The automation area of the BuddyCRM marketing suite includes a powerful set of tools to massively enhance your marketing proposition. This area allows you to build powerful ‘drip’ sequenced campaigns or automate business tasks based on activity within the CRM.
There are three core elements to the automation area:
Trigger: the thing that happens to invoke the automation
Controls: allows a time delay from trigger to action
Action: the action that takes place as part of the automation
In this article we will take you through utilising these areas as part of creating automations.
Trigger
Email activity allows the trigger action to be driven by email activity from another email sent from BuddyCRM. When you initially select ’email activity’, you are able to decide if you want the trigger to come from ‘any email campaign’ or for a ‘specific email campaign’. Specific would be used if you want one particular email to trigger another, and allows you to select the triggering campaign.
The following email activities are available:
Opened: the email has been opened
Clicked: any link within the email has been clicked (apart from unsubscribe)
Unsubscribed: the unsubscribe campaign link has been clicked
Not opened: the email has been sent but not opened by the recipient
Not clicked: a link has not been clicked by the recipient
Added to list operates on a contact being added to a Marketing list, which can either be manually done through the Marketing Contact screen, or can be automated by marketing automations (see Action below).
If you wish the automation to take affect on the contacts already in the relevant list, you can also tick the toggle switch ‘include contacts already in the list chosen’ when selecting the trigger ‘added to list’.
Field match works on CRM activity – when a company or contact meets certain criteria then the automation will trigger. This area has a similar feel & set of principles to marketing segments and the reports module.
You start by selecting the module containing the field that needs to match from Lead, Account, Contact or Case. Then choose the field, operator (equal to, begins with etc) and value you required.
Top tip that you can stack multiple criteria using the plus button to the right, and can toggle ‘and’ or ‘or’ by clicking on the word ‘and’. This follows the same logic as in segments.
An optional section ‘rule trigger on’ allows more sophisticated triggering, for example 7 days before the Birthday of the contact
The toggle switch ‘when new contact is added’ means that the automation will act when a contact is added that meets the criteria, whereas ‘when old contact update’ means that older contacts in the system that are updated to meet the criteria will trigger the automation. Carefully consider the paths that you require.
Remove from list allows the automation to trigger when a contact is removed from a specified list. Again this can be manually done or could be an automation (see Action below).
Controls
Controls allows you specify a time delay for your marketing automation between the initial trigger and the resulting action.
This might be desirable so as not to bombard a contact with an action or email immediately and is useful in drip campaigns, where emails are fed over a time period.
Action
Update field value allows the marketing automation to update a contact field or fields with new values.
This would be useful for updating a contact, lead or account to have new information based on the outcome of a campaign.
The screen design & logic is the same as the field match area:
Internal notification puts a notification in the ‘notifications area’ for the relevant account owner.
Send transactional email sends a transactional email (aka text-only) template configured in ‘Admin > Template List > Email Templates’.
You can choose whether to send using the record owners name, or to enter an email sender address.
Transactional emails are perfect where an email is needed but sophisticated imagery, hyperlinks etc are not required.
Create activity allows you to choose a pre-created activity workflow template to be created for the record owner. This means that an automated call, appointment or task will be created in the owner’s diary, great for internal follow-ups by the team.
Send HTML email allows you to choose a HTML email campaign, built within the Marketing Campaigns area for sending out to the contact or contacts that are within the automation. This is great for sending rich emails with images, hyperlinks and calls to action.
If you need advice on configuring your marketing automations, please get in touch with customer success at support@buddycrm.com.