Business markets undergo numerous changes due to the ever-evolving marketing trends. New technologies are introduced and put to the application quickly in order to enhance marketing rates and draw customers. And one such marketing strategy is email marketing.
Nearly every organization uses email marketing campaigns for promotional purposes. However, sending out emails to your potential prospects is just not enough; one irrelevant email from your side can sideline you to the spam folder.
Thus, you need an email that triggers some action, stirs up some thoughts and reflects relevance to your customers. Now, if you are wondering how to do that, then the answer is simple, automate your email marketing campaign.
So, let’s delve deeper into the concept of email automation and how to use it.
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What is email automation?
Email automation is the process of setting up an automatic email that is sent as and when a person performs any action relevant to the content of the email. In other words, it is automatic sending a relevant email to the right person at the right time.
For instance, imagine you run a website that sells customized merchandise, and as a warm host, you need to send out welcome emails to everyone who signs up. But it would be a colossal waste of time if you sat down to respond to every sign-up manually. Instead, you can just automate a welcome email that is sent as and when anybody signs up to your website.
Therefore, all you need to do is define an email context, and the email will be sent each time a person meets that context. After this, your email would be sent even without your involvement; you wouldn’t even have to hit send.
How can email automation benefit your business?
Triggering personalized email messages to people based on their actions induces a sense of relevance to your message. Moreover, it feels personalized and therefore forges a long-lasting impression on customers.
Email automation is an effective marketing strategy and must be put to use by every business organization. It is a potent tool that helps businesses schedule, scale, and send relevant emails to their customers at convenient hours.
Email automation tool can benefit a business in several ways like:
1) Pave the way for scalable marketing campaigns
An automated email service enables you to measure response rates, open rates, and click rates quite well. You can effectively scale every move of your marketing campaign, therefore, saving time and effort.
2) It saves you a lot of time
One of the essential benefits the email automation technique extends is time-saving. It saves you a lot of time by automatically generating relevant responses to target audiences.
As per the Email Automation & Excellence Report 2018, email automation proves to be the least time-consuming marketing tool. Moreover, can you even imagine manually responding to every person who signs up for your newsletter? That would be tedious and unnecessary, plus the time you save here can be dedicated to other essential business aspects.
3) Email marketing can also be coordinated with other marketing channels
You might think that email automation is specifically designed for emails, but you should know that you can integrate it with other varieties of marketing tools.
You can set autopilot mode using marketing channels and use this automation technique to other e-commerce platforms and social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The best part is that you can integrate email automation with other channels without any prior technical knowledge. It is both simple and effective.
4) It makes measuring your campaigns easy
Return on investment (ROI) measurement is one of the most complicated calculations when it comes to marketing campaigns. However, with email automation, this process becomes relatively easier. Email automation eliminates the need to find complex information such as:
- Cost of setting up
- Cost of acquiring a customer
- The lifetime value of an average customer
This is because email automation profit can be extrapolated by calculating the monthly or yearly gain you earn by the technique and subtracting it from the cost you spent on the technique’s maintenance. This will quickly help you record profits, costs, and losses.
5) It adds a touch of personalization to your emails
Email personalization is probably the best thing email automation does. Although automated messages sound robotic and far away from reality, email automated messages have a decent touch of customization and relevancy to them. And this relevant message structure is what keeps customers engaged and interested.
Moreover, as per the Email Marketing Benchmark Report, automated emails display much more engagement rates than standard emails.
How to effectively use email automation techniques for your business?
As per statistics, 75% of businesses use some kind of marketing automation tool for customer engagement and retention. There are a variety of different marketing tools, but the email automation tool just sets itself apart by retaining an ROI rate of 4400%.
The best example of an effective email automation application would be Buzzfeed. It uses email automation to personally address its customers as per their preferences, requirements, and interests. Moreover, the emails contain post suggestions, tips, and notifications about other subscriptions to keep the customers engaged. Additionally, email automation altogether consumes less time, as said by 69% of marketers.
Therefore, email automation proves to be a significant utility to marketing companies. Although it isn’t very challenging to use email automation, some people oversee its power and thereby fail to capture its true essence. This is why here is a list of tips that you could use to maximize the benefits you gain from email automation. Here we go:
1) Narrate your stories well
Storytelling is and has always been a powerful marketing strategy. People tend to oversee the effect a good story can have, but you should know storytelling has been an essential time-tested principle in the marketing realm.
Some marketers pass on the opportunity to narrate stories for customer engagement which could be a loss to their marketing campaign as compelling stories draw customers.
Good stories are known to influence customers, which in turn piques their interest in your products or services. So, among every other marketing tactic, ensure to add storytelling in your automated emails.
2) Hold clean-up routines for your email list
Automated emails get sent off without any manual interruptions, which does make your work simpler but at times endangers your social standing. Sending off emails to inactive or mistaken users could present you as a spammer. This is natural because receiving emails from unwelcome parties bugs people and moves them to their spam folder.
Therefore, to escape the image of a spammer, ensure that you check your email lists and eliminate any address that is inactive, fake, or does not fall under your marketing spectrum.
Not only does this help you escape the reputation of a spammer, but it also lets you cost-effectively use email automation.
3) Work on your first impression
The first impression is the last impression, and one only gets a single chance to make a powerful first impression. Your welcome emails are your first impression on the customer; they are the first thing a customer notices.
Thus, developing a welcome email that is compelling enough to influence customers is imperative. It sets the tone for the business experience that your customer will be exposed to in the future.
4) Conduct A/B testing experiments
A/B testing or split testing is an experimental practice where two messages that are essentially the same in meaning but with different content are sent to two groups: A and B.
Then the responses are monitored and recorded how a different customer base reacts differently to the same messages. This tip also helps you observe how tone, language, and approach can make variations in the meaning of content.
5) Streamline your audience
This technique will enable you to operate a large number of customers efficiently. Instead of collecting an email and sending it off to a thousand people at once, you can simply group your audience into segments based on their actions, interests, and previous purchases.
This will allow you to send them relevant and personalized emails, therefore maintaining your email engagement and open rates. Moreover, you can review your customers’ purchase history and your prospects’ search history for extra precise details regarding email personalization.
6) Deployment of a clear and upfront CTA
There is no point in having an engaging email if it does not contain a way to draw customers to your sales funnel. CTA or ‘Call to Action’ buttons direct a customer from their emails to the business website with a single click.
For instance, if you happen to send a customer an email regarding Christmas sales, the email should contain a button or a link that directs them to the website where they can see your Christmas collection. This button or link is called CTA. It is an easy and engaging addition to your email that could blow up your sales, visiting rates, and opening rates by significant figures.
Thus, always ensure that your email has an upfront and clear pathway to CTA.
7) Play with time slots to ensure maximum ROI
Just sending out automated emails is not enough. You also need to track if they are working in your favor or not. You can do this by assessing the open rates of your emails and observe whether the email aligns well with your customers or not.
Alternatively, you can try sending off emails at different time slots and record which slot booked you the maximum open rates and ROI.
Conclusion
We hope the strategies shared here will help you get the most out of your email marketing campaigns. If you follow these best practices in email automation, you are bound to see improved results.
In case you are looking for an email marketing software for your business, check out this list.
