{"id":43525,"date":"2020-05-12T06:56:54","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T06:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.glassmountains.co.uk\/?p=43525"},"modified":"2020-05-12T06:56:54","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T06:56:54","slug":"an-introduction-to-email-automation-with-active-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.glassmountains.co.uk\/campfire\/an-introduction-to-email-automation-with-active-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"An introduction to email Automation with Active Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"
In this first of this series of articles, I’m going to start exploring what email automation is as well as delving into some examples of how we use it here at Glass Mountains.<\/p>\n
What is email automation?<\/h2>\n
Email automation is where we create unique business rules that affect (for example) the communication our contacts receive. In this article, I’ll show some examples which will hopefully bring that definition to life a bit more.<\/p>\n
Is it wrong to automate?<\/h2>\n
In the ideal world, all our communications to our clients would be handcrafted and unique to them. Lovingly prepared so that all<\/em> the messaging is unique to their specific wants & desires – however, sometimes that is just not possible. Email newsletters are a perfect case in point;<\/p>\n
Fig 1 – an example of basic personalisation in an email campaign<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n
Pretty much all us will have received emails like the above – what we used to call a ‘mail merge<\/em>‘ – it’s s standard company message, but it has logic in place so that it knows to replace “Hi {firsname}<\/em>“, with what your contact’s first name is – the is called ‘personalisation<\/em>‘ and is a basic form of automation.<\/p>\n
Active Campaign<\/h2>\n
Now that we’re aware we’ve already witnessed (or even done our own) email automation, let’s start to look at some more complex examples in Active Campaign.<\/p>\n
Firstly though, let’s take a look at how a contact looks in ActiveCampaign:<\/p>\n
Fig 2 – a contact record in Active Campaign<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n
What you’re seeing here looks like a pretty standard contact record you’ll see in any system. Ok, I’ve blurred out personal details but we’re seeing here the regular name, email fields etc but notice as well flagged in the above the sections for Tags<\/strong>, Lists<\/strong>, and Automations<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
Lists<\/h3>\n
Let’s start with Lists first as that one is easiest to understand. If you have a ‘subscribe to my blog’<\/em> form on your website, then people will be subscribing to a specific email list.\u00a0 And in ActiveCampaign, Lists means simply that – which areas of communication has the person actively subscribed to. In the example above, the person has actually subscribed to hear about our upcoming webinars (“Interested in Webinars<\/em>“).<\/p>\n
Tags<\/h3>\n
If you have used any CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system you may well already be used to the concept of tagging<\/em>. With tagging, you can create your own attributes and then assign them to one or more contacts.<\/p>\n
In Fig 2, you can see the contact has various tags applied, let’s look at two and explore MEMBER_Facebook_group<\/strong> (we’ll explore Event_29_may_wordpress_QA<\/strong> in the next article, there’s a lot to talk about there).<\/p>\n