Automate your Email Marketing with Workflows and Autoresponders

We received these questions from our customers recently:

“How do I send follow-ups to all leads who have clicked on a specific link in my email?”

“I want to add users to a new list whenever their potential/opportunity status changes in Zoho CRM.”

In Zoho Campaigns, it is possible to send out these follow-ups from the results of an email campaign. There are a couple of barriers, though:

• The process is manual.
• It has to be done for each and every campaign separately.
• There is no way to automatically move recipients between marketing lists when they move from one stage to another in the buying process.

For a growing business, this is not a scalable solution. Our customers also wanted to move from sending batch-and-blast emails to sending targeted content based on recipients’ behavior in an email.

This made it very important that we quickly moved from providing email marketing features to email marketing automation where our users could create multi-stage automated campaigns.

And that’s exactly what we introduced in a recent update with Email Workflows and Autoresponders.

Behavior-based emails with Autoresponders

Let’s start with Autoresponders. This is not new, but with this update we introduced two new types that let you create follow-ups based on recipients’ behavior in an email.

So, let’s say you want to send follow-ups to those subscribers who have clicked a specific link in your email. You can create an email-action based autoresponder that lets you do this.

Calendar-based autoresponders let you send emails based on specific dates in a year. For example, if you run a store, you can send a “Business is Closed” message to go out a couple of days before every holiday in the year. And the best part, you can schedule these messages right at the beginning of the year. You’re sure that your message will reach your audience.

Send targeted campaigns with Email Workflows

Email Workflows let you define rules for your email marketing process based on subscriber information. These rules let you move subscribers between mailing lists so that you can send targeted and relevant content to them.

The best example of an email workflow is to create one for your buying process. As your leads move through the different stages, you can add them to mailing lists and send content with a relevant calls-to-action.

Zoho Campaigns is also integrated with Zoho CRM, which makes it easy to setup workflows based on any data that you have about your leads and customers.

So, is there a right time to start using Email Marketing Automation?

Well, it depends on your business. But, here are a few questions that you can ask yourself. If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of these, it’s the right time for automation.

• Do you stop after sending a single email to all new leads?
• Do you have valuable information about your leads that you’re not using for segmentation?
• Are you sending follow-up emails to your leads manually?
• Do you send promotional emails on holidays and occasions?

Here’s detailed documentation on this latest update that can help you get started.

We’re really excited about this first step in automation and how you can benefit from the different possibilities. Do share any feedback and specific scenarios that we should consider as we continue to build upon this feature.