Preliminary Steps

When you’re setting up your drip campaign, planning is actually just as important as creating the content you’ll be sending out, apparently. So before you get started, the fine folks over at Marketingsherpa urge you to consider some of the following questions. (Seriously, I’m not an expert on this stuff but am happy to point you toward helpful resources from folks who are.)

What’s the goal of your autoresponder campaign? For example, if you have an ecommerce site, you might want to remind someone about the items they’ve left in their shopping cart and encourage them to come back and purchase. Do you have your content sorted out? Content is still king, and having well-written, informative and relevant content will help engage your subscribers and keep them interested. What’s the trajectory and duration of your campaign? What key marketing messages are you trying to convey? What’s the time period over which you plan to send your emails? Are they leading up to a specific event? These sorts of questions will help you figure out how often you want to send, and the specific content in each message.

Getting Started

Let’s imagine that you’re a wedding photographer who finds potential clients through word of mouth, via a signup form on your website, and by using Chimpadeedoo for iPad to let interested parties sign up at bridal shows.

You’ll want to make sure your signup form is capturing all the pertinent information for your autoresponder series– first and last name, email address, date (which I’ve relabeled so it refers to wedding date) and gender. Perhaps even use the 2 line description to entice people with a special offer for signing up, as I’ve done here.

Setting Up Your Autoresponders

Remember, the whole point of this tutorial is how to count down to a special date using autoresponders. Since we’ve collected the wedding date of our prospective clients, that’s the date we’ll base our series of emails on.

When I created my signup form in Chimpadeedoo, I offered an incentive– a free wedding photography consultation. In order to make good on that offer, I scheduled my first autoresponder (containing the free consultation offer) to send a few days (3) after signup. This gives the subscriber enough time to process all the information from the Bridal Show, but not so much time that they forget they ever signed up for my list. (Note: Experiment here! Is five days the sweet spot, or do you get better results from waiting a week or maybe even nine days? Leave a comment and let us know what you discover, as my guess is that things will vary by industry and use case.)

Then I created my campaign:

Next, I’ve decided that to stay in contact with my subscribers and help pique their interest in my services, I’ll send out a “tips” type newsletter one month after the subscription date. Again, in my autoresponder setup screen I’ll click the big “add autoresponder” button, then select the list I want to send to– Georgia Bridal Show 2011. Under “send settings” I’ll set my autoresponder to send 1 month after the subscriber’s signup date:

And again, I’ll then go in and create my campaign full of wedding tips and tricks. I’ll segment this one by gender, because let’s face it, you guys need a lot of help when it comes to wedding stuff. I’ll include pointers about how not to look like a total goofball in your photos, how far in advance of your wedding you should get your hair cut so you don’t have that “freshly shorn sheep” look, and even some common dance steps so that you’re not as nervous while twirling your lady during that first dance.

Once you’ve set up your autoresponder and are ready to jump into the design process, simply set the segment of your list you want to send to in Step 1 of the Campaign Builder.

Next, you know that (according to the wedding planning checklist) couples will be seriously auditioning photographers nine to ten months prior to the date of the wedding. In order to capitalize on that, I’ll set up two autoresponders– one that will send 10 months before the date of the wedding, and the other that will send 9 months before the wedding. These are specifically intended to remind my subscribers that it’s time to pick a photographer, while also suggesting my services.

Ten months out, I want to remind the subscriber where we met (the Georgia Bridal Show on June 26, 2011 at Gwinnett Center), provide some education and links to my website and portfolio, and offer my photography services for the big day. Since I collected gender information on my signup form, I might even consider segmenting on that criteria and including a bit more concrete information for the men on my list. Guys don’t always understand the nuances of wedding planning, so it might behoove me to educate as opposed to trying the hard sell.

There’s a lot that goes into planning a wedding, so when my autoresponder sends 9 months prior to the date of the wedding, I want to assure my subscribers I know what they’re going through and that LauterCo Photographers are here to help. This might be a good time to include offers from dress shops, tuxedo rental places or caterers that my company has prior working relationships with. You can even make sure those companies know you sent them business by using Google’s URL builder to generate a unique link for each vendor.

Google URL builder

Some other ideas you might want to consider

• 8 months before the wedding, send a PYOW-powered QR coupon code to a segment of those folks who “opened or clicked” your email from the 9-month autoresponder offering a discount on your photography services

• Post a QR Code outside your studio so that visitors who stop by can quickly signup for your email list

We’ve added a new “Birthday” field that you can add to your signup forms:

Unlike the “date” field, the “birthday” field doesn’t require entering the YEAR (some subscribers just don’t want to reveal their exact date of birth).

We also added a few new pre-designed email templates for birthdays, so that making birthday autoresponders would be drop-dead easy…

When you’re building a birthday autoresponder (here’s a tutorial on how to do that), and it’s time to design the email, go to the pre-designed templates list, and choose “birthday:”

You’ll find the following new designs to help you get started:

Of course, you can always build your own using our other awesome template options, or by downloading our HTML email blueprints.

For those of you who prefer to take an offbeat approach, remember that it’s also possible to send belated birthday autoresponders by tweaking your send settings:

The birthday field can technically also be used for “Anniversaries” but we wanted to keep the button label simple.

Finally, you can choose two different date formats:

Related:

• Creating Effective — and Profitable — Birthday Emails by Jeanne Jennings, Clickz
• If you’re using our Chimpadeedoo iPad app to collect signups at your store register, our Mobile Lab team is working on an update as we speak that supports this new field.

Knowing exactly when that process was supposed to kick in like this was good for us back when the feature was new and we weren’t sure about its impact. But as more and more people started to use it, 8pm started to become a little bit of a bottleneck. Suddenly queuing up over 20,000 autoresponder campaigns at once is just not healthy.

So a couple days ago, we changed the process to be more “spread out” over 8 – 12 hrs.  As a result, you might start to see your autoresponders arriving in inboxes later or earlier than you usually do. Yep, it’s supposed to do that.

I’ll show you 4 easy examples anybody can build in the MailChimp interface, plus one clever way to use the API to trigger your autoresponder.

Trigger after subscribing to list:

This is the easiest autoresponder trigger, and the main reason we built our autoresponder tool. Schedule a series of tips and how-to-advice to automatically go out to people after subscribing to your list. In the example above, a wedding planner is sending wedding planning tips to new subscribers to get them interested in her services (here’s a more detailed example). The key here is to show off some expertise without making yourself obsolete. An alternative might be, “Top 10 wedding mistakes” to scare prospects into hiring you. I’m just saying.

Trigger based on a recurring annual event:

This works well for birthdays, anniversaries, or anything you want to happen every year based on a date that your user enters into your signup form. Maybe it’s a car tune-up reminder, or some kind of “bring your widget in for its annual checkup.”  Tip: Send belated birthday autoresponders to stand out in the inbox

Trigger based on a fixed date:

The example above is for a kids summer camp. Just before the session they’re signed up for, an email (or a sequence of emails) goes out with packing checklists, directions, etc.  Works well for travel, too. Just before the big cruise to the Bahamas, send some helpful emails on what to pack, what they’ll be experiencing (send lots of pictures), how to gloat in front of your co-workers,  etc.

Trigger after a fixed date:

In the example above, imagine you host a big event, and 2 weeks after the last day of the event you want to send a survey to all attendees asking for their feedback. Tip: In that survey, you should ask them to opt-in for news about the next big event. Actually, don’t do that. It’ll look so blatant. Hmm, how about in that feedback survey email, you point users to a landing page with pictures from the event, and where other attendees can post comments, pics, videos, and network with each other. Consider services like Crowdvine, or Ning, or even a simple Facebook Fan Page.

API – triggered autoresponders based on hidden date field:

Some users have told us, “I don’t want to send autoresponders based on subscription to a list. I need to trigger them via the API to send to people already on my list.”

Our answer to that is NO.

Autoresponders are very powerful, but they can also be very, very annoying and abusive (to be totally honest, this is why we avoided offering them in MailChimp for so long). In our interface, we deliberately built autoresponders so they’d only go to people who double opted-in to a list.

However, there are a few cases where we think it’s ok to use the MailChimp API to trigger an autoresponder.

You’d basically setup your list, signup form, and autoresponders in MailChimp, but then use the API to pass data into them.

Let’s say you’ve got an e-commerce system, and customers can order small samples from your site. Like carpet or tile or color swatches. The idea is that your product has a tall price tag, so you let them purchase a tiny sample for say, $5. The cool thing about that is you know these buyers are pretty interested if they’re paying money for samples. Anyway, upon purchase of the sample, provide a checkbox in your cart (check out our e-commerce plugins) that lets the customer receive a sequence of free “decorating idea” emails.

Maybe the emails can include inspiring photos from real customers, or perhaps a “Top 10 mistakes” sequence.

The key is to make it optional, and to set expectations about what they’re going to receive. You don’t want to “surprise” your own customers with unwanted emails.

Then, setup a list in MailChimp for customers who ordered samples from your site. Next, create an autoresponder that goes out 2 weeks after a date (the date that they ordered the sample).

Using the API, subscribe buyers to the list, and set their individual “ordered sample” date fields to be the date they purchased their sample. Tip: Set that date field in your MailChimp signup form as “hidden” in case a customer should happen to see their subscriber preferences page.

On a somewhat related note, here’s a tutorial on sending automated transactional emails with MailChimp’s powerful API, and here’s an awesome case study of using dynamic content in those transactional emails.

But if you think about it, they’ll probably be getting tons of birthday emails already.

Why not schedule a belated birthday greeting instead? They won’t be expecting that.

Schedule an autoresponder to go out 2 days (or more) after their birthday.

Design a “whoops, we’re sorry” email with a promo code or special offer to make it up to them:

To add a little humor, you might insert a photo of your staff slapping themselves on their foreheads like they really forgot:

This approach actually gets around one ugly problem: what if the email doesn’t get there on time? I mean, we deliver pretty fast and all, but you never know if your recipient’s inbox is full, or if their ISP is backlogged. If your email shows up one day late, and it says, “Happy Birthday” it kinda makes you look–well, like that lady in the picture.

Might as well add some padding and call it a belated birthday greeting instead.