For some time now I have been helping companies with email marketing automation. Linkdra today exists because of a gap we spotted with email marketing - COLD starts. Email continues to be the top choice when it comes to ROI. Social media, ads do help in brand building, impressions, retargeting, and all that jazz but it is still hard to match the effectiveness of Email Marketing.

How do we overcome cold starts?

That's the hack we are going to cover here. But before we do that, let's set the context around typical email campaigns with Mailchimp. Campaigns have come a long way with sophisticated segmentation, tags, automated workflows, and of course social media integration. Add to that the whole personalization at scale angle and it does look a bit daunting just to send an email.

With the increased competition for inbox, it does help to personalize and customize to make each recipient fill special, kind of creating that 1:1 connect which is what is lacking with Ads and social media still. The same text or graphic for everyone barring a couple of different options and A/B testing etc.

Let's dive into a bit more around Mailchimp automation and a nifty feature around tags that can trigger an email workflow.

More on Tags

Today mailing lists can hardly be called the static lists where you just keep adding emails. Not everyone on the list is in the same state. To illustrate, let's take a typical customer journey. Some users may have just started exploring which others are at an advanced stage of decision making and yet part of the same list. This is where tags come in handy. You can add tags in addition to lists to differentiate and even better trigger emails when a tag is applied.

You can add tags such as "qualified" or say "purchase" to allow differentiation when sending out content.

How to Tag?

It's a fairly simple process. Nothing technical though it helps if you are familiar with general workflows i.e. step by step process that are triggered automatically when a particular condition is met. Bluntly saying it's like you start when the light turns green and stop when it goes red.

Sign in to your Mailchimp account and under automation pick Customer Journeys. Give it a name and go to the next step to pick a starting point.

This is where you get the "Tag added" option. The approach is simple. Whenever a tag is add i.e. condition met, you can trigger an action such as sending an email. You can further tweak it by selecting a different email based on the tag but will let you discover several other possibilities around that.

Next you select a tag. Note, the list shows existing set of tags that you can use. You can always add your own. Make sure they are something that you meaningful in your world of business.

The last and final part is to apply rules and action. To keep it simple, lets skip the rules and just hit the action of "Send Email".

That's it. Now every time a contact is added or updated with the specific tag an email get sent out. Of course you can control that further by rules. For example, if the contact tags also include say "referral" then you may want to skip the email or may be send a different one.

The tag hack with Linkdra

Now that we figure the simply way to keep your email campaigns on auto pilot more with tags, the attention now shifts to how and how are the tags applied. There are many possible ways including someone perhaps you manually adding the tags but that is time consuming. If you building your list though web form sign up of some kind you can attach tags as well.

What if you don't have enough traffic and need to seek out prospects. This is probably the number of use case for most who are just starting out and need to build the audience.

Enter Linkdra with help from LinkedIn. There is hardly another public data set of professionals more complete than LinkedIn. If you are in the B2B space then you are almost guaranteed to find your prospect on LinkedIn. That's where you turn to Linkdra to search out your prospect and send a warm personalized connect request over LinkedIn. And when you do that you use Linkdra "Requirement" tags feature so that every contact you build goes straight to Mailchimp through the integrated connetor.

No manual tagging. Once applied, keeps working.

Marketing automation is not easy. But then it can be tamed with the righ tools and Linkdra sits right at the top of that lead generation funnel so that the clever automation of Mailchimp can deliver the goods. My typical recommendation is 1 Build your contact on LinkedIn 2 Share some good content to build trust and recall. 3 Follow up with an email through Mailchimp using new subscriber automation. 4 Add trigger linked to tag to follow up and perhaps start a drip campaign.

Getting started take 2 mins with the ready LinkedIn to Mailchimp connector

I come across lots of marketing automation approaches and the everyday competition to stay one step ahead. This new hack is sure to give you that edge. If you need help with your lead pipeline buidling, let's connect.