Your brand and your customers are unique, and there are times where you need to interact with, and market to, your customers in unique ways. Flagship products, custom interactable website elements, videos, blog content, and webinars are all ways you can make your brand experience different and memorable - to create a brand experience that builds customer loyalty.
Custom AutoPilot Actions come into play when you have such a unique brand experience - these actions allow you to build responsive and dynamic messaging streams that interact with your customers and visitors based on however they interact with your brand. Whether it’s reading certain content, viewing specific products, or abandoning unique site elements, you can use your visitors’ unique interactions to acquire, retarget, and build brand loyalty.
Before You Begin
Custom AutoPilot Actions are based on AutoPilot Events. Most events are collected and registered by the BuyerGenomics Universal Touch System. Before you set up your Custom AutoPilot Events, make sure your Touch System is set up on your website. This setup is straightforward and is typically completed during onboarding.
Setting Up Your Custom AutoPilot Action
New and existing Custom AutoPilot Actions can be modified from the Email Campaigns > AutoPilot Actions screen.
Each action requires a name, a description, and an event. The name and description should be concise and informative, as they will be used throughout the BuyerGenomics application for reporting your results.
The main types of events that can be used with AutoPilot Actions are:
- Content Views
- Category Views
- Product Views
- Custom Events
Custom AutoPilot Actions based on Content Views, Category Views, and Product Views will deploy after a visitor to your website ends their web session (through abandoning the website, closing the browser, or other means). Each of these events require the BuyerGenomics Universal Touch System to be detected.
Custom AutoPilot Actions based on Custom Events can occur either:
- After the websession ends (which is useful for custom “abandonment” events, such as leaving the site after interacting with a custom website element); or
- As soon as the event occurs (for example, when a user fills out a webinar signup form - useful for sending confirmation emails).
Implementing Custom AutoPilot Actions after a web session ends requires the BuyerGenomics Universal Touch System. Custom AutoPilot Actions that occur as soon as the event occurs is most often, and is recommended to be, implemented using the Touch System on your website, but can also be implemented using custom API events (see the Advanced section below for more details on API events).
Once you save your Custom AutoPilot Action, you’re ready to deploy your custom AutoPilot Campaign.
Deploying Custom AutoPilot Campaigns
For ease of use, Custom AutoPilot Campaigns are set up the same way as the AutoPilot Campaigns for the machine-intelligent, highly-dynamic Buyer Lifecycle movement and Window Shopping.
Go to the Email Campaigns > Campaigns screen, create a new campaign, select “AutoPilot”, and build your messaging stream.
When you select your target, simply look for the name of the Custom AutoPilot Action that you have already created.
Once your campaign is ready, click the deploy button, and your visitors will start receiving your messaging stream when they complete your custom events.
Advanced Features
Custom Data Input
Custom Events have the additional feature of collecting whatever data you want to pass to BuyerGenomics in the form of Key-Value pairs. Custom AutoPilot Actions can then use this custom data as dynamic variable content in your messaging stream.
This can be particularly useful when sending confirmation emails. For example, you can use the custom data input to dynamically insert the date, time, webinar name, and participant name into your emails.
API Events
When creating a Custom AutoPilot Action based on a custom event, you have the additional option of using an API event. This differs from events that are collected by the BuyerGenomcis Universal Touch System as they can occur on any system, not just your website.
For example, you can register an event from your inventory backend when a new product is back in stock, and use this event to deploy a Custom AutoPilot Action. Note that in this case, you cannot deploy the event “after the web session ends” as there is no web session - instead, the event occurs entirely on your backend, separate from the visitors’ interactions on your website.
API events, like custom events on your website, can pass custom data inputs that you can then use dynamically in your emails.