Bislr’s Autopilot Is A Drag-And-Drop Feature For Building Cross-Platform Marketing Campaigns

Bislr has launched an app for its platform called Autopilot, that simplifies the process of creating and maintaining complex channel marketing efforts.

SaaS providers and the growing list of companies that use subscription services increasingly use multiple channels such as email, the web and social media for their marketing campaigns. This is fundamental to engage and use different platforms to nurture leads and build a presence that the customer recognizes. But running these kinds of campaigns takes time and they can get expensive. Nor are traditional marketing automation platforms designed as drag-and-drop environments.

This is where Autopilot comes in, essentially serving as a workplace with templates, that lets users automate flows, which turns platforms like Twitter into data objects that can be connected though APIs or webhooks. Customers use a virtual whiteboard to draw the campaigns based on the lead and the stage of engagement. And they can create campaign emails and forms directly in the Bislr environment with all the necessary hooks to marketing automation or CRM platforms.

While that’s compelling, a SaaS using Bislr can become invasive if it’s not using the platform properly. For example, when customers sign up for their 30-day service that uses Bislr, they can expect to be monitored, weighted and targeted for goodness knows what kind of campaigns. Therefore the platform has to provide sophisticated features to prevent a SaaS from alienating its customers.

When drawing out a 30-day free trial campaign, a customer may define how to keep a lead engaged with such actions as setting a delay for reminders. A customer that has not activated a trial can be notified via Twitter asking them if they need any help.

Bislr also includes a social intelligence engine that gives marketers a way to conduct searches on Twitter and filter leads for targeted campaigns; they can then assign lead scores and send them to Salesforce or other CRM platforms.

Bislr is reminiscent of platforms that help customers create a logic tree. Yahoo! Pipes was one of the first that allowed the user to drag connectors that then formed a “pipe” from RSS feeds that could then be additionally filtered by keyword. More modern services, such as IFTTT and Zapier use APIs to connect services to create workflows and notification systems. Bislr uses the same concepts to connect platforms for complex cross-marketing efforts.

DocuSign, Cambium Networks and SOL Republic have signed on to use the service. Salesforce.com is a partner but they could also be competitors as the company builds out its marketing cloud and offers additional marketing automation capabilities.