One of the easiest ways to leverage ContactDrive’s awesome marketing automation features is to connect your account with MailChimp. And now, MailChimp just made their own tools even easier — and cheaper.

The popular email marketing provider just announced that their marketing automation features, previously only available on a paid plan, are now included with even their free offerings.

This means that ContactDrive users interested in really leveraging our tools to build better relationships now have more — and more affordable — options to achieve their goals. Check out how MailChimp describes it in their announcement post:

Whether you operate an online store, head a nonprofit, or run a creative side project, automation makes it easy to send the right message to the right people at exactly the right time, giving you a competitive edge without burning a hole in your budget.

As competition increases to break through, marketing automation is so critical to quickly reaching the right audiences with the right message through the right channels.

To help you get started, we walk through the steps of setting up an automated workflow in this blog post. MailChimp has some great resources about their automation tools here.

How does marketing automation work?

What can you do with a smart automation strategy? A few approaches might be to:

• Send a specific series of emails to prior supporters who are making a new donation (or repeat customers)
• Setup a series of emails to go to people you don’t have a previous relationship with. This series could introduce your organization to them and gradually build up to a direct pitch.
• If you have connected data sources like FullContact to your account, you could create a specific list of people who are on Twitter and encourage them to follow you there.

The possibilities really are endless! There’s only two keys to an effective marketing automation strategy:

1. Start writing and segmenting. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time.
2. Test and measure. Iterate over time. As you experiment, you’ll learn and over time serve your audience better than ever.

Next steps

While MailChimp’s marketing automation tools are terrific, they become so much more powerful when connected to ContactDrive.

If you don’t have a ContactDrive account yet though, we’d love for you to give us a spin! Sign up for a free 14-day trial today.