February 12, 2015

Inside Autopilot Beta: An Interactive Product Q&A

_“Overall, we’re loving AutopilotHQ. My god, is it so much better than…” _is among the many responses we have received since the inception of our beta program two weeks ago. Since then, we’ve been in a whirlwind of iterating Autopilot’s onboarding flow and responding to customer feedback. To open things up a little, we held a product Q&A on Wednesday with CEO Mike Sharkey and CMO Guy Marion. Here’s the full video recording.

We had a fairly active audience with many questions, some of which were as follows:

• What are some of the different types of customer Journeys that are best practices in the industry? Read 10 lead nurturing strategies and their KPIs for more customer Journeys.

• Is there a way to score leads in Autopilot?

• How do you know when someone replies to an email from Autopilot?

• What are the available actions you can take with a lead? Read about the ultimate lead nurturing toolkit.

• How can I integrate my current landing pages? Read our review of the top landing page editors.

• Can I use both my current email software and Autopilot?

• If I don’t use Salesforce, what is the best way to incorporate Autopilot into my workflow?

• How can I recognize customer attribution through ad channels?

• Why is Autopilot better than Hubspot?

• Does Autopilot deduplicate records?

• Is there a hard date for launch?

We are beginning to see a few themes take form - here are a few truths that have actualized so far.

A Best-of-Breed Approach

Our approach at Autopilot is to deliver a easy-to-use solutions that help companies create better marketing journeys and build more fruitful relationships with customers. Unlike “all-in-one” platforms, we aim to be the best at multi-channel automated marketing. Rather than competing with companies who are the best at what they do, we integrate with them and help marketers connect their beloved systems. Providing this infrastructure allows marketers to incorporate multi-channel content into their email marketing journeys, including text messages or postcards.

Email By Itself is Just…Email

Many people want to advance their marketing beyond batch and blast. Below are just a few ways to add value to email.

• Send follow-up emails to people who don’t open your first email, using a “did not open” Condition in Autopilot

• Set up criteria that ejects someone from a Journey if they respond.

Autopilot Conditions add value to email by allowing you to personalize your follow-ups in easy and creative ways.

Get a Guide

Knowing where to start automating your marketing and nurturing programs can be overwhelming. To ease this pressure, Autopilot has created pre-built marketing Journeys that anyone can use, which we call Guides. Guides make it a cinch to implement best practice programs like onboarding flows, Salesforce workflows, or event follow-ups.

Leads Need More Love

Although marketers try our hardest to stay in touch with interested prospective buyers or online web inquirers, we often leave them wanting more. Fortunately, automating this follow-up and nurturing process makes do so less time and work-intensive. Here are some automated actions that we can take in Autopilot to engage with a person (or new sales lead):

• Send a SMS

• Send a postcard

• Send a handwritten note

• Automatically send an email

• Add to a list

• Remove from a list

• Update a custom field

• Send your team an email notification

• Update fields and actions in Salesforce such as add tasks, assign leads, update campaigns, update status, create and close opportunities

• Send a survey using SurveyMonkey

• Add lead intelligence using InsideView

We Want Your Input!

Please shoot us any feature requests, and if you like, feel free to sign up for the Autopilot Beta. We are looking forward to any feedback you may have.