If you’re new to automation, some of the terms may be overwhelming. One question we get a lot is “What exactly is a campaign?”

The short answer is that a campaign is a series of automated tasks you get to determine but there is of course a lot more to it than that! Campaigns are sequences of events designed to get the participant to take action. That action could be to buy a product, register for an event, or perhaps provide a testimonial.

A campaign can be as short and simple as you’d like or they can become very complex with a variety of different steps. The most basic ones simply include a sequence of emails separated by time delays. A really great campaign though will be designed to be adaptable based on how the user reacts. For instance, using the participants behavior (email link clicks, web form survey answers, etc.) to trigger different variations of the campaign will often produce much stronger results.

Some basic campaigns that most online entrepreneurs need to have are a free report, customer happiness and upsell campaigns. So let’s look at some information on constructing these helpful campaigns.

1. Free report: When a new lead signs up for a free report, you are obviously getting them on your “email list”. But, the campaign can do so much more than that. You can deliver the free report and then create additional content delivery based on whether they’ve clicked a link in the original email or not. You can also create customized content that gets triggered based on exactly what link they click or other action they take in the emails. This allows you to establish your expertise and also provide them more specific information that targets their exact needs.

2. Customer happiness: As an online entrepreneur, customer happiness is crucial to your success but it can sometimes be hard to provide excellent service all on your own. With an automated customer happiness campaign, you can provide important information about your services as well as your FAQ’s, special offers and holiday greetings. This can all be set automatically so you don’t have to remember to deliver by yourself!

3. Upsell campaign: Once you have happy customers, the next thing you want to shoot for is upselling them to offer relevant and helpful products that suit their needs. The goal of these campaigns are to take their current product and behavior and offer the next most logical product that would serve them. Often times, up-selling falls to the bottom of the priority list when you get busy running the business, but by automating it you are able to better build the relationship with clients regardless of your workload.

Are you using campaigns to help improve your interaction with leads and current clients? Comment below or on our Facebook page. Be sure to check out our new Insider’s Kit below for more valuable information on automation.