Automation allows businesses to bolster their engagement efforts with their customers by maintaining open lines of communication with them without much (if any) manual intervention at all.
There are various software platforms out there that can serve businesses’ basic automation needs – allowing them to string together several email messages along with set time delays and then sending lists of contacts through the campaign on a scheduled date.
This is the bare bones minimum that a business should be able to accomplish with an automation platform. Which, for many businesses, is all that they want to be able to do.
However, sometimes a simple, generalized email campaign isn’t going to be enough to keep customers fully engaged. Sometimes businesses require a platform that allows them to put in more effort to create a more sophisticated communication campaign that encompasses not only email but other channels as well, such as SMS, voice, and even fax. Sometimes businesses need to send messages to subscribers based on previous interactions they’ve had with them, providing them with relevant information based on these interactions. And sometimes, they just want a way to have multiple different campaign streams and be able to randomly send contacts down a particular one.
How is it possible for an automation platform to do all that, you ask?
Well, with the right platform and with the right tools at your disposal, not only it is possible, but it’s also quite simple!
Building Condition Sets
A tool such as a condition builder that allows users to create simple or complicated queries to help the automation platform determine whether a contact should receive a specific message or not can take an email campaign to new heights by providing the ability to create different streams within a single campaign.
The way the platform does this is by working in tandem with a contact database or CRM – wherever you store the information gathered from your contacts. In the automation platform, you need to build a condition or set of conditions using the information fields found in the contact database. When a contact reaches this condition set in the automated flow, the system will cross-reference the information found in the contact database with the requirements set forth in the condition and, if the contact meets the requirements, will send them down the appropriate stream in the campaign.
A condition builder effectively eliminates the need for users to manually initiate and direct contacts into these different streams, thus increasing the overall amount of automation within a campaign. Once you set up the conditions, the system will take over and do the rest.
Random Percentage Splits
Alternatively, let’s say you have an automation campaign with a few different streams and you want an equal amount of contacts to go through each of these streams, but don’t necessarily care whether contacts meet a certain set of criteria.
A useful tool to help with this would be a percentage split tool that can be used to randomly send a specified percentage of contacts down a certain stream in the automated flow. This tool can allow users to easily choose the weight of each stream in the campaign editor depending on how many contacts they wish to be sent down each stream.
Once the campaign is active, the system will automatically send contacts down one stream at random based on the weighted percentages determined by the user in the campaign setup.
As well, if you notice throughout the course of the campaign that contacts are responding better to, or seem to be more engaged by the content in some streams as opposed to others, you can go into the campaign and modify these percentage splits on the fly! This will help ensure your contacts will be more likely to receive the higher-performing message content and ultimately remain more engaged with your communication campaigns overall.
Automated Personalization & Randomization
By definition, you wouldn’t think that an automation platform could do much by way of personalization and randomization, due to the fact that its main purpose is to facilitate the sending of mass communications to contacts. But with the right automation platform you can build out multiple different streams of content and, depending on the information stored in your contact database, you can target messages to specific contacts who meet certain pre-set conditions or you can send them down random streams in the campaign based on percentage splits.
Mix all that together with merge tags and conditional formatting and you have a powerful solution that doesn’t require much manual maintenance at all!
Click the button below to request a demo of SimplyCast’s automation engagement platform, and see how you can use our Decision (condition builder) and Percentage Split elements in your next automation campaign!
