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In June 2011, Performable was acquired by HubSpot. Find out more about this change.

No matter how much pleasure you get from putting together a solid, subscriber-focused email marketing campaign (hah!), there's probably a point where you go, "By golly, I wish I could automate parts of this process." Okay, so email campaigns are never going to write themselves, but when it comes to lining up emails to send at the most effective time, then both our app and our friends at Performable Analytics are here to help with triggered campaigns.

Last year, we released autoresponders to allow you to send campaigns when an event occurred within your subscriber list. Some of these campaigns were things like follow-up emails immediately after someone joined to your list, or an email offer automatically sent a week before a subscriber's birthday. Now, Performable have taken this one massive step further with Engage, a service which extends the autoresponders in your Campaign Monitor account to schedule campaigns based on events occurring on your site. For most of us, it's called "Wow, I just got a reminder email after abandoning my online shopping cart!" For the propeller-heads, it's called behavioral marketing.

This might all seem pretty fiddly, however the folks at Performable have smoothed out the process of connecting sites to their marketing analytics service, then in turn, connecting Engage to your Campaign Monitor account. For example, lets go back to the earlier shopping cart scenario. Lets say you've got Performable Engage rolling and a basic, 'New subscriber signs up' autoresponder (or two) in your account. You then want to send an email to folks who have signed up as customers, added an item to their online cart, but never completed their purchase. You also want to delay the email being sent by a couple of days and heck, send a follow-up email if additional criteria is met. Here's what this workflow would look like in Performable Engage (click to enlarge):

Wow, that's some pretty clever email marketing right there. Now, imagine extending this to folks who have signed up to receive your cracking latest album of ambient chiptunes, but haven't gone on to download it. Or with Performable's Zendesk integration, being able to contact people who have lodged a ticket with you, but haven't logged back into their account for your web app. How crazy automated is that?

Performable Engage is also backed up by solid reports, both from within Performable and your Campaign Monitor account. Engage will tell you how many emails have sent and are scheduled to go (alongside Performable's regular lifecycle marketing metrics) and we'll keep tabs on opens, clicks and more via your autoresponder reports.

Based on this model, you may be well keen to check out our monthly pricing - with unlimited autoresponders and campaigns bundled into most plans, it's simply less stress.

Of course, in the words of Master Splinter, with great power comes great responsibility. Just as most folk were sensible enough to not go mad with plain ol' autoresponders, this kind of triggered campaign should be used with a bit of humanity. In short, to gently encourage subscribers to come visit you again, over being, well, annoying.

Finally, the folks at Performable have extended readers like you a 50% discount on their small business plans. To see if its suite of marketing analytics and email automation tools are suitable for your site, trial Performable for free and start scheduling 'em emails.