Getting More Personal

The power of marketing automation is enabling businesses to manage their outreach with a degree of personalization and automation that goes far beyond your basic email send. Personalizing your content and its distribution allows you to speak directly to your contacts, about what they want, when they want to hear it, resulting in highly meaningful communications.

We’ve shared the how-to of personalization tags, as well as the robustness offered by our custom fields. Utilizing these tools together will enable you to create highly personalized marketing campaigns.

Tailoring your approach with personalization tags, custom fields and conditional content will help you create powerful pieces. And internal personalization in the Deals CRM will help you keep your team organized.

Better Data, Better Automations

The first step in personalizing your content is collecting quality information from your leads. It’s important to think about the times you have an opportunity to collect data from your contacts. A primary data collection method is forms.

When creating your forms, consider where your contacts are in the acquisition process. For example, someone who is simply signing up for your newsletter may be interested in your product, but may not be willing to share a ton of information. For that reason, newsletter forms are generally short, requesting only the basic information.

However, there may be times you can request additional information, helping you personalize future campaigns. For example, you can create a program where you send out coupons based on a contact’s stated interests. In this example, contacts can share if they are interested in sales on “Nutrition,” “Fitness” or “Beauty” products in a “Coupon Emails” form.

Another way ActiveCampaign enables you to collect more data is Site Tracking. Site Tracking enables you to see what your identified contacts are up to on your website. Once you’ve collected a contact’s information through a form or a link click in an email campaign, you can see what pages they visit the most frequently on your site.

Using Form Data in Personalized Automations

Collecting data about your contacts enables you to send targeted campaigns. Let’s say someone submits the Coupon Emails form, expressing an interest in Nutrition products. We are going to:

1. Create an automation with the start trigger of Contact submits form Coupon Emails
2. Create an email with conditional content, that will display Nutrition products to our contact.

Note: Because our form allows people to select from more than one interest, our email will include conditional content for all three interests.

The start trigger for this automation is going to be when a contact completes our Coupon Emails form.

After they’ve submitted the form, we will send them a welcome email with some percentage off of a particular product, targeted to their interest. While working in the email editor, select a text block in your campaign and find the ‘Personalization Tags’ option at the top.

You can create a simple email that pulls in the tag %YOUR_INTERESTS%, defined by the Coupon Emails form, to just insert the topics they are interested in. In this email, we’d also want to use their first name by inserting another personalization tag at the beginning of our message.

If you’d like to get more in-depth, you can create conditional content in your emails.

Using the information you were given in your initial form, you can create campaigns and automations and send to select groups within your contacts.

These campaigns and automations can grow over time, incorporating highly specialized content around each topic.

Using Site Tracking Data in Personalized Automations

With Site Tracking, it’s easy to create reactions to contacts visiting important pages on your site. This is a powerful option in ActiveCampaign, but it needs to be leveraged carefully.

Let’s say a known content visits the Nutrition page on your site several times. Even if they didn’t complete your Coupon Emails form, it’s possible that they would be interested in a Nutrition product coupon now.

You can begin a new automation, targeting contacts who expressed interest in Nutrition via your Coupon Emails form, as well as anyone who has visited the Nutrition page 2-5 times.

This time the trigger would be ‘Web Page is Visited’. Now these contacts will reach the Goal of “Nutrition Prospect,” and will be pushed to a specialized “Nutrition Coupon” Campaign Automation.

By combining the contacts with specialized form information with contacts who have reached a website activity goal, you are creating the building blocks to highly personalized messaging.

Using Personalization in Deals CRM

Let’s say you want to notify a specific sales team member that specializes in your Nutrition product lines when someone becomes a prospect for that line. You can create an automation that pulls in your Nutrition prospects and creates entries in Deals CRM.

In an automation, a contact who submits a form and lists an interest of Nutrition, and any contact who has completed the Goal of “Nutrition Prospect,” will be added to the CRM with a personalized title: %YOUR_INTERESTS% %FULLNAME% %ORGANIZATION% using the Add a Deal action.

This enables you to automate the process of signaling that a contact is ready for additional interaction, while also automating the process of naming the deal.

Personalization Automation is Key

The real power in marketing automation with ActiveCampaign is the many ways you can collect information and act on it, in a number of automated ways. We’ve reviewed data collection, form data personalization, site tracking personalization, and Deals CRM personalization.

What types of personalizations are you adding to your automations? Or what would you like to personalize? Let us know in the comments below.