Marketing Module Quick Start
You’re almost ready to start communicating with current and prospective clients in an entirely new way! If you want to jump in with Autoflow’s Marketing Module, this is the video for you.
Setting Maximums
It’s important not to overwhelm your clients, so Autoflow lets you set up audiences quickly, knowing you won’t hit the same people.
Set Maximums on the number of messages received per:
- Year
- Month
You can also set a maximum amount of messages SENT per campaign.
Setting Delivery Parameters – Day/Time
If you determine your audience prefers not to receive texts on Saturdays or Sundays, you can freely toggle those dates on or off.
Establishing an hour range for sending texts is useful to avoid accidental late-night texts or texting clients outside the hours your shop is monitoring for replies.
Note: Messages that would become scheduled to deliver on Saturdays or Sundays are skipped completely, they are not scheduled on alternate days.
Next: Use these simple tools to refine your client list into receptive audiences.
Create or Import Audience Filters
You’ll also start out with a few default audiences you can use right away. On any existing audience you have options to:
- Edit
- View
- Export
Note: Export and Import will only share the template filters. You cannot export your audience list to others, or import other client lists to your site.
Create a New Audience with Ease
When you click +Create Audience, you’ll enter a modal that allows a wide range of abilities.
- Start by naming the audience and adding a description.
- Next, use filters to focus your list, or add specific clients manually. You can use both methods.
You’ll have even more controls to focus your message later when you build your campaigns.
Note: Depending on your Shop Management System and it’s level of integration with Autoflow, your filter options may be limited.
Remember: While it is safe to experiment with audiences that are not presently engaged by a campaign, modifications to an audience may have an effect on active continuous campaigns.
Now: Manage your campaigns to keep in touch, meaningfully, with your clients.
Groups and Campaigns – Turn on and Test!
Campaigns are created and organized under Groups
Groups can be created and set “ON” or “OFF” – Toggle off a group to stop any recurring campaigns in the group.
Campaigns can be set to “Test” or “Live” – Test campaigns will allow you to simulate the campaign without sending any actual messages. Great for seeing who would be receiving the campaign. You can have a mix of Live and Test campaigns in a group that is toggled ON. Only the campaigns toggled Live will send real messages.
Use simple tools to edit or copy campaigns. View reports for each campaign to see their effectiveness.
Tip: Keep your groups focused and avoid using one group for all things.
Note: Groups are collapsible and may be edited but not deleted. Campaigns can be deleted.
Campaign Manager Workflow – Information
- Name your campaign and determine if it is one-time or continuous.
- Determine if you want to send by text, email, or both. Set mode test or live.
- Preview your audience and tag your campaign.
- Determine # of days or months after status changes the customer should receive this message.
- Determine the frequency, time and start date for this campaign.
Note: To specifically target customers with closed tickets, you will have an option coming up in settings that is used to avoid sending campaigns to customers with active visits.
Campaign Manager Workflow – Message
- Build your text or email template. Use variables to personalize your message, or type your own general message.
- Randomize your message (ideal if the audience includes frequent clients) to keep things fresh. This option allows you to craft additional messages and reduce the chances of appearing repetitive.
- Test the message to see how it looks on your own device!
Campaign Manager Workflow – Settings
- Use special settings to further refine your audience of this campaign.
This step exists to allow greater flexibility for audiences and mitigate any need to craft hyper-specific audiences in the tool.
Note: To specifically target customers with closed tickets only, tick the box labeled Don’t send to customers with an active visit. This is a commonly used and often recommended setting.
Campaign Manager Workflow – Summary
- Review and Save your work on this tab.
- Add your email to receive reporting results.
Note: you can always navigate directly to this tab and click save at any time.
Now you’re ready to follow up effectively. Here are some more simple tools to keep your team communicating efficiently.
You can manually exclude individuals in any audience.
Search for specific people and manually exclude them if you know they won’t want to be contacted. This is done at the campaign level. (Excluding a client from one campaign will NOT exclude them from another.)
Receive Notifications at your main text number.
Although your message sends from your new marketing number, the client replies go to the main text number on your Active Customer Page.
Tip: Be sure to toggle on your user notification option #12!
Carry the conversation per usual
Your Text Manager will now display a marketing filter, and all marketing replies will be in thread!
Deferred Services Reminders
This campaign type is only available in SMS that provide us this data in their API. The SMS that share this data include but are not limited to; Tekmetric, Protractor, TireShop. Please ask us about the capability of yours.
This guide will demonstrate how you can set up a simple 30/60/90-day drip campaign to continually keep in contact with clients who have unsold items.
Step One: Build your deferred work audience
- Go to Audiences
- Create Audience
- Use just one variable for now.
The key at this phase is simply to have a broad audience that simply contains deferred work. You can refine this list later on at the campaign level.
Step Two: Build your new deferred work campaign
- Go to Campaigns
- Enable the group that you wish to put your campaign in (recommend the default group Customer Follow-Up)
- Click Add Campaign
The group must be ON to add a campaign. You can safely leave any campaign in test mode. Only live campaigns will send texts.
Step Three: Campaign Information
- Name your campaign. (Tip: Name the campaign based on the time frame the trigger is set for easy reference later. See the circled regions in the image.
- Set the campaign to continuous.
- Set Text and Email on.
- Leave the campaign in test mode while building (Tip: Campaigns cannot be edited after running live. Live campaigns would need to be cloned and edited.)
- Set frequency to Daily. (Tip: Set a start time that isn’t too early or too late in the day.)
- Set a start date. (Tip: While editing, use a later date to give yourself extra room to make changes.)
Step Four: Message Builder – Text
- Use variables to personalize.
- Keep character count low.
- Add the Deferred Service Link variable to the message. This is replaced with a clickable link for the client to review services left unauthorized.
- Test the message by texting yourself. (Note: Test messages do NOT use your personal information, they will use hard-coded variables only. This is by design.
Tip: Do not use language like “Click here” or “Click the link”.
Step Five: Message Builder – Email
Emails can afford a greater variety of messaging lengths and creativity.
- Paste images into the editor if you do not use image URLs.
- Use the same variables available to text messages.
- Make a clear call to action in to open the deferred service link.
Test send the email to yourself. Tip: Multiple uses of the Deferred Service link can help drive clients to click on the report where they can review and schedule services with you. Invite them to click in any language you want with emails!
Step Six: Final Settings
For this campaign example, the default settings can be left as shown.
Step Seven: Summary
- Review
- Click SAVE
Tip: Skip to this step and click save to prevent losing work anytime. This page is currently the only page with the save button and it is critical to prevent losing your work.
Last: Clone Campaign
Once your 30-day campaign is set, you can clone the campaign and change the send trigger to 60, 90, or other day/month parameters.
Cloning is a 1-to-1 copy. You will need to make only two changes if you wish to complete a replica of this example.
Rename the campaign to reflect the trigger and do NOT forget to change the trigger to match.
With the steps outlined here, you will have three separate campaigns that run every single day.
Does this campaign hit the entire audience? No. An audience is just a potential group of people that the campaign could be designed to hit.
This campaign as demonstrated will send a message to a handful of clients every day that meet all the following criteria:
- Client has deferred work
- Client had a status today that matches the trigger (i.e. 30 days ago their ticket was closed with deferred work)
- Client does NOT have a future appointment
- Client does NOT have a current appointment
- Client has not received a marketing text in 7 days
- Client has not replied to a marketing text in 7 days