Let’s Talk About Email Marketing Automation

Despite the rise of social media, email remains one of the top-performing channels to acquire new customers and drive revenue. In fact, email beats social by 40x for customer acquisition. With automated email workflows, your business can leverage the full potential of email marketing in nurturing existing customer relationships and converting leads.

As your business grows, it can become hard to keep track of your customers’ journeys and personalize at scale without email marketing automation. Imagine having to create and send out hundreds of individual emails, perfectly timed to reach and engage your customers when your business is still top of mind. Email marketing automation tools allow you to save time on repetitive tasks and connect with customers at a speed that’s just hard to achieve manually.

Personalization is the name of the game. Customers only engage with emails that deliver content they care about. Statistics show that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened and marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns. If you’re sending out blanket emails to everyone in your database without proper segmentation, your email will likely get marked as spam.

With email marketing automation, you can concentrate on strategy, which includes tailoring your messaging and segmenting your audience. You can send targeted messaging based on a customer’s behaviors and preferences, which means they are more likely to engage with your content. 

Many email marketing automation software offer detailed reporting features that can provide more insight into campaign performance. With this data, you can analyze engagement, find out which emails perform better, and evaluate your deliverability, to improve your email marketing efforts.

Creating a welcome email series is a great way to give new customers or subscribers a more in-depth introduction to your brand, products, or services.

For instance, if you run an eCommerce business, you can trigger the email automation series to begin when a customer creates a user account or signs up for a mailing list. You can follow up with user testimonials, product recommendations, or discount codes for new buyers. If you have a service-based business, you can create an onboarding email series to share tutorials or best practices, introduce your support team, and showcase client success stories.

With email marketing automation, you can set up messaging to re-engage customers who have not interacted with your business for a defined period, such as 3-6 months. You can reach out to these inactive customers with incentives for re-engagement, re-introduce your brand, share any new and relevant products or services, and more.

If a contact fills out a form, clicks a link on your website, or downloads a piece of content, this is a good opportunity to bring them closer to conversion with more valuable and relevant content. Using their action as a trigger, you can send the customer other supporting content, such as whitepapers, case studies, blog posts, or product demos.

As an eCommerce business, there’s plenty you can do with email marketing automation tools.

Here are some ideas:

• Re-engage customers who abandoned their shopping carts with reminder emails and special discounts.
• Upsell or cross-sell to customers based on their previous purchase.
• If your business allows customers to purchase products on a subscription, automated emails can be a good way to send reminders letting them know they could be running low and should re-fill their subscription.

Celebrate your customers by sending out automated emails when they hit a milestone in your business relationship. This is a great way to acknowledge and boost customer loyalty. It can also serve as an opportunity to upsell, cross-sell, or deepen engagement with your product or service. Check out this example from Canva.

First things first – choose an email automation software. A good email automation software can lay the foundation for a successful campaign. And now, these tools also leverage AI to help you build effective automations. Here are some things to look for when selecting your software.

• Mobile friendly: You want an automation software that can assist with optimizing your emails for mobile.
• Integration capabilities: Look for email automation software that can work with other tools in your marketing stack. Having connected systems will help you leverage comprehensive data to create more powerful automations and emails. For instance, look for automation software that can integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) system or eCommerce platform for more functionality and visibility.
• Template library: If the software comes with email and automation templates that are easy to use and customize, you can leverage these pre-made designs to get a jumpstart when creating your email assets or workflows.
• Reporting capabilities: Your automation software should offer robust reporting capabilities, so you have the data to improve your campaigns or identify new opportunities.

Before you create an automated campaign, decide why you’re doing this. What is the strategy behind this campaign? What action do you want customers to take? The goal for your campaign will directly influence the contact segmentation and messaging, so spend time planning the entire workflow to get customers to achieve the desired outcome.

As we talked about earlier, personalization is key to getting customers to pay attention to your emails. So, if your campaign has messaging that only applies to a specific group within your audience, make sure you properly segment your contacts by either attributes, behaviors, or preferences to ensure the emails are targeted at the right contacts.

Design and set up email content for every stage of your automated workflow. You can also leverage email templates in your automation software to help you get started.

This is where the fun begins! In this step, you can choose to set a trigger and start to build your automation. Using different sending options, conditions and workflow, you can outline the different steps your customers could take and what the software should do in response.

Run a test of your automated campaign to make sure your workflow is set up correctly.

Once you’ve tested your campaign and fixed any errors, go ahead and launch it!

Even once your email automation is live, keep monitoring the campaign to identify any unforeseen issues and make adjustments on the go.

At the end of your campaign, make sure to analyze the performance of your emails to find any areas for improvement.