Email automation should be used by every business whether big or small. The reason is obvious, email is the most preferred channel for generating leads in a limited budget.
Wondering how you can accurately use email automation to support, educate, and pull the customers towards a sale. This email automation guide is for you.
What is Email Automation?
Email automation is a systematic way of coming up with unique emails that target a specific group of audience at the right time without having to do the work every time.
When you think of the best way to reach millions of people in your subscriber list, email marketing automation should ring in your mind.
You can also define it as sending action triggered and time-based email to provide relevant information. It’s like having a default template for customizing your emails and sending them with a button click.
Email automation is the essence of email marketing. With effective email automation, you can disseminate your content to a large audience and realize your marketing ROI in the shortest time.
At least 87% of marketers are using email marketing to reach out to potential and existing customers.
6 Benefits Of Email Marketing Automation
The top benefits of email automation are:
1- It Scales Your Marketing Strategy
Sending emails manually to your subscribers can be a bit challenging. Sometimes your subscribers can double or even triple.
If you have over a thousand emails on your list, you can give up sending regular emails, and this affects your marketing strategy.
Related: Best Marketing Tips By World’s Greatest Marketers
With email automation, you can stay on a tight schedule and keep sending your subscribers frequent emails on time. The good thing about email automation is that it can send an email to new customers as soon as they sign up to your email list.
This increases your customer conversion rate because you can follow on customers who’ve shown some interest in your business.
Ideally, most customers expect you to send them an email as soon as they subscribe to your email list.
2 – It Saves You Time And Money
Email automation is cost-effective for any startup. It helps your business escape the cost of hiring someone to send emails to your new customers.
When a new customer signs to your email list, you can automatically send them an email, increasing your marketing efficiency. You don’t have to assign a staff member to keep replying and sending emails to your subscribers.
Additionally, customers can easily integrate into your system when they perform those actions you stipulate on the email.
The system uses the customers’ online behavior to predict the kind of message to send them, reducing the demand for additional resources to do the work.
3 – Improved Customer Retention
Every business looks forward to keeping existing customers and attracting even more. With email automation, you can improve your customer retention rate.
You can use email automation to stay in touch with your existing customers and remind them of the new offers in your business and why they should look forward to revisiting your business. When you send emails to your customers, like once a week, they will always have you in mind.
As long as the copy you are sending them is relevant, customers will be more willing to hear from you.
Related: Modern Techniques of Copywriting
Email automation helps you keep your customers coming for more.
Here is an example of an email draft that can help you bring back a customer that almost forgot about your business.
“Hi Mike, it’s been a while since we heard from you, and we wanted to inform you that we have some latest offers that we believe are meant for you. The utensil you last bought is now available at a 10% discount. Come shop with us while stock lasts.”
The above email can easily retain a customer and make them take the time to visit your business every time. When you retain most of your customers, you are going to be in business for long.
4- Increase Transactions
The main objective of sending emails is to inform people of your business offers and entice them into buying. With email automation, you can include some personalized fields in your emails and tailor them for a specific audience.
You can also customize email subject lines for your subscribers and increase your open rate by 26%.
When you apply email automation and send your customers personalized content, you can realize a transaction rate that is six times higher than before.
5- Helps You Understand Your Customers Better
How do you know more about your customers if you don’t communicate with them regularly? Email automation lets you understand your customers even when you have a million tasks on your desk.
You can find out more about the links that your customers like to click, the pages they visit more on your site, and the types of content they are more interested in.
Once you gather this information, you can work to better your business and retain customers.
6- Increases Brand Awareness To Customers
When a business adopts email automation in its marketing strategy, the results are professional and more consistent. That is, email automation can make a business look more professional and organized.
Most customers appreciate a brand that has a more decent and professional touch. A professional look makes a business win the hearts of customers in search of class.
Besides, when prospects get relevant emails from your business on time, they can better understand your business. Customers get to read about your business, and that creates your brand awareness naturally.
When your salesperson contacts a customer after a series of emails, the customer will be more willing to listen to them because they already know what the business offers.
How Does Email Automation Work?
Email automation is not that challenging for a business or a marketing profession as long as they have the best software, tools, and marketing database.
There are different ways to apply email automation in a marketing campaign. Here is an example of how email automation works:
- A customer visits your business’ official website, downloads an APK file, fills a form, places an order for your best selling item, etc.
- The system adds customers to the email-marketing database automatically.
- By using factors such as behavior, gender, location, personal interest, etc., the system places the customers in different marketing segments.
- The marketing professional or business owner creates the email campaign, sets the rules, and schedules the emails.
- Once the marketer has set the marketing campaign conditions, customers in the subscriber list start receiving emails.
How To Get Started With Email Automation
If you are looking forward to getting started in email marketing, there is no right time to jump in. Here is what you should do to keep going:
1- Pick Best Service Provider For Email Marketing
Choosing the best email marketing service provider should be your first move in email automation.
When you work with an email marketing service provider, you can easily leverage your email marketing automation and get the most out of your marketing campaigns.
Related: Hubspot, MailChimp, And Other Free Tools For Email Marketing
A service provider makes it cost-effective and easier for you to send multiple emails to all subscribers. The company provides you all the tools and email templates that you will need to manage and grow your email list faster.
2 – Build An Email Marketing List
Ideally, before you think about email automation, you should be having a significant number of existing customers you would like to be sending frequent emails.
This is what you should do. Collect contacts of all your customers regularly and use that to build your email list. If your business is just starting, you can begin from scratch and have friends, family, and relatives in your email list.
Another trick you can use to build an email list is by adding an online sign-up form on your business website. Go ahead and encourage all your social media followers to engage with your brand and sign up for your email list.
3 – Include Customer Contacts To The Email Marketing Account
You can add your contacts into the email marketing account once you prepare your email list and create an account. Import your contacts from Outlook or Gmail accounts to your new email marketing account.
If you had initially prepared an email list with your contacts, you could upload all these contacts to your marketing account.
Once you have included all contacts on your marketing account, you can focus on segmenting those contacts based on what you know about your customers.
For instance, if you run a business dealing with clothes and footwear, you can develop a separate email list for customers interested in clothes, and another list for customers interested in footwear.
When you group your customers based on their interests, you can easily personalize the emails you send them and, in so doing, increase the open rate.
4- Tailor Your Welcome Email
A welcome email is very important for any email marketing strategy. It is the first email that those in your email list receive.
You must craft it the right way to create that first impression about your business and make your audience willing to read more of your upcoming emails.
Since those who’ve signed to your email list will expect to hear from you, you should ensure your welcome email delivers some valuable content to their inbox.
Here is how to go about a welcome email:
- Use polite and persuasive language in your writing.
- Include important but basic details about your business.
- Start the email with a warm greeting.
- Inform the recipient about what they should expect to hear from you in the emails you’ll be sending regularly.
- Ensure there is something useful for the audience in this first email. For instance, you can include a discount offer or a coupon to make customers take the next step.
5- Measure Your Results
When you begin sending emails to your subscribers, you should find out if those emails help you achieve any positive results.
Most email automation tools will provide you the data and email-related metrics that you can use to determine how people are engaging with your emails.
Move a step further and find out some important metrics such as revenue, number of visits, and a growing customer base. Having an insight into your email automation helps you know if you are on the right track.
Email Automation Tips To Follow
Here are the best email marketing automation tips for savvy marketers:
1 – Send Your Emails At The Right Time
There are hundreds of emails on the internet talking about the right time you should send emails. Every marketing professional have their perception of when is the ideal time to be sending your emails.
However, the truth is that you should test and find out which time has the highest open rate. Try sending emails early in the morning, in the afternoon, or late at night, and see which time works best for your audience.
Keep sending emails on different days until you get one with the highest open rates. You should also check what times each segment of your email records the highest open rates and focus on sending emails at that time. Before sending your emails, it’s important to perform an email warm up to establish a positive sending reputation with internet service providers (ISPs) and increase the likelihood that your emails will reach your subscribers’ inboxes.
2- Use More Text That Images
Most email subscribers use email programs that block unnecessary images in their inbox. While you may be taking a lot of time to come up with high-quality images to make your emails eye-catching, you should make them lighter.
Email automation is all about speed, and wasting time on images may sound inefficient, given that most of your subscribers may not even be interested in those images.
3- Allow Your Subscribers To Manage Their Email Preferences
You should always offer an option to your subscribers to set their subscription preferences.
Ask your subscribers about when they would like to receive your emails, the kind of content they want, and how often they want to receive your emails.
This will help you segment your subscribers and improve your emailing attrition rates.
4- Focus On Building An Active Subscriber Base
Most people believe that building a larger subscriber list is the most important thing in email automation. Well, that is not true.
You can have a large subscriber list with only a bunch of active people reading your emails. Therefore, you should focus more on building an active subscriber list if you intend to boost your email automation.
5- Ask Your Subscribers What They Want
This may be the most overlooked tip by most email marketers. When sending a second email after a welcome email, you should target to know what your subscriber would like to hear from you.
Ask your subscribers what they want and pay attention to their feedback. Depending on the feedback, you can segment all your subscribers and begin to personalize your emails. This way, you can retain your subscriber for longer because you will be feeding them relevant content.
Best Email Automation Tools
The top email automation tools that you can use to minimize your email marketing efforts and maximize the productivity are:
1- Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the best tools you can have for your email automation. Although it may look shallow for advanced email automation, Mailchimp is good at what it does. Here are some reasons why you should opt for this tool:
- It enables you to send a welcome sequence to all new subscribers.
- You can use it to follow up on your messages.
- It makes it simple to customize all order notifications form customers.
- It comes with a feature that enables you to engage all inactive customers on your email list.
2- Marketo
Marketo is an all-in-one email marketing and automation tool. Unlike other tools, it helps you with mobile marketing, customer base marketing, and lead management.
As a cloud-based tool, it helps you to build customer relationships and retain them for longer.
Another advantage of using Marketo is that it comes with a free trial. That means you can try using it for some time before you commit to buying.
With extensive features for customers, this tool seems to be the best you can get for email automation.
3- Moosend
Moosend is a more simplified email automation tool. It comes with all the advanced features such as well-designed templates, AI cross-selling recommendations, and weather-based email triggers.
With all these features at your disposal, you can manage your emails and retain your customers.
The pricing for this tool makes it more cost-effective for small and upcoming businesses.
Additionally, you don’t need to be a guru in email marketing to use Moosend, making it the best tool for beginners. However, compared to other tools, it is a little weaker on reporting.
4- Hubspot
Hubspot is one of the best tools you can get for your email marketing campaign.
The tool comes with all features you need, such as landing pages, CRM, chats, marketing automation, forms, and email marketing. It is an ultimate tool for companies looking forward to increasing sales through email marketing.
The tools offer a free version for small businesses. However, to get their advanced features, you’ll have to dig deeper into your pockets.
5- ConvertKit
ConvertKit is another useful email automation tool you can count on. This tool is built for bloggers, e-commerce stores, and other businesses.
It comes with a simple user interface, which makes it easier to use. With a handful of triggers, the tool allows you to create your email automation and set the conditions for sending emails to your subscribers.
The tool has four main types of features that you can use to make your email marketing a piece of cake. It enables you to send an email sequence, segment your subscribers, remove a tag, use the ‘if’ based condition, and speed up your automation flow.
6- Mailjet
Mailjet provides you the basic email automation features and gives you the chance to custom them based on the result you want.
With this tool, you can:
- Choose dates to send a sequence of emails to your subscribers.
- Modify your email sequence when your contacts change their email preferences.
- Send welcome emails to new subscribers.
- Follow up on customers that buy from your store or sign up to your email list instantly.
The only downside with Mailjet is that it doesn’t allow you to build any advanced workflows because it lacks the ‘if’ clauses. It also lacks an in-built mechanism that enables you to integrate it with your e-commerce.
Best Email Automation Examples
Now, let us take a look at some of the most promising email marketing automation examples from the world’s best companies.
Here are the best email automation examples:
1- ‘Product Return’ Email
Amazon is one of the most successful companies using email automation to connect with customers and keep them updated.
Their ‘Product Return’ automated emails are a good way of keeping customers updated that their refunds are under process.
Since the company has millions of customers that place orders and ask for payment refunds, they apply email automation to reply to customers.
The automated emails make it needless for customers to contact their customer care desk if they have issues with product returns.
Here is a screenshot of emails from Amazon
2- Abandoned Cart Emails
Most customers normally abandon their carts when shopping online because of many reasons. It could be because they realize the items are too expensive or don’t know how to pay for the items they order.
With more abandoned carts, it is important to apply email automation to remind your customers within 24- 48 hours that they have an awaiting cart.
You can also offer the customers some incentive to entice them to visit your store and buy again.
Below is an example of an abandoned cart email from Ralph Lauren you can learn from.
3- ‘We Miss You’ Email
Sometimes your customers can take a long time before visiting your business. You can send them, “we miss you’ email to remind them of some latest business developments.
Just sending a simple email reminding your customers that you miss them can play some magic. Typeform has been sending this type of automated email to its customers to inspire them and persuade them to shop for more.
Always add something extra to the email that will give the customer another reason to visit your online store. For example, you can provide discount offer, coupon, or a free shipping offer on the email to persuade the customer.
4- Confirmation Emails
When customers buy something from your store, they would like to get an immediate email confirming the purchase. Set automated confirmation emails to remind customers when they should expect their orders to arrive or how to track their orders.
Confirmation emails give your customers peace of mind and reduce the calls and emails directed to your customer support desk.
Have a look at this example of a confirmation email from Big MOO, which intends to inform a customer of their order.
5- New Customer Onboard Emails
This type of emails gives welcome email a new meaning. By sending this type of emails to new customers you’ll be providing all the information they need, like your contacts and self-service directions.
When customers visit your online store and join your email list, follow them with welcome emails to entice and engage them with your brand.
A welcome email should have content that persuades the customer to take the next step.
It should also remind the customer how to custom their email subscription settings – that is, how they can choose the emails to receive and when to receive them from you.
Here is an example of a ‘new customer on board’ email from Sunrise.
Final Thoughts
Applying the best email automation for your business should not be that difficult.
All you can do is get the best tool and adopt the right email marketing practices I have highlighted here.
By following the tips I have shared here, you are one step away from achieving your marketing goals.
