Automation is a real buzz word nowadays. Marketing automation, in particular, is experiencing rapid reception across a variety of industries. In fact, it is becoming a central part of the marketing strategies of many companies.
With email marketing as an integral part of your digital marketing strategy, you will be able to nurture existing customers, increase your customer loyalty and boost sales.
Now the question is are you benefiting from this untapped opportunity?
This guide will help you understand how to automate email mail marketing, what it can do for your business, along with its workflows and ideas.
What is Email Marketing Automation?
Email Marketing automation facilitates the distribution of automated emails to your prospects/customers at the right time.
It automates marketing actions by automatically sending time or action triggered emails to users.
Basically, it means you can create multifunctional email campaigns within minutes with personalized messages and build strong customer relationships.
Why Do You Need Email Marketing Automation?
The following are just a few of the things that you can actually achieve with email marketing software like Teleduce:
- It helps you to save time, reduce effort, and automate the entire process of seamless communication.
- With email marketing automation, you will be able to provide personalized experiences to your prospects or customers.
- It will enable you to filter your leads based on their level of interest and engagement.
- You will be able to land quality leads and nurture them.
- It can help you build and manage email marketing campaigns.
Besides email marketing automation, your business can benefit from a complete workflow automation system as well. It will help you streamline various tasks, diminish errors, and prevent productivity from slashing into bits.
Email Marketing Automation Workflow
Let’s begin with understanding what workflows and triggers actually are.
Workflows are essentially a series of emails that you can set up within the email marketing system.
These emails are sent once your customers are ready to receive them.
Most workflows have only one email but you can include more in a single workflow.
As for triggers, they are what sends the workflow to the customers.
It can initiate any action that is combined with one of your email system’s other features.
Some of the best lead management system CRM will offer pre-built workflows and triggers. However, you can also easily create a custom workflow of your own.
How Do You Build Your Email Marketing Automation Workflow?
It’s pretty simple as it operates on conditional logic, “if A happens, then B will happen”.
This means you create specific conditions (or triggers) for a particular email to send. There are two types of triggers you can choose from.
- Campaign-based: Did your customer open the email? Did they click on a particular link in the email? These are campaign based triggers.
- Activity-based: Did your customers download a whitepaper from your website? Did they make a purchase from your landing page? These are activity-based triggers.
Each workflow can have several triggers added to it and customers will only receive those emails once the triggers have been met by certain customer actions.
Email Marketing Automation Strategy
To reap the benefits of email automation, primarily, you need to fully understand your goals and explore how Email marketing automation can help.
Below are a few strategies that you can implement to get excellent results.
1) Segmenting and Sequencing
Not all customers are the same. And, they won’t respond the same way to every message you send.
This is why you need to segregate them into smaller groups to create emails that are truly relevant to them. You can segment them according to:
- Profile Data: demographics, interests, industry, geography, etc
- Campaign Activity: how frequently they engage, last engagement, inactive, etc.
- Shopping Behaviour: purchase frequency, the purchase amount, last purchase, cart abandonment, etc
You can even target your messages by layering segments on top of each other.
Along with segmenting, you need to have a sequence that will be applied to different leads right from welcoming them to different changes in their behavior.
With an automated series of emails sent on time, you can convert leads into paying customers. After all, you can generate up to a $38 in ROI for every $1 dollar spent on email. So, make sure to prepare an email sequence for your leads.
2) Test, Try and Analyze
Did the segment you create is working effectively? Is the content you are sending giving you the results you desire?
To get answers to these questions, you need to test your email campaigns and experiment with them.
Make two versions of the same email campaign and send version A to half of your subscribers and version B to the other half.
Try different subject lines, copy and visuals and analyze the results to understand what is working.
3) Engage Customers With Dynamic Content
Dynamic content is smart content that changes based on the interest or past behavior of the customer.
Basically, it’s sending customized emails to the reader or prospects at the right moment.
In fact, 47% of the buyers engage with 3-5 pieces of content before interacting with a sales agent.
This means, to get the best result from the email marketing automation, you need great and credible dynamic content that aligns with customer’s past behaviors and satisfies their interest.
4) Drip Campaigns
Blasting a single message to all your email subscribers is really ineffective. You need to tailor your content to each lead based on their behaviors.
That’s where drip email campaigns come in. They are all about what the customers want.
They are auto-generated pre-written emails that are executed when a new subscriber is added to a nurturing campaign.
They are pre-scheduled as per intervals or user behavior or sometimes both.
Drip marketing should be a part of your email marketing strategy since they have about 80% higher open rates and 3X click-through rates.
5) Multichannel Approach
You can add other channels like SMS marketing, social media marketing into your marketing automation workflows to pack an extra punch.
This way you will have an effective email series going out along with social media reach and for the customers who have opted for SMS campaign will have a message that’s seen almost immediately.
Email Marketing Automation Best Practices
Email marketing has massive potential to showcase your brand and get new customers. So follow these best practices and revamp your email marketing automation.
1) Hygiene List: Delete invalid email ids, duplicates, try deleting unsubscribers if they are not interacting through any channel. The focus should remain on the leads that are interested in you and your business.
2) Personalize Campaigns: Create tailored email campaigns to suit individual contact’s interests. By sending personalized emails for each email segment, you can drive higher engagement rates.
3) Run Time-sensitive Campaigns: Schedule your emails based on the target user’s time zone.
4) Don’t Send Emails Without Consent: Get your subscriber’s consent before sending emails. Most email marketing tools like Teleduce require the permission of contacts to send emails.
5) Review Before You Hit ‘send’: Check Sender Name/ From Name, Reply-to address, Subject line, Preheader, any spelling mistake in content, broken links, alt text for images and UTM parameters for tracking. Test it by sending it to yourself once, and only when you are sure hit ‘send’.
Email Marketing Automation Examples
Automated email campaigns help marketers and free them from repetitive tasks thereby boosting brands to their bottom line.
But which automated email campaigns should you be sending?
Here are a few email marketing automation ideas to kick-start your brand’s email marketing automation strategy.
1) Lapsed Customer Automation: How do you entice the segment of customers who haven’t visited your website or made a purchase from your over 6 months?
Simple, use this time period as a trigger and send your lapsed customers a friendly automated email, stating you missed them along with a link to the new brochure.
2) Welcome Email: Introduce your brand to new email subscribers with automated welcome emails.
This is an opportunity to tell your brand story. You can design a series of email marketing campaigns that move your customers right from the welcome to initial interest, to buying intention to motivating them to make their first purchase with you.
3) Thank You Email: Once your subscriber has now made their first purchase, build rapport with your customers with a thank you email.
This is a great way to celebrate a customer’s purchase and bolster your new customer’s bond to your brand.
4) Feedback: Strengthen your relationship with your customers and improve your product offerings with automated feedback emails.
These are sent after the product is received. This feedbacks are important as they can empower you to make the changes that your customers want.
5) How-to Guides: Deepen your post-purchase relationship with your customers by sending them useful content.
This helps to cultivate a positive brand sentiment. You can send how-to guides about using your website or your products or services.
6) Product Discounts and Offers: You can plan and send different types of product discounts and offers to entice both your new and old customers.
You can offer discounts to users who have abandoned their carts or you can simply set up email automation to send a related product discount to customers to sweeten the deal.
7) Product Recommendation: Curate similar items of interest-based on the user’s past purchases or select best seller items and send a tempting selection of recommendations. This is a great way to cross-sell and upsell both your new and old customers.
8) Sale Countdown: This works great for eCommerce websites and even with physical stores.
If you have a sale coming, Send your subscribers’ countdown timers that a sense of urgency in your emails. With an automated sale countdown campaign, you can get people excited to buy today.
Bonus: For eCommerce businesses, here’s a Multi-channel Strategy That Drives eCommerce Revenue. Learn how to shape the path to purchase and brand loyalty by embracing effective multichannel strategies.
Best Marketing Automation Tool For Email – Teleduce
There are a lot of parts that need to be moved when it comes to email marketing automation.
But with the right strategies and workflows, you can pretty much set it and forget it.
You can effectively nurture leads, furnish highly personalized customer experiences and reduce your marketing costs by automating email marketing.
By using the best omnichannel email marketing platform like Teleduce, you get your hands on an easy-to-use email service that is particularly designed to meet the needs and requirements of email marketing professionals.
Teleduce email marketing software comes with an incredibly user-friendly interface. With Teleduce, you can create lists, manage content, send emails, automate marketing processes, and test and generate revenue at ease.
If you haven’t started using email marketing automation yet, try it today with Teleduce.
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