Email automation & email nurture | Office hours recap July 27 2023

Hi, Copper community! Yesterday’s office hours group was smaller than last week’s, which meant we got to talk in depth about a big topic: email automation and email nurture. Here’s a recap of what we discussed.

What do we even mean by email automation?

The term “email automation” is really broad. But in my experience, Copper customers are usually thinking about two specific kinds of emails:

• Newsletters and promotional emails: These go out to a large portion of your audience at once. They’re usually nice and polished with images and hyperlinks and maybe some HTML formatting. Their main purpose is to build brand awareness, authority and engagement.
• Nurture emails: These are meant to help develop the relationship between a contact and your organization or a specific rep. Within this category, I often hear about outreach emails from sales reps, welcome emails to new customers and automated onboarding emails. These emails should be tailored to a contact’s current relationship with your organization.

For each of these, think about who will receive the email and when. Those factors are critical to both the success of those emails and how you’ll set them up.

What do I need to think about before getting started?

Once you’ve outlined the emails you want to send, I recommend thinking about:

1. How you’re gonna segment your audience, and
2. What tool you’re going to use.

For #1, you’ve probably got data in Copper that you can use to split up your audience into segments. I often see Contact Type and Tags being used for this purpose. But you can also use most types of custom fields or even Inactive Days. The important thing here is to make sure you have the right data and that it’s complete and reliable.

For #2, I see a lot of folks get overwhelmed because there are so many tools out there with so many terms and categories. For simplicity, I’m going to outline a couple of options that are built into Copper and a couple of options that you can integrate with Copper.

Sending mass emails from within Copper

We have two main options here that fill different gaps.

Bulk emails allow you to send an email to up to 200 contacts at a time. You can either select your recipients one by one or apply a filter to your list and do a select-all.

I see a lot of sales folks apply a filter for their target Contact Type and then further filter or sort by Inactive Days. This helps them stay on top of prospects before they drift away.

Some notes on bulk emails:

• They are not mass BCCs. Each recipient receives a separate email. From their end, it looks like you’ve typed up an individual email just for them.
• You can send multiple batches in a day but you need to stay within the email limit for your Gmail account.
• You can use email templates when setting up a bulk email to save time.
• The emails are automatically added to each contact’s activity log.
• You can track opens on each individual email but you won’t get overall performance stats for a bulk email batch.

Here’s the main takeaway for bulk emails: they help you send emails that you might otherwise send one by one. These emails aren’t technically automated but they can add a lot of efficiency to your outreach.

Email Sequences allow you to set up automated emails based on specific triggers. For example, you can have the system add contacts to a specific Sequence each time you assign them a certain Contact Type or Tag.

There are a lot of settings and options available so I recommend checking out this article for more details. But here are some key notes:

• Each Sequence can contain a chain of emails. So if someone doesn’t open or respond to the first one, the Sequence can send a follow up for you.
• You can set up Sequences based on which stage an Opportunity is in by having Workflow Automation tag the Opportunity when it enters that stage.
• Each email is recorded in the contact’s Activity Log, in addition to opens, clicks and unsubscribes.
• You’ll get performance metrics for each Sequence.
• You’ll have a maximum number of email sends per month based on the number of users on your account.

The main takeaway for Email Sequences: it’s great for automating nurture based on your relationship with a contact. Unlike bulk emails, the contacts can be added to a sequence one by one instead of in batches, and the email sends are automated. You can also use it for small-scale newsletters but I wouldn’t recommend it for mass emails going to thousands of contacts at once.

Integrating email marketing and automation tools with Copper

You can also integrate with a separate tool if you prefer. Here are some of my recommendations:

• If you’re sending mass blasts to thousands of contacts, consider Mailchimp with our native integration. It syncs data from Copper to Mailchimp so you can set up your Mailchimp segments and campaigns using data from Copper.
• If you’re sending personalized nurture emails, try PersistIQ and their native Copper integration, which allows you to easily add Copper contacts to a PersistIQ campaign.

You can find more options in our integration marketplace under the sections for email marketing and sales automation.