Welcome to the Anthill guide for transactional email and SMS delivery options.
In this guide, we shall cover in detail the opportunities you have for automatically sending emails or SMS messages.
Through your Anthill system, you can create and send communications, at designated stages in your bespoke workflows, ensuring both staff and customers alike are always up to date and engaged.
Trigger Events
The first stage in delivering automated communications is establishing at what point you wish to send them.
Within Anthill you can dictate trigger events which, when activated, automatically deliver your prewritten and personalised messages.
Common use cases often relate to a particular activity stage within a sales cycle.
Transactional messages can be delivered when activities are created or when a certain step has been completed within your workflow. Examples include:
- Internal emails to notify of a new opportunity.
- Welcome emails to customers hot off the press.
- Service updates to customers as their journey hits a key new stage.
- Appointment confirmations and reminders.
The full list of triggers:
- Activity Created
- Activity Dead
- Activity Converted
- Activity Completed
- Activity Cancelled
- Customer Created
- Contact Created
- Appointment Date
- Appointment Created
- Appointment Completed
- Appointment Cancelled
- Appointment Changed
- Workflow Due
- Workflow Completed
- Workflow Cancelled
- Customer Opt-in
- Customer Opt-out
- Contact Opt-in
- Contact Opt-out
Trigger Types
There are three types of triggers that your events can use which control the timing of the trigger.
Immediately – sends as soon as the trigger happens.
Time Offset – add a time to send the message after the trigger.
Specific Time – send messages at a fixed time for all triggers in that period.
Segmenting Your Recipients
Having created your messages and selected your trigger events you may want to add additional segmentation.
Doing so allows you to provide a different version of the message based on the specific, personal data within Anthill.
For example, you could create two segments, one for Modern Products and the second for Traditional Products. Then tailor the content appropriately.
By doing this, you can deliver hyper personalised communications, retaining a human touch whilst enhancing your efficiency.
Content Rules
Content Rules enable you to create advanced communication touch points that are influenced by previous recipient engagement.
Rules can be configured to only trigger a message if emails were opened or a specific link clicked for example.
This means you can gear your communications down to even the smallest details, increasing opportunities to convert prospects and enhancing the relevancy of content to customers.
In essence, Anthill does the heavy lifting for your vital, business winning customer communications.
Email Attachments
For emails, you can add relevant files to support the transactional message.
Attachments pull from the relevant customer records by type, meaning individual documentation such as invoices or final designs can be sent in line with key workflow stages.
Fixed attachments are powerful for generic content and are uploaded centrally to each communication.
Recipients
Last of all, the delivery stage. Here you can choose who to include and how to include them.
Anthill automatically pulls this data from your records, so you don’t have to.
That way, you can keep the personal warmth of your engagements without having to do the manual hard work.
Now you have your transactional communications ready to go!
Read on to see how other organisations are harnessing Anthill’s capabilities for their own gain…
Anthill Top Tip – Brochure Requests (Example)
For many Anthill users, transactional emails have been revolutionary.
One particular use case we’ve found to be especially effective is creating a trigger offering an appointment, or chance to talk with the team, sent out 5 days after a prospect has requested a brochure.
This would be created by:
- Building an Appointment Offer template.
- Linking this message to an Activity Created, the trigger event.
- Identifying the type of activity as ‘Brochure’.
- Setting a trigger delay of 5 days from receipt.
- Segmenting further via the content rule of ‘brochure enquiry still live’.
Now, rather than manually following up, you can deliver a personalised message inviting an already engaged customer to speak with your team.
If you have any other Support Queries, please visit the Support Hub or Contact Us directly.
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