Harness the power of email marketing and automation

Rachel Craber Marketing Strategist specializing in Lead Generation and Content Marketing.

opinion: Last year my Facebook Ads account was closed.

One of my client’s accounts was hacked. When I jumped in to save her account, Facebook also froze our ad account.

It took me four months to regain access to my account and hers. During that time, I didn’t know that many other small businesses I’ve seen had the same problem.

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Losing access to Facebook ads can be a huge problem for some small businesses. Losing access to your Instagram account or any of our social media accounts can disrupt the flow of leads and sales you rely on.

In some cases, like Dr. Waseem Alzaher, you don’t even have the option of using ads to promote your business on Facebook.

Alzaher founded The Cannabis Clinic in 2018 to provide people with natural plant-based therapeutic solutions for mild to severe medical conditions.

Although this product is prescription only and must be fully regulated and prescribed by a qualified registered physician, it is not a legally approved drug and therefore is not permitted to be advertised. Is not …

“Medical cannabis products are a minefield of the mind because they are unlicensed pharmaceuticals and have not been proven to help any specific condition. Therefore, we cannot promote them.

“I mean, on TV, you might see paracetamol advertised as approved for pain. Medicinal cannabinoids like THC and CBD oil aren’t,” explains Alzaher.

Alzaher has to walk a fine line between what can and can’t be said online.

“We work within the laws provided by Medsafe. As a medical clinic, we have requirements from the Medical Council about what we can and cannot say in terms of messaging and marketing.

“Add to that, there are digital platforms that have their own cannabis policies and what they can and can’t say.”

This means no meta (Facebook and Instagram ads) and no Google AdWords.

I asked Alzaher to speak on my Map IT Marketing podcast. This is partly because he likes interesting businesses, but the inability to use Meta and Google ads has forced him to divert his marketing energies and focus on his marketing, emails, and getting too deep into his automation. Because we were able to .

Even if you can use Meta or Google Ads, it’s worth considering how email and marketing automation might impact your business.

I have been fortunate enough to work with many related health businesses that have limited marketing messages that they can use. Email marketing can be a powerful option.

In some businesses like mine, the range of what we can and can’t say is so broad that the risk of getting kicked out of Meta is low. Increase your sales and leads with marketing automation.

I was lucky enough to work with Alzaher as an ActiveCampaign partner and bring his ideas to life, so as an agency I was at the forefront of Alzaher’s creative process. (When I say, I mean my husband Rod, because leading me to complex automation is a recipe for disaster. You need a certain kind of brain, but I have it. Is not).

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform. Some of what Alzaher did is extend many other platforms, but most of the options suggested at the end of this column can be done with most automation platforms for small businesses.

Alzaher initially invested time, energy and budget into building SEO (search engine optimization). While this is still part of his strategy, his content on his website is problematic for Google and his business is considered a restricted industry, so his content will be downgraded. had.

“We rely entirely on search engine marketing. Algorithm updates have been punished several times.

“We’ve learned that if you rely on something external, you risk getting hit from below. We’ve had very difficult days and weeks where things fluctuate and we wanted something that gave us more control.” he explains.

Entry into marketing automation also had issues with limitations. Initially, the content was flagged as “drug use” and the marketing he started with his automation account was closed.

“We got kicked out of the email platform we were using overnight. They banned us because we unintentionally violated their terms of service. ”

We asked Alzaher to analyze his thought process on how he decided what problems marketing automation needed to solve. How can we make the process of getting there simpler and more effective?”

Part of that is putting yourself in people’s shoes at each stage of the customer journey, first coming to your website and then figuring out how to make the process as simple and easy to follow as possible.

“That’s where the inspiration comes from. It’s like, wow, you know, I think we have something great. I think I’m doing something positive, how can I do more of it?” he reflects.

There are two key stages in the customer journey. Alzaher spends a lot of time improving. These are the pre-conversion stages before someone books an appointment and, depending on the outcome of that appointment, the stages after this.

Start by asking, “Will this help my clients improve their quality of life?” Alzaher’s marketing automation and other marketing decisions will help Alzaher move away from making another sale or making more money to make decisions towards customer care and relationship building. increase. .

This is consistent with his values ​​as a doctor and as an ethical entrepreneur.

Customers have internet access, so using a platform with email and text marketing automation was essential. At the heart of every choice was the desire to better serve prospective, current and past customers.

“We try to use methods and means of communicating with people who are our clients or who have expressed an interest in our work. doing.”

This combination is driving more people to take action. This is aided by the fact that their problem is literally solving the pain point, so the text message is received favorably.

“Using text messages significantly improves open rates and reduces response time. Generally speaking, people carry their mobile phones with them all the time. There is an incentive to open up.”

Instead of creating generic emails sent to his mailing list, Alzaher creates personalized emails and emails that look different to others, depending on needs, communication styles, prescription requirements, and engagement. I asked for (and helped create) a text communication journey. on your website, marketing materials, etc.

The goal of marketing automation is to enable each person to communicate personally and on time as needed.

Over the last year, we’ve also seen an increase in using marketing automation platforms to collect data and improve our marketing content. Some of the content created did not initially resonate with the ideal audience of cannabis clinics. They also realized the benefits of using outsourcing to help automate their marketing.

“It was important to have the ability to recognize your own lack of knowledge. I didn’t.”

Getting support will give you time to check what worked. “Once the system is in place, it’s important to understand what’s not working and what’s working, and that’s where the data comes from.”

By setting up reporting dashboards, he and his team can get a clear picture of how people are responding to their emails, giving them more flexibility to serve their cannabis clinic’s client base. You can now make clear decisions. He explains: Maybe that’s my medical side. ”

The next 12 months will be more focused on internal communications, as much of the automation is set up around the client. The same automation platform will be used to improve communication, remind team members of his tasks, and keep his members informed of what is happening in the growing national organization and staff across New Zealand. to

“As we expand our influence and help more people, we realize that people within our internal system are struggling. And that needs to change.”

If you want to invest more time in email this year and move away from monthly or bi-weekly bulletins, here are some easy starting points.

1. Spend time thinking about how you want your customers to experience. Consider what this might look like at each stage of your journey.

2. Think about how you group (or segment) your current mailing list. That way you can talk to a smaller group of people and make it more personalized.

3. Take the time to consider how to create content and support it with a series of emails to help people who may not be ready to work with you yet. (This is called lead generation).

4. If you’re an e-commerce business, you can use purchases to help your segments work. Email marketing can help increase your ecommerce business revenue by 30%.

5. Basic automation, like a series of short welcome emails for new clients and a series of post-work tasks to add more support, can help keep clients engaged.

The key is to take the time to think about email marketing and automation as something that helps your community, not just tasks that need to be completed or sales generated.

This mindset shift will help you create a sticky email marketing web that will help you grow, retain, and re-engage those who have chosen to trust you enough with your email address.

Alzaher adds that it’s very important to think about whether your content will be read by people.

“If you don’t want to read through your social media posts or read all your emails, you may need to change things up a bit.”