How to create an Automated Email Campaign

As part of the optional Marketing Module, BigContacts offers a suite of marketing automation tools that will enable you to create automated campaigns that are triggered by certain actions that you per-determine when setting up that campaign.

Step 1

Click on the "Marketing" tab and then in the upper right hand corner of the marketing Dashboard you will click on the "Automations" link in the top blue bar.

Step 2

 Now that you are in the Automations tab, you will select the button in the top right corner labeled "New Automation".

Step 3

Now it's time to tell the system what you want to use to "trigger" this automated email (or series of emails) that you are about to create.  There are currently 2 methods that we fully support and they are highlighted on the screenshot below.

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Trigger the Automation when someone Subscribes to a list

BigContacts will automatically "Subscribe" a contact to a list in 1 of 2 different scenarios

Using your webform Let's say you have a webform on your website to capture leads. The moment a new lead has completed a form, an entire series of events can be triggered to automatically occur…         Including an automated email that is sent out or even a series of emails sent to this new lead.

• CLICK HERE to learn more about how you can connect your webform to your BigContacts account so that you can start automatically loading leads into your account. 
• CLICK HERE to see how you can take this process even further and have the Marketing Module automatically assign a task to follow up with the new lead AND even send out an email (or even a series of emails) after the contact has been loaded in your BigContacts account.
  
  Using your Sales Pipeline - If you are using the Sales Module to track your sales opportunities, you can have an email or an entire series of emails trigger based on where a prospect or customer might be in your Sales Pipeline.  These automated emails are triggered based on the sales stage that you place a contact into.  
• CLICK HERE to see how you can have the Sales Pipeline automatically assign a task to follow up with the new lead AND even trigger the Marketing Module to send out an email (or even a series of emails) after the contact has been loaded in your BigContacts account.

Trigger the Automation when a Tag has been added to a contact record

Let's say you are using tags to identify and segment your contacts. You can set the system up so that the moment you add a specific tag to a contact record that it can automatically trigger an email or entire series of emails to be sent to this contact.
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Step 4

In this example we chose to trigger the automation when a contact is added (or is "subscribed") to the marketing list.  In the screenshot below you will see that we have chosen the "BC Contacts" list and will use this to trigger this automation and now we are ready to create the list of actions that we want to occur in our Automation.

Step 5

On this next screen that appears, we click to create that first " action" of this automation that we are creating.

Let's say we want the system to wait an hour before it sends the email just to make it look like a real human sent it and not a machine.  So, here you will see where we click to insert a waiting period before we send our first email.   

Let's go ahead and create our first email to send.  Here we select the "+" again and then choose "Sending Options" and then "Send Email".  When you click this option, you will follow the normal steps to design and customize your email template. 

After you have completed the design, you will click "Save & Exit" to be returned back to the main screen to continue building your Automation.  As you will see below, you always will know visually where you are in building out this Automation.

The sky is the limit in what you can do when creating an Automation!!!

IMPORTANT NOTE: 
We strongly recommend that you first write out the entire process to ensure that it flows exactly the way you want it and THEN begin building your Automation.  This will save you a lot of time in the long run and will ensure you get exactly what you are looking for.