Lesson 1: The foundations of SalesAutopilot and its major building blocks

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Overview

Email marketing and marketing automation software operate on principles that make them different from personal mailing software (Outlook, Gmail, etc.). Furthermore, SalesAutopilot is significantly different from most email marketing, marketing automation and CRM software. In order to reach the best results with SalesAutopilot, it is vital to have a firm understanding of its basic principles.

THE 4+2 BUILDING BLOCKS OF SALESAUTOPILOT

1. Lists

With SalesAutopilot, you can create different types of lists, each serving a different purpose. A few examples: newsletter subscribers, potential clients, leads, orders, affiliates, etc.

You can create an unlimited number of lists, and you can store unlimited amounts of data in them. You can edit your lists at any time. The lists are independent of each other, but if needed, you can connect them in different ways. We will look at these later.

You can learn more about lists here: Managing Lists

2. Signup forms and update forms

When you embed a signup form into your webpage, it will collect subscribers right into the SalesAutopilot list it belongs to. Creating a signup form will only take a couple of minutes with the software's easy-to-use wizard. Then, you will be able to easily embed it into your webpage with a simple copy-paste method.

You can custom-tailor your forms to match your company's image perfectly.

Another fascinating feature of SalesAutopilot is that it allows you to integrate it with a wide variety of marketing software, such as LeadPages, OptiMonk, OptimizePress, Clickfunnels, Zapier, just to name a few. You can even publish your SalesAutopilot generated forms to your Facebook page.

Update forms have several purposes: you can have an update form link in all of your emails, allowing subscribers to update their data, and you can create update forms to conduct surveys or questionnaires. For example, you can create customer satisfaction surveys, or market research surveys using update forms.

Update forms have a special attribute: they each have a special code. If you paste this code into an email, then every subscriber will see a unique, personalized link. If a subscriber clicks on this link, the link will open their personal form. Thus, there is no need for further identification.

To access the update form links of an individual subscriber, go to the data sheet of the subscriber. Using the special features of update forms mentioned above you can also use SalesAutopilot for automating your non-marketing company processes. For example, you can use update forms to administer the application process of potential employees. When they meet certain criteria, you could use an update form to send them an email informing them that your HR assistant will contact them in two days. Another way to make the most of update forms could be to administer when packages leave your warehouse and are on their way to the customer. Additionally, this update form could trigger the sending of an email that notifies the customer of their order being shipped.

Important: a form always belongs to a specific list, and only to that list. However, you can create as many forms for a list as you wish.

You can read more about forms here: Managing forms

3. Communications

Communications refer to the message that will be delivered to your subscribers. This can be in the form of HTML emails, SMS, or DM letters / prints (envelopes, postcards, etc.). This is one of the major differences between SalesAutopilot and other marketing software. Other software think in terms of campaigns, which include the delivered content, the list of subscribers, and the time of delivery. However, SalesAutopilot treats different forms of communication separately, thus allowing you to reach your subscribers in many different ways.

You can read more about emails here: Create and send emails

4. Delivery schedules (mailings)

You can assign delivery schedules to your communications. With these delivery schedules, you can determine which list, and which segment(s) of the list will receive a given communication, when they will receive it, and who they will see as the sender of the communication. This applies to all of the available types of communication, though their may be slight differences due to the nature of the form of communication.

The diversity of delivery schedules in SalesAutopilot guarantees that you can build a wide variety of marketing systems, even fully automated ones.

Here is a list of the available delivery schedules:

• Absolute: sent at a specific time
• Relative:
  • sent a specific number of days before or after an event at a certain time of day
  • sent a specific time (hour:minute) before or after a certain event
• Email at subscription
• Email at double opt-in subscription
• Unsubscribe email
• Data update email
• Blog notification (RSS based)
• Name day (or some time before/after it)
• Birthday (or some time before/after it)
• Anniversary of any event (or some time before/after it)

You can read more about delivery schedules here: Creating delivery schedules

5. Actions

Actions play a significant role in building complex email marketing systems. They allow you to define what other events should take place whenever there is a subscription, data update (whether by the subscriber or by an external system), an email opened, or someone clicks through from an email. Below is the list of the different types of actions.

• Subscribe to another list
• Unsubscribe from another list
• Update data in any list (e.g. add a date, change a status, increase a counter, etc.)
• Communicate with any other external system (e.g. record a new customer in your SAP system)
• Create a CRM task
• Create a Helpdesk Ticket

These actions can trigger additional processes, create new branches in processes, or stop processes. Due to the wide plethora of possibilities offered by SalesAutopilot's actions, you can pretty much design and operate any sales and marketing system and communication based process within your company.

You can read more about actions here: Actions, the heart of complex marketing systems

6. Landing pages

The concept of landing pages in SalesAutopilot is quite different from how landing pages are commonly thought of in online marketing.

A SalesAutopilot landing page is a page that you can create from a built-in or personal template, you can easily edit at any time, and you don't need storage for it, because it's hosted by SalesAutopilot. However, your landing page can be displayed with your own domain or subdomain name.

The three types of landing pages:

• Normal landing page. In SalesAutopilot, even the normal landing pages are special. They have a public version with a public URL (on one of your own domains or subdomains, including the home page of your domain or subdomain), and a personalized version that your recipients can access through a private link you can add to your emails with SalesAutopilot's merge tags feature.
• Landing page with a deadline. This type of landing has a pre-deadline and a post-deadline version. The deadline – if you place the link of the landing page in an email – could be any number of days before or after a date related to the subscriber. E.g. 5 days after subscription at 2:20 pm. This is an excellent tool for your limited time offers and product launching campaigns.
• Password protected landing page. You can make the closed version of a landing page available to a group of subscribers who are in a certain segment. Thereby, you can build closed membership systems for your customers and subscribers without any programming.

It is important to emphasize that not only will your email marketing become more effective when you use actions, update forms, and landing pages, but you will be able to automate most, if not all, of your communication based business processes.

Should you have any questions, don't hesitate to drop us a message.