Everything You Need To Know About Email Marketing Automation - A Comprehensive Guide
- By Frank Morrison
- May 10, 2021
- 7:00 pm
- No Comments
Email marketing isn’t dead. There are 3.9 billion active emails around the world and according to Marketing Sherpa, 72% of consumers prefer email as the main channel for receiving promotional messages.
Marketers have more tools to utilize than ever before — email automation is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity.
If you’re wondering how to leverage email for your own benefit and automate the entire process, look no further — we got you covered.
Let’s begin.
What is Email Automation?
Simply put, email marketing automation or email automation is a process where campaigns are sent out automatically to your customers and subscribers based on a certain set of triggers, actions, or schedules.
The Process of Email Automation
Is Email Marketing Automation and Marketing Automation the Same?
Is email marketing automation and marketing automation the same?
Email automation is a part of marketing automation. It allows you to build subscriber lists, schedule autoresponders, and launch drip campaigns.
Marketing automation focuses on nurturing, building brand awareness, forming a relationship with your customers, identifying possible leads, and capturing them.
Examples of Email Automation
Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns (also known as lifecycle emails or autoresponders) are a series of automated, pre-written emails that are sent out to your subscribers based on a specific timeline or user actions.
The main purpose of drip campaigns is to drive the recipients toward conversion. They continuously provide information or ‘drips’ about products, services, new features, updates, and more.
All the other emails we’re going to mention falls into this category.
Welcome Emails
At first, your subscribers will not be ready to buy from you.
By sending them a welcome email the moment they signed up, you can introduce them to your brand and show them what you have to offer.
Here’s how to make a welcome email in 4 steps:
Write a welcome message and thank your subscribers for signing up
Show them where to get started: give some product or content recommendations
Insert your website address, your social links to further engagement
Tell them how often will you send emails and what they will receive
Welcome emails will allow you to build a meaningful relationship with your recipients and eventually convert them into customers.
Transactional Emails & Invoices
The purpose of these emails is quite self-explanatory. When a customer makes a purchase, an email with the details of the transaction gets sent out.
You can set up automated invoice workflows with ease by using a tool like ConvertKit.
Additionally, giving coupons, product recommendations, and adding social media links to those emails will drive more leads to you.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned carts and unfinished checkouts can be quite common — in fact, it can be as high as 65% percent.
It occurs mostly because of hidden costs, expensive shipping, or a lengthy checkout process.
Abandonment or checkout recovery emails are designed to bring back the visitors to your site and make them complete the checkout.
If you offer a discount, the chances of converting them will be even higher.
Some email marketing platforms such as Active Campaign or Benchmark Email come with cart abandonment features, but typically, you’ll need to connect an additional tool (a cart saver), if you wish to send out these emails automatically.
Event Announcements
One of the ways you can promote your upcoming events is by sending out automated announcements.
These emails serve as reminders for your subscribers — if you utilize them to promote your event, the number of attendees will definitely increase.
You can further your efforts by offering free seats for your web visitors if they sign-up for your email list.
Reasons for Using Email Automation
A More Personalized Customer Experience
Automation may sound robotic, but in reality, it allows you to connect with your subscribers on a much more personal level.
Personalizing emails starts with organizing your subscribers into different lists depending on their behavior, interest, or engagement.
That’s called segmenting, and later in this article, we’ll talk about why it’s essential for your email marketing strategy.
It enables you to learn more about your ideal customer or target audience. You can to talk them more personally and find out what they’re interested in.
That lets you create more relevant messages tailored to their needs and converting them into customers will be much more straightforward.
Higher Customer Retention Rates
Keeping your customers is as important as getting them. Invespro says existing customers are 50% more like to try a new product, than new ones.
By increasing your customer retention by just 5% percent, your profits could go up by 95%.
That being said, how do you retain your existing customers?
Send customized welcome, and thank-you emails. These emails show that you care about your customers and value when they purchase something from you.
Offer special discounts and promotions. That will encourage your customer to keep making purchases and interact with your brand.
Develop a strong, lasting relationship with your customers. Send meaningful messages, provide value and ask for feedback.
That being said how do you retain your existing customers?
Send customized welcome, and thank-you emails. These emails show that you care about your customers and value when they purchase something from you.
Offer special discounts and promotions. That will encourage your customer to keep making purchases and interact with your brand.
Develop a strong, lasting relationship with your customers. Send meaningful messages, provide value and ask for feedback.
It Saves Time and It's More Efficient
As its name suggests, email automation handles everything on its own- replacing manual intervention altogether.
After you created your workflows and campaigns, every action of your sequence will take place automatically — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without you doing anything with it.
Email automation enables you to automate CRM tasks such as customer data, lead scoring, nurturing, and ROI calculation.
You’ll be able t focus on creating valuable content and coming up with new product ideas, instead of worrying about your campaigns.
With that said, it’s important to monitor your messages’ performance from time to time, analyze results and test out different methods.
Getting Feedback Becomes Easier
By sending out surveys, doing customer research, or asking for product feedback, you will discover a lot about your recipients.
You’ll get insights from your customers. If done correctly, they will tell you why they bought your product, what were their expectation, what did they like about it, what are their goals with the product, what should you improve, and a lot more — plus, you can automate the process entirely.
Tips for Email Automation
Utilize Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are a great way to collect email addresses. They are incentives (such as eBooks, checklists, or cheatsheets) that marketers give away for free when someone sign-ups to an email list.
Before you start, there are a few steps you need to take.
First, identify your audience — those who come to your site and follow your content regularly. Then, find out what obstacles are they facing — what are their struggles and ask yourself how can you solve their problems.
Although lead magnets are free, the key is to provide as much value to your visitors as possible. Give something irresistible, that they cannot ignore — something, that contains practical advice and provides a permanent solution.
Be professional. Make sure you design your lead magnet carefully — pay attention to the quality and only include information that your audience needs.
If you follow these steps, you’ll get the emails of those who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
You’ll create more targeted marketing campaigns, which will drive better results — more sales, more leads, higher open rates, conversions, and engagement.
Create Valuable Content
Email automation makes sending out content a lot easier, however, you still need to create it.
Have a content strategy. Figure out how often will you create content, what will you talk about, and how will it benefit your subscribers — what value will they get out of it.
Make it informative, easy-to-digest, and educational. Use your blog post and repurpose it. Compare brands, products, link out to other articles — utilize landing pages and lead magnets.
Craft a Strategy
As we mentioned earlier, one of the biggest mistakes in email automation is the lack of strategy.
If you don’t know what are you’re trying to achieve, you won’t succeed.
Follow the steps we outlined previously, and start planning your moves.
Choose the Right Software
Selecting the right platform is a crucial part of your strategy. Email marketing is a highly competitive space — there are dozens of options on the market and going with the wrong tool comes with enormous costs.
Take a look at your goals and the objectives you laid out — remember what you are trying to achieve with email marketing.
Write down all the features you need to make your plan a reality and find a service that’s equipped with those particular features.
Collect Data & Create Segmented Lists It
Your visitors have different interests. They are coming to your website and signing up for your email list for different reasons, which means you cannot send them the same emails about the same subjects — you need to segment.
Segmentation is the categorization of your recipients into smaller groups (segments) based on a certain set of criteria such as location, behavior, interest, or engagement.
Make your campaigns as targeted as possible. Start collecting data — determine the characteristics of each group and create content for each segment.
That way, you will send more relevant messages and the likelihood of your subscriber interacting with you will be significantly higher.
Focus On Customer Journey
A customer journey is a process of a visitor signing up to your email list and becoming a customer.
The goal is the move the prospects through your funnel as smoothly as possible — make sure to remove every issue or obstacle that prevents them from making a purchase.
Before you start, you might want to consider creating a customer journey map. Here’s one made by Campaign Monitor that shows you how the process looks like
Email Marketing Automation Platforms to Check Out
Active Campaign
Active Campaign is a customer experience automation (CX) platform that’s used by 145 000 companies.
CX automation creates an optimized customer interaction by automating the traditional, behind-the-scenes marketing, and sales processes.
Plus, you’ll get pre-built automation workflows, which combine email marketing, CRM, and machine learning for a smooth and seamless customer journey.
Pardot
Pardot is a platform developed by Salesforce that provides marketing automation services for agencies and B2B companies.
It allows you to manage your marketing and sales department from one central dashboard — that way, generating leads and moving them through the pipeline will be much quicker.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is an online marketing company founded in 1995. Since then, they became a global email marketing operation — one of the most trusted names in the space.
With their features, they are appealing to smaller size-sized businesses. Among these are triggered-based email series, event management capabilities, and a built-in analytics tool.
Dot Digital
Dot Digital (formerly known as dotmailer) provides an omnichannel marketing solution for B2B, B2C, and NFP marketers.
Features include email marketing, SMS messaging, live chat, social media ads, and more.
Moreover, Dot Digital connects with CRMs and e-commerce systems, such as Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, or Magento.
Customer.io
Customer.io focuses on automated messaging features and behavioral campaigns.
It’s built for more experienced users.
The platform offers Ai-based automation tools, customized behavior data, transactional campaigns, advanced segmentation, and much more.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a complex email marketing automation platform that’s dedicated to helping business reach more people and connect with their audience.
They offer a free plan, that enables you to build opt-in forms, landing pages or give away lead magnets.
You can also get a 14 day free trial or opt for a premium plan, which comes with advanced automation features and unlimited sales funnels.
How to Manage Email Automation Directly from WordPress
Omnisend
Omnisend is an e-commerce marketing automation platform that specializes in campaign engagement, shopping behavior and SMS messaging.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing solution that charges based on the number of emails you send.
The plugin gives you the ability to manage your forms, lists and workflows from the WP Dashboard.
HubSpot
An inbound marketing platform that’s designed to attract visitors, drive more leads and close customer.
There’s a generous free forever plan available, allowing you to get started with CRM and marketing automation.
OptinMonster
A lead generation tool focusing on pop-ups, opt-in forms and lead magnets.
Email marketing automation for Wix
For Wix users, there is a built-in email marketing tool available, Ascend. It comes many powerful features and automation is one of them.
You can set up automated workflows to keep your visitors connected and engaged with your brand.
Here’s how to do set up a workflow in Ascend in 4 simple steps:
Click on New Automation
Set a trigger (e.g. new form sign-up)
Define the action (e.g. welcome email) that will take place in response to the trigger
Decide when the action should happen (e.g. immediately, 2 days from now, a week from now, etc.)
To make the setup process even easier, Wix has pre-installed automation templates and recommended automation.
If you’d like to learn more about Wix, click here.
Conclusion
Email automation makes marketing scalable. It allows you to send the right messages, at the right time for the right people.
By creating personalized content and nurturing your relationships with your customers, a higher conversion rate is guaranteed.
If you’re stuck, try ConvertKit. It’s more than just an email marketing tool: it’s an all-in-one marketing platform with powerful features.
It comes with an intuitive editor, segmentation features, the ability to sell products, and more.
Use the pre-made landing page templates, and start building your email presence.
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