Get Your Life Back with Email Automation

emailautomation Nov 28, 2017

Imagine if your to-do-list was a little bit shorter…I can almost hear your immense sigh of relief from here. Tweaking the way you work and changing your processes can unlock more time to spend on other parts of your business and allow you to be more productive. One great example of this is using email automation.

Automating your emails can revolutionize how you use your time and the relationships that you can build with your customers too. It’s completely up to you how complex and segmented you want to get with automation, but it’s about marrying data and personalization to create better results. Tools like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor can help you out with this.

For example, a simple campaign can involve sending out timely emails at certain points in a user’s journey. All the way up to more complex campaigns that include several workflows running simultaneously.

It’s about reaching the right people, at the right time with relevant content.

Let’s look at why your business should seriously look at email automation:

Build a Relationship

Automation helps you to nurture more of your leads. You can generate leads using lots of different marketing methods – such as incentivising sign-ups with a lead magnet. Once you’ve captured a user’s email address, you can add them to your automated campaign.

You’ll then be able to deliver relevant awareness building content to introduce your brand to a new user, provide them with useful content and create an onboarding series. Timely, relevant content and offers can help to keep your leads warm and encourage them to interact with your brand and hopefully make a purchase...or at least like you more anyway.

This can be done for particular user journey milestones like meeting a spending threshold or taking a specific action – automated emails can trigger and send to give a timely response. 

  • Recover abandoned carts
  • Follow-up on completed purchases
  • Deliver order notifications
  • Reward loyalty

All of these elements can help to bring people back and improve engagement. And it gives you team more time and information, so they can analyse metrics and act on quality leads, instead of weak ones.

MailChimp give a good example of automating and building relationships with the brand, Happy  Socks. They automate with a 3-part series and send an email after 1st purchase thanking a customer, then they introduce new products and their last email delivers a promo code. They generated a 20% higher open rate and 50% higher click rate than a typical email they send. Brilliant.

Segmenting and Targeting

Personalization can blur into segmentation and targeting, but it’s worth noting again how important this is for your marketing strategy. DMA estimate that segmentation and targeting generates 58% of all revenue. That’s huge.

Multiple email automation campaigns allow you to tailor the tone, offerings, information and insight you give specific demographics.

Personalize your Emails

Email automation software can easily help you with personalizing your emails. On a basic level, even something as simple as using a user’s first name in an email can influence click-through rates.

But personalizing isn’t just about names. It involves responding to subscriber’s needs, wants, fears and interests. And addressing this can increase your CTR on average, by 14%.

Here are a few examples of bits of data you can capture and act on:

  • Find out which emails/content a user has engaged with before
  • The entry-point a user discovered your brand through i.e Instagram, gated lead magnet
  • Which offers they’ve used

Dynamic content allows you to deliver a range of email content to different segments or lists, determined by the targeting you’ve engaged in based on variables like gender, age or whatever data you’ve collected. This can be something like a different email layout, font changes or colours.

Automated campaigns can work more effectively if you integrate them with CRM software you have or e-commerce platforms. You can then access and integrate buying data for your users and deliver more targeted content i.e purchase history, repeat customers etc.

Directly Contact your Customers

Social marketing campaigns are all well and good, but with so much noise and brands jostling for attention, sometimes it can be difficult to cut through and interact meaningfully with your customers.

Email is great because you can directly speak to your customers and land in their inbox. That’s not to say they’ll read your content, but you can try your hardest to make sure they do. This will give you a direct line of communication. Ensure your emails are mobile optimized and customers can pick up your emails wherever they are.

You have control of your reach frequency, whereas on a platform like Twitter, you can never guarantee all of your customers will see your Tweets.

And email marketing’s ROI is a no-brainer. 75% of companies surveyed by EConsultancy said that email offers ‘excellent’ to ‘good’ ROI. It’s one of the cheapest marketing methods you can use and it helps you get straight into customer’s inboxes and allows you to personalize your offering to specific users. Your email automation software will cost you, but the actually act of sending your emails is a drop in the ocean.

Align the rest of your Marketing with Email Automation

If your email campaign is linking through to landing pages and your website then it’s important to make sure that your tone and content aligns with your emails. You can also create segmented landing pages and A/B test, to create even more personalized content for your users at every step of their buying journey. This can keep momentum flowing and creates consistency.

Learn from Data

It’s vital that when you start automating your email campaigns, that you closely analyse your results so you can make adjustments to your automations. Look at elements like engagement rates and which emails generate more revenue. What is driving some emails to be more effective than others?

Play around with templates, calls to action, subject lines, email timings etc and be proactive about testing out what works with different audiences.

Good Key Performance Indicators to look at are:

  • Delivery rate
  • Open rate
  • Click-through rate
  • Conversions

Automated email campaigns should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Automation’s cheap, effective and allows you to directly and persuasively target the right users at the right time, using the best content to address their unique needs.

 

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