I've been looking into marketing automation emails lately and am really excited by the idea but rather disappointed by the actual customizability. I've investigated hubspot, mixpanel, intercom, mailchimp, and several others.
It seems that they fall into one of two modes.
A pre-defined drip campaign, perhaps with some simple if/then branching to choose the message.
A completely targeted message based on criteria while more or less ignoring the overall message queue being sent to the person. (ie. when they do this, send them this message a day later)
I would really like a more intelligent mechanism that is a mix between those two that works something like this...
- Every N days, send the prospect an email.
- Choose the email to send from this large pool of potential messages.
Each message in the pool would have some sort of weighting algorithm. For instance there might be a default priority on each plus several behavior based rules to modify the priority.
Then, when it's time to send a message to a person, the system calculates all the priorities for that user, chooses the one with the lowest priority score that the user hasn't seen yet, and sends it.
Message one - about pricing: Priority 100 If the user has looked at the pricing page already, add 300 to priority.
Message two - Tell about a premium feature A Priority 200 If the user has used feature B, subtract 100 priority (for instance, if feature B and A go well together)
Message three - Tell user how to invite other people Priority 50 If the user has already invited someone, add 200 to priority.
And maybe we have 50 different messages to choose from (each user would only get X messages total)
From there, we could track what messages lead to sales most often and go back and adjust priorities from time to time based on that.
Any ideas on more advanced targeting like this (or some other more advanced mechanism?)
If we can't find something out there, would anyone else want something like that?
