All about Automation in Email Marketing
Time is money, which means every minute you spend manually completing a task is potential money being lost— especially for complicated tasks like email marketing.
This is the glory of automation. It not only saves time and money but minimises potential mistakes made by human error. Not to mention it frees up precious bandwidth that you can use to focus on other areas of your business.
Automating your email marketing also provides valuable benefits to your customers or audience. We’ve already explained why emails are such a powerful (and underrated) marketing tool. But by automating the entire process, you experience a higher capacity to keep users engaged with both your brand and the sales process.
Different Ways to Automate Your Email Marketing
Email marketing is highly-customisable, which means it’s an area with massive potential.
With marketing automation, you can:
- Propel the user along different stages of the user journey through trigger emails (more on this below)
- Promote new content to drive readers to your blog
- Share special offers and discounts to boost sales or enquiries
- Encourage customers to leave feedback
- Follow up a customer enquiry in a timely manner
- Send out confirmation and welcome emails for new subscribers
- Share free resources
- Notify users that items they’re interested in are back in stock
- Utilise user data to target custom audiences based on how they’re engaging with your website
- Send reminders for payments due and upcoming appointments
- Deliver regular content and modules for an online course
- Remind inactive customers to return to an abandoned cart to finish a transaction
- Send sales invoices, shipping updates and other important documents
- Inform your team of any customer actions and sales updates through notifications and integrations
To put one of these examples into context, let’s look at how an automated trigger email campaign might work.
Let’s say a user abandons their shopping cart just before checkout. You can set up an automated email to remind them of the item they “forgot” in their abandoned cart. If they still don’t complete the transaction, you can send them a discount code to entice them to take the plunge and purchase.
Now let’s say the customer makes a purchase thanks to that well-timed discount code. A few weeks later, you could send them an update on the same or similar items they might be interested in that have just been marked down, leading to more returning customers.
And don’t forget another email kindly requesting they leave a review. Customer feedback is invaluable in building brand credibility.
The best part is, thanks to automation, this entire lead-nurturing process is completely taken care of without requiring you to do a thing.
Dos & Don’ts
Before you launch into automating that epic email campaign, there are a few things you should keep in mind.
Conduct Thorough Audience Analysis and Segmentation
It’s essential that you’re targeting the right people with the right emails. Are you sure that particular user will appreciate 40% off all baby clothes? Sending someone irrelevant emails and offers is a surefire way to guarantee they’ll click the unsubscribe button.
Always A/B Test
You never know what you’re doing wrong (or what you could be doing better) if you have nothing to compare your current efforts to. Test different campaigns with different audiences to make sure you’re getting the maximum return possible.
“Email marketing is highly-customisable, which means it’s an area with massive potential.”
Build a Dedicated Landing Page
This is a great way to not only track engagement and conversions, but create a simple user journey with a clear end action. You can read more about landing pages in our blog post here.
How to Get Started
Whether you’re analysing your user data or trying to find the right automation software, email marketing is anything but simple. Trust us— your email list is precious. You don’t want to lose those subscribers with the wrong move.