If you feel like you're spending way too much time manually doing things in your
marketing, I think you'll like today's episode. We're diving into
marketing automations. You know, the ones that save you time so that you
can work on those big, beautiful, juicy projects that light you
up instead of fiddling around with, I don't know, an Instagram
reel. I love marketing automations as well because they help
me stay balanced and present even in those moments where
I literally cannot because I'm, you know, holding my 3 month old baby
who just loves to be held by mama and mama alone. We're covering
all of that in this episode and more. Let's dive into it.
You're listening to the Mindful Marketing Podcast. I'm Andrea
Jones. I've recorded over 300 podcast episodes. Yeah.
It's a lot of podcast episodes, and I've tried a lot of different virtual
recording studios. But my favorite has been
Riverside. Riverside makes their virtual recording studio look
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don't have to hunt and search for that perfect clip. So if you
wanna try this out for yourself, click the link that
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in the show notes. Okay? Click that link. Use the 15%
off coupon code. It's Drea, DREA, and try
Riverside for yourself. Thank you, Riverside.
Alright. So marketing automations. These are so
essential for your business and for business owners because they
really just make your life so much easier. In fact, this
entire month of July 2024, we're diving
all the way deep into marketing automations, and I'm kicking us off with a
little bit of background around marketing automations and specifically the
ones that I love to use for myself and for my clients every single
day. I distinctly remember the first time
I set up Dubsado in my business as 1 of my back end
automations. So it's, a
tool that helps, you know, invoicing and proposals and,
you know, it's like a sales CRM tool for business. And I remember
setting it up and going, this is a game changer because I was
spending so much time manually sending out all these things and they had, like,
this automated sequence where, you know, a client can click
and sign the proposal, sign the contract, and
pay all in the same section, basically. And it was
at that moment that I was literally obsessed, and I became obsessed with marketing
automations. And I use them a lot in my business. But let's start
with just a basic definition. What is a
marketing automation? Well, it's a tool that can help
you save time in your business. And I wanna
emphasize that it is a tool. There are so many different
ways that you can use marketing automations, but, essentially,
it is something that's supposed to help you. K? So if you feel like,
the setup of it is just gonna take way too much time, that may not
be
of it is just gonna take way too much time, that may not
be actually beneficial to you in this moment. K? And a lot of
times with automations, you're automating things that you've been doing
manually. So if you haven't been doing anything manually, it may
be harder for you to, like,
scheduling and you you've never posted to social media
before. If you just log into a scheduling tool and it's like, oh, you wanna
post Instagram, is it a carousel post or a reel? If you've never
posted to Instagram before manually, you're gonna be scratching your head
going, what what is the difference? Why do I even need to
choose between these 2 options? And so there is a benefit
to understanding how things work manually first, then
automating them. And the automation, again, should really save you time, but it
also should increase your efficiency. So because you're automating in
this area over here, you're going to be able to do something better in that
area over there. It also improves the customer experience,
your your community's experience. So, for example,
I mentioned at the top of this episode, automation has saved my butt
this year because my little baby, she's sweet and she just
loves to cuddle is how I'm framing it, because she wants to be
held constantly, which is not always a bad thing, but it
also makes working challenging sometimes. So I'm just glad
that I can work ahead a little bit and schedule my emails and my social
posts to go out, at, you know, appropriate times
and not at 2 in the morning while, you know, we're waking up from a
little baby slumber. So automations could really help with
the community experience, especially when you have,
moments where you need to be present and you physically can't.
I do want to for us to remain mindful though
about automations. I personally
believe that a mindful approach to marketing automations,
it's that it helps me breathe creativity into my work.
So I'm able to be creative when I am creative. And when I'm not creative,
I rely on my automations. Okay? So it helps me be
more creative. So again, for example, I have a 3 month
old. She it takes a lot of time and energy
to have a 3 month old. And so on the nights where, you
know, she's not sleeping very well, I wake up a
lot with her the next day. If I have to record videos, sometimes
I can't. And then recently, she's been sleeping through the night. So now I
have more energy to record videos. I'm recording them in a big batch and then
scheduling them to go out, you know, a couple weeks from now
so that, I have content ready to go. So that's how I use
automations, mindfully in my business
so that it frees up time. Now there are kind of,
2 types of marketing automations I wanna talk about. The simple
basic automation and then something that's for my advanced marketers out
there. So let's just start with basic automations.
Email marketing is the biggest area where I see automations coming
into play for a lot of business owners. Someone signs up to your
email list, you aren't manually
emailing them personally every time you have a new
offer or a new discount or something you wanna share.
Instead, they're added to a list of people
and they automatically get your updates when you send them. Now, the
best automation though is that welcome sequence. The
very first email they get to you, that very first
email, typically for a lot of businesses has the highest open
rates. So what that means is more people will
open that email than any other emails that you send. So
it's very important that that's automated. You're top of mind.
They just put their email in. Then what happens? What happens
next? That what happens next question, if you can answer that with an
automation, it's even more powerful because they're getting
a automated email in their inbox from you. You
didn't have to, you know, see their email and paste, copy, paste somewhere else, automated
to you. And it's something that can help them
understand you, your perspective, your business at a time when you're they're thinking
about you. So welcome emails, very helpful. You can
also do an email series as well depending on your business
type. So this will be, you know, usually 5 to 7
different emails about your business, your
offer, you know, educating them on your
perspective, those sorts of things. Another good
type of email to have, especially for my e commerce businesses, are abandoned
cart emails. So abandoned cart emails is a great
automation for people who, like, go to your website. They, you know,
put stuff in their cart. I'm a I'm a cart shopper.
I left a window shop online. I put stuff in my cart, and then I
go home. If I feel like buying this tomorrow,
then maybe I'll buy it tomorrow. Because, you know, sometimes we gotta give ourselves
some space. And most of the time, the answer is no. But what I do
love about abandoned cart emails is it's a great reminder
for me as a consumer that I put something in my cart. I
did this recently with Crocs. I posted on threads.
I feel like I'm about to buy some Crocs. I know, I know. I feel
like I'm trying to talk to my fashion nieces out there who wanna talk
me out of buying Crocs. But I tried on my mom's Crocs, and
they're so comfortable. I'm considering it. And I will
be 35 this year, so I feel like I'm at the point of where I've
just stopped caring. I know I shouldn't be.
It's just for around the house. I mean, it's just for daycare runs. I mean,
I'm just going to Walmart with it. I feel like I'm gonna end up wearing
them everywhere. However, I put the Crocs in my cart,
and then I said, I'm gonna think about this. And then the next day actually,
it was within an hour. Crocs emailed me and said, hey.
You put this in your cart. Maybe you forgot. Here's 15% off.
K? I didn't use it, but I thought it was brilliant to get that
email. Because as a consumer, I was like, oh, they're really, you know,
considering me and they're showing up for me, and
I really appreciate that. But I'm not gonna buy them now, but I really appreciated
the email. And then finally, with email marketing, we've got just
your regular email distribution, your email marketing distribution, whether
that's a newsletter that you send out regularly, sales and updates that
you send out regularly. You don't wanna have to, like, BCC
everyone on an email. Gmail using an email marketing tool can be helpful for
that. Okay. 2nd basic email marketing automation is
social media scheduling. It's my favorite automated
way to streamline your business. It helps
you stay really consistent. And now a lot of
these social media tools have native scheduling, so you don't need
a 3rd party tool. Prior previously, you would
need something like a Hootsuite or a buffer or later
to schedule your posts, now you can go to
Instagram, you can go to LinkedIn, and you can schedule
your post right there in the app or on desktop. Okay?
So it'd be very helpful for those moments where you're not
able to be online to preschedule your posts and state
maintain that consistency. Last basic automation here is
a CRM tool. This falls more into the sales
side of marketing. However, once you
get a lead that comes in, you definitely wanna nurture them. And I
do think of this differently than email marketing, and usually CRMs are
for service based businesses. That's how I think of them.
So, my ConvertKit, for instance, is
for, you know, my products and,
a lot of my memberships and things like that. And then
my CRM, right now, I'm using Moxie, but I
was on Dubsado before, is for
my services. So, you know, I can send automated
reminders, follow ups. I can book calls. There's personalization there.
I can see my sales flow. It'll be very
helpful automation for, for a basic automation.
Alright. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I wanna talk about
some more advanced automations plus some of my favorite ones when we get back.
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And we're back. So let's talk advanced automations. My
favorite 1 right now is AI powered chatbots. This is
an advanced tactic though. Okay? So buyer beware. But I
love using AI powered chatbots to help with marketing
conversations. It really helps again streamline things and
make it easier for the person on the other side of the screen. That's always
my goal. And so I've been playing around with ManyChat. I did post
a video to my YouTube about this. I've done some training in the Savvy Social
School about this as well. ManyChat is a,
AI powered chatbot that helps you with your
marketing. So how it works is someone will, on Instagram, type a
keyword. So for instance, if I say, say the word
launch, I'll send you my launch plan. And someone types in
launch, then ManyChat gets to work. It is based
on what I give it. So it'll respond to that comment. If they comment
the launch, I've got ManyChat saying, got it. I'll send it in your direct
message. Then they immediately get a direct message that says, here's the link.
Why this is helpful is that on Instagram, it can be
a lot of steps to click the link in the bio. K? So I
don't know if you've tried this recently, but to click the link in the
bio, you are, you know, tapping on the name, then you're
looking at the bio, tapping on the link at the bio. There's multiple links now
in the bio, so they gotta pick the link. If you've got a landing page,
now they're scrolling that page trying to figure out, out, okay, I need the launch
plan, then they're clicking the launch plan. Now they're on the launch plan. That's, like,
4 or 5 steps that they're going through before they even get to what they
wanted. And even at that point, sometimes for me, at least in
this scenario, it's a freebie. So I want their email address and
now they gotta type in their email address. Then the automation will send
them. Is this your email address? Yes, confirm. Then they get the launch plan.
It's a lot of steps. With ManyChat, what you can do
is cut down on a lot of those steps and you can stay top of
mind because you're now in their DM. So they have the link in their direct
message. And with ManyChat as well, you can simply just ask for their
email address there. It hooks up with ConvertKit. So you
ask their email address, they type it in, you can send them the launch plan
right there, and they're in your ConvertKit. So it's it cuts down on the steps,
and it saves it right in their direct message. So I love AI powered
chatbots. There's a lot of them too. You may see the on-site
chatbots that a lot of people have now. Think like an intercom
or I think Drift does this as well where, you know, you go to someone's
website and their little robot pops up. It's like, ask me a question. I can
help you with an answer. That's marketing. Right? And that's a marketing,
automation. Another automations that I
love are, more complex
things in, email marketing tools. So
when I first started email marketing, I was a Mailchimp girly. I
still love Mailchimp. If you're starting out today and you just
have 1 group of people that you're gonna be emailing about
1 product, I highly recommend Mailchimp.
It's really easy. I think their emails are pretty. I they have
they used to have a free plan that was very, very, affordable.
I still think they have it. So I I recommend Mailchimp for a lot of
people getting started because you don't have to be super techie to get started.
However, at a certain point in business, when you start adding in multiple
products or if you're starting to speak to different kinds of people,
you may need different behavioral triggers in your emails, and
that's where more advanced tools come in. So that's why I'm on ConvertKit.
Because I can do interesting things with tagging. I can do
interesting things with funnels. So if someone comes in through my Instagram mindset guide, for
instance, you're getting an offer to my Instagram Instagram mindset guide, for instance, you're getting
an offer to my Instagram bundle that no 1
else gets to see. Right? Only the people going through that specific
funnel. And now I know forever that you came in through that funnel. So if
you buy something in the future, I can kind of see where you came in
at. K? So that's why I love advanced automations. It really
helps inform some of the things that I do in my marketing.
The next advanced marketing automation that I use is
Zapier or Zapier, I've been told
it's called. I've been saying Zapier for years. It may be Zapier
because, yeah, it's called a Zap. Okay.
It helps connect a lot of your marketing things
together. It's like a, linking up tool, if you
will. So for example, 1 of the things that I use in my marketing is
a free private podcast. If you are a social
media manager or a marketer, I've got a free private podcast called Raise
Your Rates, but you gotta give me your email address to get it. So what
happens is when you give your email address, I wanna send you that private
podcast. I do send the link through an email, but I also
wanna give you direct access to it. And I use Zapier to have those
2 tools talk together, ConvertKit and Hello Audio,
which is my private podcast tool. So I use Zapier
Zapier to have those tools talk to each other so that,
Hello Audio knows you gave me my email address so you can have the direct
access to that private podcast. There's so many different ways you can
use Zapier, Zapier. I'm gonna keep saying both ways as
well because of, all of the integrations. I've
looked at other, competitors and most of
them are great as well. However,
Zapier still has the most connection, so I'm sticking with them
even though some of the other tools may be a little bit cheaper. But it
helps automate some of my marketing things so that, you know, I don't have
to be the 1 pressing the button. The last advanced
marketing automation tool that I wanna talk about is social listening.
This is specifically when it comes to social media. So for
example, a lot of bigger brands will use this when
people just mention the brand name, when it's not tagged
at all. Okay? So you're not tagging them. You're just mentioning the brand
name. I saw this recently on threads with, Wendy's.
So Wendy's, yeah, the the fast food restaurant is on
threads. It's they're hysterical as always. They brought that energy that they used to have
on old school Twitter over to threads, which I love. I love it for
them. And somebody mentioned
Wendy's, but did not tag them. K?
So there's someone out there monitoring for mentions that
aren't tagged. Just the word Wendy's was used.
There are social listening tools that will help you collect
those mentions. So even if someone's not tagging you, you can
still see the overall sentiment and how people feel about your brand.
Again, this is mostly for larger companies and bigger brands,
but we use this with the e commerce company that I worked with a few
years ago where people would mention the brand without
necessarily tagging them. And we use Brandwatch for this.
And so this is really helpful when people talk
about the brand casually, especially if they love it. We wanna
thank them for that. But also to give overall sentiment, and a lot of
these, like, Brandwatch do a sentiment analysis. Hootsuite does this as well.
I believe Sprout Social does this as well where, you can
get an overall sentiment analysis of your mentions.
So are people talking about you? Yes. Great. Is it
good? Is it neutral? Is it bad? K. So we want to know that
information. So it's definitely an advanced tactic. But this way, you don't have to
manually search for you know, go to the thread search bar and type in
Wendy's. You can have this, collected and then
they use their AI tools to measure sentiment so that you can kind of
get a sense of, do people love us or are they hating us right
now? It'd be very helpful too to see spikes in this. If there's, you
know, some conversation happening online, you definitely
wanna know about it before it's too late. Alright. So I kinda
talked about some of the tools I like throughout, but I wanna wrap up with
an overview of some of my favorite automation tools and why I love
them. I talked about Manichat. I know
that there's a little bit of a discussion about Manichat
and common DMs, comment funnels on Instagram,
but I love them. Now what I will say is as a
person who uses the app, sometimes I don't comment. Especially if
it's, like, low key someone who does the same thing as me and I'm just
creeping on them, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna leave a comment. I don't want
people to see that I'm commenting on your post. But I will go click the
link in the bio if I wanna be nosy. This is just me being nosy.
K? So I do think there's some of that where people don't wanna feel like
they're forced to comment. And so have the link in the bio
as well. Let them be curious and do a few more steps. That's fine
too. But for the most part, I love the comment DM because it sends it
to you know, I just comment, sends me info in my DMs. I'm here for
it. I I love it all day every day. 2nd favorite,
these aren't in any order, by the way, but my second 1 on the list
is ConvertKit. I am a ConvertKit stan. I
love them. Again, I moved from Mailchimp, and I have never looked
back. I have a few clients on ActiveCampaign as well.
I'm not a fan of ActiveCampaign. I just find it so clunky to use. I
love ConvertKit. I love their automations. They're going through a rebrand right
now. They're gonna be called Kit going forward, and they're adding in more features. I'm
excited for them. I love them as company.
Zapier. Zapier. I love that 1. I have tried
other tools. I even tried to pay less for Zapier.
Xavier, and I I just keep
coming back to it. It's, not the most fun thing
to set up, but I love it when it works, that it just helps connect
everything. I don't have to worry about it. I'm also loving circle
automations right now. So I have a community in
Circle only for my paying clients and customers. You can buy any product from me,
even my lowest $1.9, and you'll get added into my
clients and customers only community. I do also have all my
memberships in there as well. And so with Circle Automations, I
can send things to my clients, to customers, and continue marketing to
my most loyal group of people, which I love. I gotta talk
about my social media scheduling tool that I'm using right now. It's Metricool.
I'm loving it. You know, I try so many different tools, and
Metricool is 1 that I've actually stuck with for the past. We've been using it
for almost a year now in my agency. And
what I like about it is our reporting. I'm a huge reporting person. I
don't care if the tool schedules, every tool schedules. Like, I can
get a scheduling tool anywhere. What I struggle with with some of these
scheduling tools is they don't have great reporting. And sometimes
the reports are inaccurate. I don't know how they set them up. And sometimes the
reports are just ugly and hard to read. And I need something where I can
go in and go, oh, look, client. Here's the results that we
got for you. Let's take a screenshot of this. Right? So I need it to
be useful to me. And MetraCool is that, and I love that for them.
So MetraCool, great automation for scheduling, yes, but also
love the automated, reporting. It makes my job so much easier
when I can just see everything in 1 place. I'm also
loving Riverside AI. Okay. So Riverside obviously
sponsors this show. They're at the top of every episode now.
But 1 of the things that they added recently was a lot of AI
tools. Now some of them are creepy. Like, I can upload a script, and because
I've recorded so many podcast episodes with them, I can it'll
read it in my voice. And, actually, I'll play a
little clip right now so you can you can hear what it sounds like.
Welcome to the Mindful Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Andrea
Jones. I'm also the host of the upcoming social media day summit
live happening on Sunday, June 30th. I'm so excited to announce
that the social media day summit goodie bag is now available.
Packed with incredible discounts and free goodies from our amazing partners,
this goodie bag is our special thank you for joining us at the summit. I'm
geeked to have you with us and can't wait to see the great things you'll
accomplish with these resources.
Yeah. It's creepy, and I would not say it
that way. And it's so flat sounding. Like, it's
not exciting when in places where it should be.
But there you go. They have their AI tool. But what's interesting about the AI
tool as well is that in post, so in editing, if I
say the wrong thing, which knowing me, I probably will say the wrong thing.
I can change 1 word, and it will change it not
just in the audio, but in the video. Cree be. But there you
go. Riverside is that's an automation that can be
very, very helpful. And, I don't know if I'll have AI
Andrea ever do a podcast episode.
I'm not about that life. What what's even the point? Right? But, yeah, there
you go. Riverside has a bunch of automations that really help. I've started using it
for everything too. Just like they they they have editing very much like Descript
where you can edit the text. I love it. You can
automatically remove all of the, like, pauses. You can remove
umms and ahs if you want, which I like to leave those in because I
think they add flavor and personality personally. But it's an
automation that can really help depending on, you know, what kind of help you need.
So I really like that 1 too. I'll leave you with this as we
wrap up. To keep things mindful and to
keep a focus on, like, thoughtfulness, I do wanna
remind you that as much as I love automations, there's a
balance to being automated and also including personal
touch. Like, I don't want automations to feel like a
robot. So when I have an automated email in my email
sequence, you know, that goes out, I still want the
overall feeling to be, oh, this still came from Andrea. It's just
it's automated. Right? So adding in the personal touch.
I want them to feel genuine and authentic. Like I like I wrote
it or like I I said it, but doesn't
necessarily need to be,
yeah. It just it really helps save me time, but also, you know, there's a
human over here kind of setting up the automations. Also,
with these automations, make sure you check them regularly. It happens all
the time. Something happens in the universe and suddenly they break,
and this happens with Zapier all the time. You gotta go
check it, make sure it's working. They'll send you an email to be like, hey.
This isn't working anymore. You gotta go fix it. You can go fix it. This
happens a lot with social media scheduling tools. The accounts get disconnected all the time.
You gotta reconnect them, such as life. Right now, thankfully, the
robots still need us to run. So, we still gotta, you know, poke and prod
them to keep them going, but there that's important thing to note. And then
lastly, you know, I don't want us to be overly
automated. In my humble opinion,
automations are to help us connect more on a human level
with our lives and with the people in our communities. They're they're here to assist
us, not to replace humankind. Right? Not not to replace
all elements of human interaction. And there is such a thing as
overly automated. If everything you do is automated,
especially as a personal brand or especially as a service,
it can feel a little,
it can feel disconnected. So for example, when I call with a
customer service support line and I need help, I wait
until 0 to speak to a person. Like, I'm not
gonna try to talk to that automated voice. It's just not for me.
Right? It it never understands me, first of all. I think I talk with a
weird accent or something. It just never understands me.
Alexa never understands me either, neither does Siri. So I don't know what that says
about me, except when I'm not talking to it, and then
suddenly, it's like, hello. Like, okay. So when I'm calling for
customer service help, I wanna talk to the human.
I I love the automations. That's great. Give me the human, please. I can explain
my situation. So there, there are certain moments where automation
are always helpful and if there is an option to talk to a human, I'm
choosing it. So think about that in your own brand as well.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Mindful Marketing Podcast.
Make sure you subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify. It helps us keep us in the top 100 marketing
podcasts, and that's because of you, dear listener. Coming up
next week, we're continuing this conversation all about marketing automations with
Lucy Reyes. I'll see you then. Bye for now.