Over & over—automatically

Ever wonder how to automate certain marketing to repeat over and over periodically to the same people? For example, consider a birthday card or email you want to send to clients every year, or the announcement of your semi-annual sale, or their annual anniversary as your client, or whatever you want to do on a repeatable basis to the same group of people.

The answer is, of course, marketing automation! You could do it manually, but why would you? I am going to use Infusionsoft in this example (since that is the sales and marketing automation platform we use and recommend), but whatever platform you use should be able to do the same thing.

In Infusionsoft, we use what is called a looping campaign. Here is what the whole campaign looks like:

1. First we collect their birthday if we don’t already have it in the “Collect Birthday” step.
2. Then we tell the campaign to put them in the birthday loop “Happy Birthday Reminder” tag.
3. We wait until their birthday arrives, we send them what we are going to send them in the “Happy Birthday Email” sequence.
4. Then we remove them and put them back into the “Happy Birthday Email” sequence and wait until next year.

In Infusionsoft, the key to making this work is in the “Happy Birthday Email” sequence. So, let’s look at the key parts more closely:

1. We wait until the next occurrence of their birthday.
2. We remove the “Happy Birthday Reminder” tag.
3. The Happy Birthday email is sent (you could send a card or gift here instead).
4. The “Happy Birthday Reminder” tag is reapplied to set them up for next year

If you go back to the whole campaign view you will see that we have a ‘goal’ to look for the setting of the “Happy Birthday Reminder” tag both before and after the “Happy Birthday Email” sequence.

This is a really cool feature of Infusionsoft…..an ending goal will always be met before an entrance goal.

So, in our case, the person is taken out of the “Happy Birthday Email” sequence, end then put back in, simply by setting the “Happy Birthday Reminder” tag again after the email is sent. That person will remain there until next year when their birthday again rolls around.

There are really so many uses for this looping structure to automate repeating and recurring events. We regularly find new uses for this technique. The bottom line is that all marketing automation platforms can do some really cool things if you learn them and let your imagination loose.