Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation for Small businesses & Nonprofits

Whether your goal is retention, lead nurturing, fundraising, or askings for reviews, email marketing via marketing automation can be one of the most effective and cost-efficient strategies for small business owners and nonprofits.

Many companies and organizations here in the Central Coast struggle with the same two issues when it comes to marketing automation:

• Using email beyond newsletters: how to make better use of your loyal customer or donor database beyond monthly check-ins.
• What email marketing platform (or CRM) to use based on their needs.

Screechy Cat Media works with small businesses and nonprofits to develop marketing automation strategies, including email marketing, to meet you individual needs.

Email Marketing: newsletters and beyond

Email newsletters are still valuable marketing materials—Screechy Cat Media recommends email newsletters in all applicable email marketing campaigns. But, if you are only sending your contact list a monthly newsletter, you’re missing several opportunities each month to connect with your most valuable audience.

We have seen industry averages of between 3-18 email sends per month—however, this figure often includes not just campaign emails such as newsletters, but drip and trigger emails as well.

For those unfamiliar with those terms, drip emails are pre-written emails that get sent to your database over time, often as a series; while trigger emails are single automated messages sent to a user when an action has taken place.

Type	Examples
Drip Email	New customer welcome series, new product launches
Trigger Email	Cart abandonment, password reminders

Email through marketing automation

Email is powerful: automation is the key that drives it. Automated emails drive a 22x ROI over campaign emails. Automation starts with a strategy tailored to your business or organization’s needs, designed and set up in the CRM of your choice.

Sample marketing automation flows include a welcome series for new customers, birthday or anniversary emails, text alerts for events, post-stay emails for hotels, and cart abandonment emails.

Screechy Cat Media is a Brevo partner agency: we recommend Brevo to our clients looking for a CRM because its low initial pricing & inclusion of most features on no and low-cost plans. We can work with any popular CRM (or your custom CRM with a little training), though marketing automation feature availability may differ from platform to platform.