Back in my Kaplan days, I was a bold user of email marketing. This time could probably be depicted as “the early days of email marketing.” Typically, I would acquire lists and then painstakingly “edit,” “copy,” and “paste” my recipients into the BCC of my email program. Other than a compelling “Subject Line,” there weren’t many options to dress up the actual content in the email.
Fast forward a bit and programs such as Contant Contact, Mail Chimp, Active Campaign etc. created template based email where one could produce a more visually impactful campaign. At this point, designing newsletters and sending .html formatted emails with images and even video became possible and reasonably effective provided one’s email list was of good quality.
Fast forward again and we have the advent of Automated CRM Based Email Marketing. Because of those pioneer days mentioned above ( circa 2001), the value inherent to me seemed astonishing.
Essentially, one can think of Automated CRM as “smart email + having an amazing assistant.” This assistant will track client interaction through your virtual business footprint (for example: Facebook, YELP, G+, website, phone number combined) then, in real time, the assistant would schedule the appropriate follow-up date and next email message (which is already written and ready). Lastly, our assistant filters and creates a list of clients who may be nurtured to provide a Five Star Web Testimonial–then, carefully nurtures them. Oh, and with marketing automation, the assistant never leaves work and performs the tasks above endlessly.
While it is true that one can manually create a basic automation campaign, say a Newsletter followed by a Thanks for Reading My Newsletter to “openers” of the original newsletter, it is equally true that effective automated email has become far more complex and nuanced. In fact, one might say that automating one’s CRM is the new baseline for email management.
For that reason, we invested in our own Automated CRM. We did the whole “incubator-to-pilot” and just dropped this white-paper. Our product is called “Marketing Autopilot” and although it is laser-focused on helping Tutors & Independent Educational Consultants market intelligently, its basis — the automated CRM–has been applied to just about every “personalized consumer service” I can name.
