email
When a subscriber open the email you can proceed with different set ups depending on the purpose of your flow. The purpose with this example flow is to give the new subscriber a special offer.
You can use the TimeFrame node to set a time and specific days when the email will be sent. So the subscriber will not receive the email outside 8-16 or weekends.
It’s a good idea to use Multiple Inputs node to be able to connect several nodes to each other. It’s not possible to do without this node.
If the subscriber does not open the first email, but open the reminder email you might want to connect the decision of that email to this Multiple Inputs node, and the subscriber will continue the flow.
Add to list node is used when you want to add a subscriber to a specific list. You have to create the list in PRO first. You can send the offer with an email or an SMS. To use the SMS node you need to have SMS activated on your account and a phone number in the subscriber mobile field
Not opened email
If the subscriber did not open the email you might want to send a reminder. The TimeFrame node can be used here as well, and can be set up with a different timeframe than the first email.
If the subscriber does not open the reminder email you can use the Remove from list node. Then the subscriber is removed from the list and will not continue the flow.
If the subscriber open the reminder email you can connect that decision to the Multiple Inputs node and the subscriber will continue the flow to the discount offer.
The Welcome subscriber flow can be designed in a lot of different ways. You can for example let subscribers go in to
different lists depending on what links they click in the email. A fashion company might have seperate lists for women and men, and what the subscriber click in the newsletter can decide which flow they will enter and what list they will land in.
When you are done with your flow you can activate it and try it out! You can do this by simply add subscribers manually to the list in PRO.
Statistics
When you open statistics for each node you can see how far in the flow your subscribers are.
You can also see detailed statistics for a node. And when you click on the numbers you will see a list with subscriber details.
Pause flow
To be able to edit your flow you have to pause it first. The subscribers that are in the flow will continue, but new subscribers coming into the flow during pause will remain in the start node.
Stop flow
Stopping a flow will also stop the collection of data and subscribers in the flow will be stopped. If you activate the flow again the subscribers and collection of data will continue.
Report
In the report tab you can see detailed statistics for your flow. You can see how many has started the flow. It also shows how many subscribers that are still active and how many that has been cancelled. You can change date range and see what actions/decisions has been taken.
Flow settings
This is the general settings for your flow. You can set flow name, responsible, number of times a flow will run (for example, set Unlimited if you want the birthday flow to start every year), language and specific OptOut settings.
You will also see the event log. It will show which user has edited the flow and what has been edited. The log shows the ten most recent changes.
OptOut logic
Marketing Automation is using transactional emails for the send outs. This means that OptOutList and OptOutAll will not work since transactional sendings ignores that. When you have changed the OptOut-link to ##OptOutMA## in Pro and a subscriber decides to unsubscribe, they will be able to choose:
● “Remove from further sendings like this” (unsubscribe from a flow)
● “Remove from all further sendings from company X” (unsubscribe from all sendings in Marketing Automation and Pro)
Bulk sendouts
Marketing Automation should not be used for bulk sendings. It is not only semi-effective but it will also become extremely expensive. The purpose of Marketing Automation is 1-to-1 communication.
Limit of filters (conditions)
When starting a flow you can manually add filters, but there is a maximum of five.
Using changes in Demographic Data to steer/stop flow
If you want to use changes in Demographic Data in the actual flow, for example:
* 2nd email in the flow should only be sent to those who have FavoriteBrand equals to Apple but had FavoriteBrand equals to Samsung when they started in the flow
Use “Exist in list”-logic instead if possible.
Notification node
Send out an internal email to a person within the organisation with information about the subscriber who has come to that specific part of the flow. However, there are a few things that you need to know about regarding this:
● Marketing Automation Lead = recipient has to be a user in APSIS Lead
● Marketing Automation Pro = recipient has to be a user in APSIS Pro and has to have logged into Marketing Automation at least once from their account in order to be “activated” as a user.
Report
General report in Marketing Automation. More detailed report in transactional numerical report in Pro. This report is really important. For example, it shows link mostly clicked which can help you decide what direction to take.
Using filter where DD-field value is 0 or empty
Example; Start when added to list A where Age Equals to 0.
This will not work because 0 is not a value in itself and will be interpreted as null. Same result with empty value. Solution is to use Age smaller than 1 instead.
API-check timeframe
Marketing Automation is checking the API-key every 12 minutes. If you just created a list in Pro it can take a while for it to show up in you flow. There is no timer that shows where in the timeframe you are, so just be patient.
When you have created a mailing list in Pro, with subscribers on it, connect it to your flow and start the flow. Then any subscribers already on the list will go into the flow if the flow is started within an hour after the mailing list was created.
Example: When a user starts a flow with Added-Subscriber-baseline for the first time at 14:35 MA will import all subscribers added to the specified mailing list from 13:35 and later.