Automating Your Promotion: How to Launch an Effective Promotion Using Marketing Automation

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Launching an online promotion can be really intimidating to a business owner.

If you have made any type of revenue goals or set expectations, you and your business depend on meeting those goals.

Promotions tend to contain a lot of moving pieces and parts. Any type of miscalculation impacts your entire bottom line.

And that’s why promotions can cause stress, anxiety, and worry.

In this blog, I’m going to show you a way to let technology help you with your promotions, to help reduce some of the anxiety attached them as well as help you create better results for your business.

The Principals of a Promotion

Promotions are campaigns that generate any type of sale, lead generation, create retention and loyalty with your existing customers, or even further engage and nurture your audience.

The idea of a promotion can be used for more than just a sale announcement; you can use promotions to announce new free offers, product releases, webinars, and events, trials and or upgrades to your existing products and services.

Typically, promotional offers are sent to a list that is already warmed up and ready to receive. This means, that the people you are sending the promotion to are already familiar with you, and your business. They are ready to receive your offers.

Promotions are typically sent during a pre-defined promotional period, that is usually determined by an overall promotional calendar.

Promotional calendars are the 30-day and 90-day calendars containing the planned email campaigns that will intentionally move a prospect through the customer journey (Digital Marketer.com).

… and if you aren’t currently using a promotion calendar, I highly recommend you create one. It will help create consistency and stability within your business.

When plotting your email campaigns and choosing the content to include, aim for an 80/20 mix using the Pareto Principle. Simply put: 80% of your content should be devoted to valuable and useful information, and 20% should be devoted to the promotions, sales, and products/services you’re selling (CampaignMonitor.com).

how to get started with email strategy

Data provided by Convenience and Convert

Core Components of a Promotion

Promotions, whether they be digital or otherwise, are always going to contain a series of core components. These core components are proven methodologies that help you get more engagement from your promotions.

These core components include:

The Offer

  • The offer is what you are presenting and a call to action to obtain it. This also includes the WHY someone needs your offer (what problem it is resolving for them).

Proof

  • The proof of your promotion is the reason why someone should buy your offer; evidence supporting that your offer WORKS. This can be provided by customer story, testimonial, specific results, etc.

Scarcity

  • The scarcity is the last call; the end date and time, of your offer, will expire. All promotions should have some sort of scarcity in order to entice the purchase.

Creating a Promotional Sequence

Each of the core components of promotional sequences can be string together, to create a promotion series that can be delivered via marketing automation.

In this example, I will be creating a promotion for an offer that is available for 10 days.

Meaning the promotion starts on day 1 and last for 10 days after. (Note: there are many different cycles in which to run a promotion, this is just ONE example).

Typically, with a promotion like this, I’d set up my emails as follows:

Email 1/Day 1: Introduction to the offer, call to action

Email 2/ Day 3: Reminder of the offer, check to make sure it was received

Email 3/Day 5: Testimonial that helps overcome the objection to the sale

Email 4/ Day 7: Testimonial that helps overcome the objection to the sale

Email 5/ Day 9: Testimonial that helps overcome the objection to the sale

Email 6/Day 10: Scarcity, last call

Email 7/Day 10: Scarcity, the final call to purchase

Running a Promotion Using ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign, makes it easy to run a promotional campaign and while staying organized so that you know it’s going to the right people at the right time.

With ActiveCampaign, you can set up automation to manage and track your promotion.

Automations are useful for when you want a sequence of events to be followed. This could involve pre-sale nurturing of a contact, post-sale up-sell emails and touch points, etc.

The Advantages of Using an Automation

Your Promo Content is in a Single Location

What’s better than having a single, organized spot for all of your promotional content? By using automation for your promotion, you have access to every email, wait period, and goals in a single spot.

This will allow you to make on the fly updates to campaigns, change wait periods or distribution times, and even track the contacts in real time, where they are at during any given promotion.

Your Promo is Easy to Track and Measure

Looking to monitor and track your opens, clicks, and conversions? By keeping your promotional sequence in an automation, will allow to do just that!

  1. An automation report will show you how many contacts received each email, along with your click an open rates.
activecampaign automation report

2. A goal report will allow you to view exactly how many contacts reach the goal automation – in this case, purchasing your promotion.

3. Finally, you can use the advanced search function to identify when contacts reached the goal (whether it be the first email, or the last.

It’s Easy to Replicate, Repeat, and Reuse

Once you have set up an automation for a promotion, it’s really easy to duplicate and reuse for other promotions. Just go into the automation menu and duplicate it.

This will allow you to keep all or setup, and adjust any triggers, tags, and goals accordingly. You can copy and paster you updated email copy, and be ready to go!

Get Start with Your Promotions

Regardless of your tool, developing, and sticking to a promotional strategy will allow you to effectively systemize your work so that you can be more effective, save time, and generate additional revenue.

Furthermore, having a solid promotional strategy in place, will help you keep integrity. By ensuring you are sending the right content is sent to the right people, at the right time.

Promotions are just about sending endless offers or creating a cobweb of systems that don’t work together… they are to help create ease and efficiency in your business.

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