The Ultimate Marketing

Automation E-Book
HOW TO SAVE 100 MAN-HOURS A MONTH ON MARKETING
(FEATURING ACTIVECAMPAIGN)

WRITTEN BY: JOHNSON LIM ZHUANG SEN

S E N I O R D I G I TA L C O N S U LTA N T | HASHMETA DIGITAL AGENCY
W H AT
IS CRM
AU TO M AT I O N ?
CRM Automations are by far the most common type of Marketing Automation,
and is also commonly referred to as “Email Automation”, “CRM System” or “CRM
Marketing”. It aims to manage and improve customer relations more efficiently
by automating marketing tasks that are considered “routine”, such as:
• Sending weekly newsletters
• Sending appointment reminder emails
• Following up with customers
• Lead scoring to identify “hot” leads
But a good CRM Automation software will take it a step further – by accurately
and automatically capturing customers’ demographics, actions, location,
behaviour, and social data so marketers can design and send personalised
content for specific groups in the contact lists. This essentially allows marketers
to do a better job at customer relationship building with less man-hours.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

This e-book will be especially useful to Marketers who are researching and
evaluating the merits of a CRM automation system for their organization. By
the end of this e-book, you can expect to:
• Learn about the key features of most leading CRM software
• Have a conceptual understanding of how CRM software works
• Be inspired on ways to implement a CRM system for your organization to
improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness
In addition, note that the software and tools mentioned in this e-book are just
some of the possible solutions that you can consider, and that it is possible to
use other similar solutions other than the ones mentioned.

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 A HYPOTHETICAL COMPANY

In this e-book, we will take on the perspective of a company “ToeBox” who is a

click & mortar retailer of shoes in Singapore. It carries a large variety of shoes for all
occasions from many leading brands (e.g. Nike, Adidas, Timberland, Rad Russel)
around the world on its online store that was built using ZenCart (https://www.zen-
cart.com/) more than a decade ago. By looking at the problems ToeBox faces and the
steps that it can take to resolve them with the help of a CRM software, we can better
understand how CRM software works and how you can implement it in your
organisation as well.

Since its founding in the 1990s, ToeBox’s CRM processes have been traditional – using
tools like Microsoft Excel to store customer data and engaging 3rd party companies to
blast out marketing emails to purchased email list – and management has observed a
continuing decline in ROI for its marketing efforts in recent years. The marketing team
are also struggling to keep up with tedious day-to-day marketing operations due to
the manual way that things are done.

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S AV I N G
MAN-HOURS,
O N E F E AT U R E
AT A T I M E
Chris is a newly recruited marketing manager who is given the task to
modernise and transform ToeBox’s marketing team and improve its
marketing effectiveness and efficiency. He decides to start with ToeBox’s CRM
as he knows it is less costly to retain existing customers than to gain new ones.

CONTACT MANAGEMENT

The Current Situation

After talking to retail staff and customers, Chris discovered that customer details
from offline retail purchase was not proactively collected as it was completely
optional and there are no incentives to do so. Customers also usually prefer to
not fill in the pen and paper form as most of them see it as a waste of time, and
that they have received the spammy and irrelevant emails from ToeBox in the
past (e.g. female customers receiving promotional material about Men’s Shoes).
There was also no detail record of what was purchased by the customer. To make
matters worse, the form will then be manually transferred into a Microsoft Excel
document containing the details of all contacts by an intern (who took 1 hour
daily to do this, on average), and this process is prone to typo errors.
In addition, only basic details (e.g. name, email, contact) of customers who
purchased online were recorded, and this was done in a separate spreadsheet
document before being merged with the offline spreadsheet document. Chris
also noticed that it is common to find multiple versions of the same spreadsheet
document circulating around the company due to miscommunication between
the Marketing, Sales & Customer Service teams. This worries Chris, as this can
result in:
• Incomplete/incorrect/duplicated customer details
• Lack of control over who has access to sensitive customer data
• High manpower cost in administering the CRM system

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 Syncing of Customer
& Inventory Data

Deep Data
Integration

WCPOS S ystem Online Purchase

The Solution
To resolve these issues, Chris decided to migrate the online store from ZenCart
to WordPress with WooCommerce (https://woocommerce.com/) for ease of
maintenance, as well as to take advantage of WooCommerce’s many integrations
with other applications (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook Catalog, etc), including the
ActiveCampaign CRM System.

Connect with us to develop your

own Marketing Automation workflow.

Find out more about the other uses of Marketing Automation to

improve the efficacy of your sales and marketing funnels:
• Customer Relationship Management Automation
• Sales Automation
• Website Content Automation
• Social Media Automation

If you liked reading this E-book and want to

take this a step further, feel free to schedule
a Discovery Call with us!

Connect with Us

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Any online purchase will automatically be recorded in a centralized database
within ActiveCampaign via deep data integration (https://www.activecampaign.
com/deep-data/), with no chance of human errors. Some Fields (read more
about Tags and Fields here) that are automatically exported to ActiveCampaign
include:
• Total revenue
• Total number of orders
• Number of products brought
• Individual order data on the dropdown Order # field, with fields such as:
• Product Name
• Product Category
• Product ID
• Order Price
• Order Currency
• Order Shipping Method

All these data can be used as Triggers and If/Else Condition within ActiveCampaign.

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 (Shown above: WCPOS Interface)

(Shown above: NeverBounce’s Dashboard)

For offline purchases, Chris implemented a POS system called WCPOS (https://
wcpos.com/) that synchronises with WooCommerce’s customer & inventory
management systems. Existing customers can be quickly tagged to a purchase
by searching for their email address, while any new customer can provide their
email address and their info will be added to WooCommerce automatically.
To encourage customers to provide their email address, Chris plans to offer 6
months free warranty to all customers that provide their email address upon
checkout. WCPOS also works with many external card readers, barcode scanners,
and receipt printers. However, Chris also knows that inactive contacts and spam
is an issue in the current contact list. Chris runs the existing contact list through
a list cleaning tool like NeverBounce (neverbounce.com) to remove invalid emails
from the list before importing the list to ActiveCampaign.

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 ActiveCampaign Automations

Engagement Tagging Automation - Part 1 Engagement Tagging Automation - Part 2

No Start Trigger Start Triggers: Contact Read

Any Email, Click Any Email Link,
Visited Any Page of Website

Add a Tag (Engaged)

Remove a Tag (Disengaged) Exit Part 1 Automation

Wait 90 Days Enter Part 1 Automation

Add a Tag (Engaged) End This Automation

Remove a Tag (Disengaged)

End This Automation

In addition to that, Chris also wants to make sure that contacts who have
not engaged with ToeBox in the past 90 days are automatically classified as
“disengaged”, and no email will be sent to disengaged contacts to preserve
ToeBox’s Sender Reputation. To achieve that, Chris created a set of automations
in ActiveCampaign that works together
to tag contacts who have not:
• Read any emails;
• Clicked any link in email; or
• Visited ToeBox’s website
In the past 90 days as “disengaged”. Note that when a “disengaged” contact
engages with Toe Box, the timer will reset and they will be retagged as “engaged”
for the next 90 days.
ActiveCampaign Automations
Spam Check Condition

Yes

Contact has “Disengaged” Tag? End This Automation

No

Send Email

End This Automation

For the “Disengaged” tag to be useful, Chris will also incorporate a “spam check”
condition in all the ActiveCampaign automations that send out emails to make
sure that contacts with the “Disengaged” tag will not receive any email as a result.

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ON-BOARDING WORKFLOW

The Current Situation

The second issue Chris noticed are the lack of follow-up emails to new customers
to introduce them to ToeBox. This resulted in a ton of repetitive enquiries from
existing customers about warranties, exchange policies, ToeBox’s online shop,
and other issues. As a result:
• Precious manpower has to be diverted to handle these enquiries (around 20
man-hours per month)
• Lack of information on warranty leading to unhappy customers

WooCommerce x ActiveCampaign
Deep Data Integration

New Customer on WooCommerce

ActiveCampaign Automations
New Customer On-Boarding Email

Contact Customer Status Field

Changed to “Current”

Send On-Boarding Email

Enter This Automation

The Solution
As all new customers will be automatically entered into ActiveCampaign with
the Customer Status field being set to “Current” via ActiveCampaign’s Deep
Data Integration (https://www.activecampaign.com/deep-data/), the solution for
this is to automate the sending of a comprehensive on-boarding email to new
members with an automation like the one shown above. This helps to reduce the
amount of repetitive enquiries that the customer service team has to handle on
a daily basis.

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LEAD NURTURING WORKFLOW

The Current Situation

Chris also noted that ToeBox adopts a “Spray-and-Pray” method
of email marketing, where the same promotional email is sent to
all contacts in the spreadsheet regardless of their characteristics
(e.g. gender, past purchases). This has lead to a drop in
ToeBox’s Sender Score (read more about Sender Score here) and
has affected its email deliverability as well as customer satisfaction.
In addition, 20 man-hours per month are needed to consolidate
the many duplicated lists floating around, and check that the current list of
emails are correct and accurate.

The Solution
Chris’ plan is to implement a personalised lead nurturing automation that will
send bi-weekly, personalised promotional material, as well as useful tips & tricks
relating to fashion and shoes (e.g. How to Take Care of Your Leather Shoes) to
contacts in ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign Automations

Contact Makes a Purchase Contact Makes a Purchase

Product Category Contains Product Category Contains
“Men” “Women”

Tag with Tag with

“Purchased Men Products” “Purchased Women Products”

Contact Makes a Purchase Contact Makes a Purchase

Product Category Contains Product Category Contains
“Formal” “Sport”

Tag with Tag with

“Purchased Formal Products” “Purchased Sport Products”

Recalling that WooCommerce will send contacts’ purchase history to ActiveCampaign

automatically via deep data integration, Chris decided to use their past purchases to
segment the contacts, using the gender type (e.g. men’s shoes vs women’s shoes) as
well as usage type (e.g. Casual, Formal, Sport) of the product purchased

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 ActiveCampaign Automations

New Contact

Wait 7 Days

Send Promo Email with

Conditional Content

Wait 7 Days

Send Article Email with

Conditional Content

Above is a simplified example of how a lead nurturing automation would look like.

Connect with us to develop your

own Marketing Automation workflow.

Find out more about the other uses of Marketing Automation to

improve the efficacy of your sales and marketing funnels:
• Customer Relationship Management Automation
• Sales Automation
• Website Content Automation
• Social Media Automation

If you liked reading this E-book and want to

take this a step further, feel free to schedule
a Discovery Call with us!

Connect with Us

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 Conditional Content Example

Header Image

Appears if Contact tagged with

Men-Centric Header
“Purchased Men Products”

Appears if Contact tagged with

Women-Centric Header
“Purchased Women Products”

Appears if Contact not tagged with

Generic Header
neither, or tagged with both.

Body Text

Appears if Contact tagged with

Men-Centric Body Text
“Purchased Men Products”

Appears if Contact tagged with

Women-Centric Body Text
“Purchased Women Products”

Appears if Contact not tagged with

Generic Body Text
neither, or tagged with both.

CTA Button

Conditional Content allows you to show certain piece of content in your email if
the contact has certain tags or lacks certain tags. Essentially, this allows you to
personalise the content that a contact will see based on his/her characteristics. In
the above example, a customer who purchased Men products previously will see
men-centric header image and body text in the email, likewise if the customer
purchased Women products.

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POST-PURCHASE WORKFLOW

The Current Situation

To gauge customer satisfaction level,
ToeBox regularly follows-up with
random customers using in-store
surveys. Retail staff have to be trained
and around 30 man-hours per month
has to be allocated for this task. This is
problematic as it can result in:
• Lost opportunities for service
recovery (e.g. customers who had
a bad experience have taken it
directly to social media instead of
writing in to ToeBox)
• Difficulties for management
to identify opportunities for
improvements
• Inability for management to
accurately gauge customer
satisfaction level

ActiveCampaign Automation

Contact Makes a Purchase Contact Completes Feedback Form

Wait 3 Days Negative Feedback?

Yes

Send Email with Feedback Form Alert Customer Service Team No

Send Email with Coupon Code

The Solution
To resolve this, Chris can set-up an automation that will send out an email
requesting for feedback within 3 days from any purchase. To encourage
participation, Chris can also send a unique coupon code to customers who have
completed the feedback form. If negative feedback is detected (e.g. based on
scores of the feedback form), the Customer Service Team can be alerted for
follow-up.

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RE-ENGAGEMENT WORKFLOW

The Current Situation

Currently, ToeBox does not have any method set in place to track customer’s
past purchases, and hence no way to re-engage inactive customers.

ActiveCampaign Automations

Contact Makes a Purchase Current Date is 180 Days after

Contact’s “Last Purchase Date”

Update Contact Field

“Last Purchase Date” Send Reminder Email
to [Current Time] to Repurchase

End This Automation End This Automation

The Solution
Chris implemented a re-engagement automation by setting a customer’s Last
Purchase Date as a field using the first automation. He can then use this field to
trigger a reminder email if the current date is 180 days after the contact’s Last
Purchase Date.

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WIN-BACK WORKFLOW

The Current Situation

Chris also noticed that there are a large number of customers who have
abandoned their online cart, and there was no follow-up on these customers in
any way. This can lead to lost opportunities to close customers who are ready to
buy.

ActiveCampaign Automations

Contact Abandons a Cart

Wait for 1 Day

Did Contact Recover Cart? Send Abandoned Cart Reminder

No
Yes

End This Automation

The Solution
Thanks to ActiveCampaign’s deep data integration with WooCommerce, it is
possible to trigger an automation when a customer abandons a cart. As shown
above, the automation can send an email to remind the customer about the
abandoned cart (and perhaps includes a nifty discount code) if the cart is not
recovered within 1 day.

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P R OJ E C T
SUMMARY

Above is a summary of the amount of man-hours Chris saved by adopting

CRM automation. However, it is noted that certain workflows, such as the
“Re-engagement” and “Win-Back” workflows, are not possible without CRM
automation.

The benefits of adopting CRM automation does not stop at the number of man-
hours saved. ToeBox’s customers are happier now due to:
• More relevant and personalised emails from ToeBox.
• Faster service recovery thanks to the Post-Purchase workflow.

The management can also expect to see increased revenue due to:
• Attractive promo codes from the Re-Engagement workflow prompting
inactive customers to make new purchases
• Win-Back workflow reducing the number of abandoned carts on ToeBox’s
online store.

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Connect with us to develop your
own Marketing Automation workflow.

Find out more about the other uses of Marketing Automation to

improve the efficacy of your sales and marketing funnels:
• Customer Relationship Management Automation
• Sales Automation
• Website Content Automation
• Social Media Automation

If you liked reading this E-book and want to

take this a step further, feel free to schedule
a Discovery Call with us!

Connect with Us

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