Today, businesses continuously leverage technology's power to communicate more effectively with their customers. In this digital age, email continues to be one of the most popular and effective marketing channels.
However, with the increasing volume of emails being sent daily, it can be challenging for businesses to stand out and engage with their audiences.
This is where email automation comes in. Businesses can save time and drive better results by automating key aspects of email marketing, such as list segmentation, personalized content, and triggered messages.
In this blog, we'll explore everything you need to know about email automation, including its benefits, best practices, and strategies for success. So let's dive in!
Email automation β what is it?
Using specified rules, email automation is made to send messages when a certain action is taken. To maintain contact, you can send highly targeted, tailored emails to your subscribers at predetermined intervals.
Email automation can also be used to send emails as a response to the user's activity. For instance, when a user completes a transaction, an email with a payment confirmation is sent.
How is email automation executed?
Email automation allows marketers to design automated email workflows for each email marketing campaign. You can include actions, events, and conditions in these automated workflows so that an email is sent when a condition is satisfied and the action is finished.
The most popular email automation triggers used by marketers and salespeople have listed below:
- The Greeting email
- Pageview/product view
- An Abandoned cart
- A Post-purchase
- A Subscription expiration
- An Upsell or a Cross-sell
- A Milestone achievement
Based on these triggers, you can develop automated emails for your marketing, sales, or customer service procedures.
6 Advantages of email automation
Most business duties chew up your quality time because they are busy. Emailing is one of the most demanding but important tasks. It can take a long time to manually create an email list and prepare each communication for many customers.
You won't be able to produce them on time and will make mistakes even if you try to do it on your own.
Email marketing ROI is estimated at up to $44 for every dollar invested. Also, automated emails have noticeably greater click rates.
This is where email automation comes into playβyou can complete everything on time while saving valuable time and energy.
But this is not all; let's look at how email automation might help your company.
1. Re-engage previous clients
You may have a list of clients who, for whatever reason, no longer use your services. You need to contact them since their needs may have changed recently. By including them on your mailing list and getting them back on board, you can encourage them to join your company again.
Depending on what works best for you, you can compile a list of all the customers who haven't interacted with you in two, three, or even six months. Next, you can produce persuasive emails encouraging them to check out your new offers.
2. Provide the correct information to the Relevant Audience
Every action a consumer takes may be turned into a workflow with email automation, which sends emails in response to those triggers. For each trigger, these automated emails are uniquely tailored.
For instance, you may automatically send a welcome email to a new customer who just signed up as a trial user. The automation will then begin operating in response to the subscriber's actions.
The more you know, the better. After all, 55% of consumers prefer receiving emails with pertinent offers and items.
3. Boost your Income
With the use of email marketing automation, you can design numerous programs. With these marketing strategies, you may boost sales, win back lost clients, and spread the word, all of which will boost your bottom line.
You may design cart abandonment campaigns and send follow-up emails to encourage customers to complete their purchases.
By sharing recommendations based on their search history and persuading them to buy them, you can cross-sell and upsell in addition to those products.
4. Boost team performance
This solution can be a game-changer for your sales team's productivity if manual email sending is still the norm.
Sending emails at the appropriate time is necessary for your sales staff to stay in touch with the leads and ensure no lead is missed.
To better focus on closing business, your team can automate their sales emails.
5. Provide a customized experience for each customer
We understand your question: How can an email automation system assist in creating a customized email?
Using email automation, you can send highly tailored emails based on the user's actions and preferences. Also, you can modify the emails and distribute them to your audience segments.
Today, creating highly tailored emails for your subscribers is necessary rather than simply personalizing emails with the recipient's name.
6. Keep more clients.
Using email automation, you can nurture your current and former customers by sending them interesting emails about new products, limited-time deals, upcoming events, etc. You may maintain contact with your consumers and keep them as patrons for a long time by putting such a system into place.
7 instances of email automation
There are many different techniques to execute email automation; you just need to choose the best one for your email marketing strategy. Let's examine some email automation examples for various businesses.
1. Thank you emails
The ice-breakers are these. Additionally, they help you establish your brand among clients. The automated real estate email example below welcomes new users to the group.
Such welcome emails value your prospects and interest them in your value proposition.
2. Emails developing relationships
Most of these emails are customized to your client's needs. You only deliver what they request. The email in the example below has been deftly written to sell the subscriber's home while they are getting married and must be seeking a new place to live.
3. Specific SaaS marketing emails
These emails are the foundation of any internet business; they are employed in introducing, advertising, and selling new goods.
4. Emails on birthdays
These emails are issued for a special occasion on a particular date each year. So, you can program automatic emails to send a particular email on your clients' birthdays and anniversaries. These are such a godsend to fostering relationships.
5. Cart abandonment emails
Online shoppers sometimes become sidetracked and leave their shopping carts empty before purchasing. Automated emails can assist the website in recovering almost lost consumers in this situation.
6. Follow-up emails post a transaction
Whenever a purchase is made, emailing the consumer to express gratitude and guarantee their pleasure is a nice touch. You know the level of client satisfaction and what may be done to enhance it.
7. Re-engagement emails
People's choices and attitudes vary, and they regularly change. Once customers purchase from your website, they can forget how much they enjoyed it and make another buy later. Re-engagement emails are therefore necessary to remind your clients of the reasons they made their initial purchases from you.
4 Guidelines to follow before emailing your clients
After your well-designed and automated email workflows are ready, remember a few best practices before pressing the send button.
1. Tempo
Think about the ideal moment to email your clients. Keep a space between each email if you are sending a series to ensure it has an impact.
2. Quantity
Giving your customers the right messages is important, but sending them incessantly can alienate them. Concentrate on the appropriate opportunities, and only send emails that benefit them at the appropriate time.
3. Accept opt-outs
It is acceptable if your company is occasionally irrelevant to your clients. If this happens, include a simple unsubscribe/opt-out option in your emails so your subscribers won't mark you as spam and stop receiving your emails.
4. CASL and CAN-SPAM
Since automated emails are regarded as marketing communication, they aim to direct clients back to your website from where they first signed up for your mailing list.
Hence, you must ensure that every one of your automated emails complies with CAN-SPAM and CASL rules.
How do I begin using email automation?
Regardless of the market, your business is in, the process of getting started with email automation is rather similar. Let's dive in and learn how to launch your automated email marketing campaign.
1. Determine the people you wish to draw.
Whatever target demographic you wish to interact with must first be determined. You can examine the clients who have already purchased from you or joined your mailing list, categorize them according to their interests and actions, and then modify your strategy for each group.
2. Analyze the concerns of your current customers.
Keep your current clients satisfied. To achieve that, you may begin by learning more about your current consumers' difficulties. You can improve your product/features based on their problems and attract more satisfied customers.
You can retain more consumers by addressing the current problems and giving new customers a better experience.
3. Tagging
You can utilize tags based on the user's behavior to ensure you send pertinent information. For instance, you can find a customer under the tag "webinar registration" if they sign up for an event.
These tags help you group your audience so that you have specific information for each advertising or sales campaign you run.
4. Point them in the direction of the option you want them to make
Specify what they should do. Before you launch any marketing or sales campaign, build a map showing how customers will get to the CTA.
If the customers are still waiting to be ready to buy your product or service, you can either shift them to a sign-up list or, if they are, you can encourage them to sign up for your newsletters.
5. Write your email carefully.
Your emails now have the power to make or break deals and determine the success of your campaign. A persuasive, expertly written email can persuade customers to convert or, at the very least, subscribe.
Ensure you send out emails with high-quality material worth your readers' attention. Here are some helpful hints and pointers for your upcoming emails that you might use!
6. Establish an email sequence
You will decide which emails will be sent when and in what order in the sequence. Your email sequence will change depending on your services and who you're targeting.
7. Evaluate audience segments.
You can separate customers based on the opt-in they provided once they subscribe to your email list. These opt-ins may be based on one or more of the following:
- Pages that the user has visited
- Depending on where they are
- Regarding the deeds (abandoned shopping carts or bought goods), etc.
- These opt-ins can be A/B tested to determine which produces the best results.
8. Assess and enhance your outcomes.
You may examine the findings and adjust your strategy as you A/B test your email automation process.
You can alter the language, the opt-in format, or the incentives to increase opt-ins. Similarly, you may examine the open rates of your emails and test several subject lines to determine which one is most effective.
9. Use behavioral tracking to build trigger-based automation
Your prospects receive behavior-based triggered emails in response to their behavior.
With email automation, you can construct workflows that execute various actions based on the clients' behavior.
Examples of triggered-based actions are opening emails, signing up for events, going to a certain landing page on your website, or using your social media platforms.
For example, visitors who constantly view your pricing page could be interested in purchasing your product or service. So, you can build up email automation, offer them a bonus deal or discount, and persuade them to buy.
By automating your email marketing and sales campaign based on behavioral triggers, you can ensure that each campaign component is carried out appropriately.
How do I search for the best email automation tool?
After learning everything there is to know about email automation, you may be wondering how to pick the ideal email automation tool for your company. It's a good idea to have a backup plan in case your first plan is compromised. Here are some tips to make your process easier:
1. Identify your needs.
What are you searching for in an email automation tool? You must first determine your needs. Email automation aims to speed up the email marketing process, but the ideal mailing experience requires careful consideration of your unique demands.
You might wish to think about the following inquiries:
- Do your marketing initiatives require client segmentation?
- Will you exclusively use email to communicate, or will you also utilize other methods?
- How much can you spend?
- Do you also require CRM software? If so, do you desire a CRM with email automation functionality?
After writing down your requirements, carefully consider each and list the tools that meet them.
2. Evaluate the responses
It's time to consider your options now that you know what you want.
3. Review websites for products
Searching through product review websites like G2 is an excellent approach to finding the software. You can reduce your choices by reading reviews from customers and industry professionals on these websites.
4. See what products other businesses are using.
You might get assistance from your connections in choosing the best email automation tool. You can enquire locally and look for the materials competing brands use. Ask them if they are satisfied and would suggest their existing email automation tool. Why should your email automation be tested?
Best email automation tools in 2023
Finding the appropriate instrument is the next step after determining your needs. This little list should help determine so.
- MailChimp
- Mailshake
- Omnisend
- Moosend
- SendGrid
- Sendinblue
- GetResponse
- QuickMail
- AWeber
Why should your email automation be tested?
As you have deduced, email automation can speed up your email marketing process, analysis, and personalization.
Email testing is a QA procedure that ensures your emails appear and work exactly as they should. The good news is that this procedure can also be automated!
In testing your emails, you might want to be aware of the following mistakes:
- Combined tags/broken personalization syntax
- Inconsistent operation of many devices
- Link breakdowns
- Font text is properly displayed. Pictures that don't display
- Typos and misspellings
Based on these elements, you can create emails without typos and raise your brand's visibility among subscribers.
Conclusion
Plenty of online stories suggest that emails are dead in 202 Reports. However, they imply the opposite. As much as 18% of all deals are sold through emails.
Email marketing is undoubtedly incredibly successful, and when done properly, it can produce amazing results.
With the right email automation software and strategy, businesses can send personalized and relevant messages to their subscribers at the right time, increasing engagement and driving more conversions.
It's important to note that successful email automation requires careful planning, thoughtful segmentation, and ongoing optimization to ensure that messages resonate with recipients and drive the desired results.
By keeping these best practices in mind and continuously improving their email automation efforts, businesses can build stronger relationships with their customers and achieve their marketing goals more efficiently and effectively.
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