BlueLena Guide: Publications can tailor content delivery to individual subscribers based on their preferences, behavior and interests through automations.

What are automations? 

Automations are powerful tools designed to automate and enhance the marketing and engagement capabilities of publishers. Automations enable publications to deliver personalized content, onboard new subscribers, track reader engagement, segment audiences, nurture leads and re-engage inactive subscribers. Automations streamline various tasks, from content distribution to subscription management.

Why would I use automations? 

Automations can improve the reader’s experience and engagement with your publication by delivering targeted content based on their preferences and behavior. Additionally, automations play a crucial role in enhancing data flow management with contacts. Publications can benefit from using automations in ActiveCampaign for several ways: 

  • Welcome series
    • When a new contact subscribes to your email list, you can create an automation that sends a series of welcome emails, introducing them to your brand, products or services.
  • Subscriber re-engagement
    • Create re-engagement campaigns for subscribers who have become inactive or disengaged, aiming to rekindle their interest.
  • Subscription renewals and upgrades
    • Use automations to send renewal reminders and offers to subscribers whose subscriptions are about to expire, encouraging them to renew or upgrade.
  • Dataflow management
    • Automations can be super powerful tools in sorting contacts on a regular basis, triggering date based events, engagement tracking, etc.

How do I create an automation? 

If you’re looking to create an automation, you can learn more about this process and setup here.

How do I view all contacts that entered an automation?

If you’re looking to view the contacts that entered an automation, you can learn more about this process and setup here.

How do I add contacts to an automation?

AcitveCampaign allows you to add/remove a single contact, or bulk add/remove multiple contacts from automations. You can learn more about how to conduct these automation processes here.

How do I manage automation unsubscribes and subsequent list associations?

Within each automation you have to option to select which list(s) that the automation and campaigns within it link to. This means that if someone were to unsubscribe via an email within your automation, they would be unsubscribed to whichever list(s) were selected as being associated with the automation. For further details on how to update your automation list associations as well as what all this helps accomplish, click here.

What are the different triggers in automations and their use cases? 

Here are some examples of triggers used by publishers:

  • Subscribe to a list:
    • This is triggered when a contact subscribes to a specific email list. This trigger can be used to welcome new subscribers, send them a series of introductory emails and guide them through the onboarding process.
  • Opens an email:
    • This is triggered when a contact opens an email. This trigger can be used to segment your audience based on their engagement with specific emails and send follow-up content or offers to highly engaged readers.
  • Clicks a link in an email:
    • This is triggered when a contact clicks a link in an email. This trigger is valuable for tracking reader interests and behavior, allowing you to send targeted content related to the clicked links.
  • Date-Based:
    • This is triggered dependent upon a date formatted data point for each specific contact. This is a valuable trigger as it’s often used to fire off both billing notifications in advance of the next payment, as well as being used in reacquisition series at specified time frames after a subscription has expired. This trigger can also be set to only fire on weekdays or weekends.

If you’re looking to set up an automation using specific triggers, you can learn more about this process and setup here.

What is the difference between Automations and Campaigns? 

Automations:

  • Purpose: Automations are sequences of actions and triggers that allow you to create personalized and behavior-based customer journeys. 
  • Use Case: Automations are ideal for creating highly targeted and personalized marketing emails, onboarding sequences and re-engagement efforts.

Campaigns:

  • Purpose: Campaigns are one-time, mass-email sends that enable you to send a message or set of messages to a large audience. They are suitable for sending newsletters, promotional emails and announcements.
  • Use Case: Campaigns are typically used for periodic newsletter distribution, product updates and one-off marketing messages to your entire list or specific segments of your audience.

What should I do if my automation is not working?

If you’re looking to troubleshoot and test an automation, you can learn more about this process and setup here.

Can I use automations to help with list cleanup?

By implementing list cleanup using automation, you not only maintain a healthy and engaged contact list but also streamline the process for ongoing maintenance, ensuring your email marketing efforts remain efficient and effective.

Regularly removing inactive contacts from your email list leads to higher engagement rates, focusing on contacts likely to open and interact with your campaigns. Despite a reduction in contact count, this practice positively impacts overall deliverability. This ensures clearer insights into your email marketing strategy, enabling more accurate reporting and a better understanding of campaign performance for effective strategic adjustments.

If you’re looking to perform an expedited list cleanup with automation, you can learn more about this process and setup here.

Why are date-based automations preferred over date-based campaigns?

Generally for BlueLena publishers, either date-based automations or campaigns are used for renewal and reacquisition series. If a publication wants to only send one renewal email and one reacquisition email, then using date-based emails may be preferred here.

However, most publishers like to send multiple emails in advance of a renewal, for example sending a 30, 14, and 7 day renewal notice to ensure the subscriber is aware of an upcoming renewal or expiration. These publishers also like to send multiple emails after a subscription/membership has expired to ensure there wasn’t an issue with making payment, if they had auto renew turned off and forgot to renew, or generally if a subscriber wanted to take a pause on their subscription. For example, sending a 30, 60, and 120 day reacquisition email to these Ex-subscribers.

Dealing with multiple emails trying to achieve the same purpose makes this much easier to track using an automation as compared to making each of those emails their own date-based campaign. Within the automation, you can insert wait steps so that these campaigns are delivered at the desired interval, and if for example someone re-subscribes during the Reacquisition automation you would be able to apply tagging to know that they converted from the automation. With date-based campaigns only, you wouldn’t be able to automatically apply these tags.

What is site tracking and how do I set this up?

Site tracking is a valuable tool which tracks the activity of contacts that click through your ActiveCampaign emails. They only need to interact via a campaign or form once and if they visit the site through this then it will begin tracking them via 1st-party cookies. To learn more about the about the process of implementing site tracking, click here.

What is engagement tracking and how do I set this up?

Engagement tracking helps publishers keep track of how engaged contacts are with their email marketing content. Generally with BlueLena publishers, this is also an effective way to keep your lists clean and ensure that un-engaged contacts are removed from your mailing lists so that they do not drag down deliverability scores or open rates. This requires two separate automations that will work in tandem, and you can find the documentation on both of these automation recipes here and here