Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
A Comprehensive Guide To Email Marketing Automation
Digital marketing strategies are consistently evolving; however, email marketing has remained a reliable foundation for our efforts. With this, however, the days of aimless and non-selective email blasts are in the past! It’s time to get up to speed on the new era of email marketing automation. This powerful tool can transform your campaigns, delivering tailored content and engaging marketing to your lists of subscribers. Let’s take a look at everything you should know, including what they are, the best practices and how to measure and analyse them. This is the future of unlocking your business’s full potential with both fundamentals and advanced strategies.
What Is Email Marketing Automation & Why Should You Use Them?
Simply put, email automations are pre-arranged workflows available on platforms like Klaviyo and MailChimp that send your targeted emails to your list of subscribers based on their previous actions and triggers. This could be something as basic as subscribing to your weekly newsletter or more advanced, such as checking out an order on your website.
These workflows allow you to improve your personalisation, relevance and efficiency. Better personalisation will lead to better engagement and conversions. Email automation also saves the effort and time of marketing specialists by repeating the repetitive tasks so they can focus more on the strategy. As well as this, you can ensure you are delivering the right message to the right person at the right time that aligns with the subscriber’s behaviours and interests. These emails will see an improved click-through rate and more sales!
The Types Of Email Marketing Automations
There are four types of email marketing automation, these are:
Time-Based Automation
Welcome emails, onboarding sequences, thank you for your purchase messages and regular newsletter sent on a specific time schedule.
Trigger-Based Automation
Sent when your subscriber has conducted a specific action, including email opens, link clicks and cart abandonments.
Behaviour-Based Automation
Your behaviour-based emails will be sent to your subscribers based on their browsing patterns, engagement levels and purchase history.
Drip Campaigns
A drip campaign is a sequence of emails that your subscribers will receive at predefined intervals, guiding them through a nurturing process. You choose how often they receive the emails and how many they receive.
Building Effective Email Marketing Automations
There are four key things to do in order to build effective email marketing automation.
The first step that needs to take place is segmentation. You should segment your email subscription list into behaviours, preferences, demographics and more to ensure you are only sending people content that is relevant to them.
The very best automation will not work if you do not provide your audience with compelling and enticing content. If your content is a little dull, too wordy or irrelevant, your subscribers will be unlikely to click any links and will most likely unsubscribe. A great email is both engaging and valuable.
Your customers’ journey is incredibly important, and you need to understand this in order to plan the most appropriate automation for them. If you were your own customer, what messages would you want or need to see to convert you to a sale? The different stages of your automation need to be compelling based on customers’ needs at specific times.
The most powerful automation workflows include a welcome series to make a significant first impression with new subscribers. Abandoned cart emails have proven to be equally effective, allowing you to remind your potential customers to check out whilst enticing them with a discount code. Drip campaigns allow you to nurture leads with a series of emails that provide them with value on the journey to convert. Finally, automated responses allow you to effectively reach out to subscribers who have followed specific actions such as link clicks and checkouts.
Measuring & Analysing
Analytics Tools
With automation, you can use advanced analytics tools to gain essential insights into the behaviour of your customers, which allows you to produce better content aligning with their needs for improved results.
Key Performance Indicators
Start looking at and tracking your KPIs, including the essential click-through rates, open rates and conversion rates, and the revenue you have generated from your automation campaigns.
A/B Testing
Conducting A/B testing on your content, including subject lines, preview texts, sending times and the content itself, allows you to refine your automation campaigns to produce better results.
Advanced Email Marketing Automations
Predictive Analytics
This allows you to anticipate the behaviour of your subscribers so you can better tailor relevant and effective content for them.
Lead Scoring
If you want to segment and prioritise your leads based on their engagement and their conversion probability, you should utilise lead scoring.
Multi-Channel Integration
If you happen to use other marketing channels like social media or SMS, you can use a multi-channel integration to sync these to your email efforts to provide a holistic customer experience.
Dynamic Content
If you want your content to change for your subscribers based on their location, behaviours and preferences, then you may opt to create emails with dynamic content.
Best Practices & Tips
Here are some of our best practices and tips to follow if you want to see successful results from your email marketing efforts:
- Always ensure you are following email marketing regulations, including GDPR and CAN-SPAM. This will allow you to retain trust from your customers and avoid future legal issues.
- Ensure your emails are desktop and mobile-friendly, as a significant portion of your subscriber list will most likely open emails from you on their phone.
- Stay updated with the latest email marketing trends and future technologies; this will keep your campaigns effective, fresh and in line with your competitors.
- Always maintain a consistent scheduling time, sending emails to your subscriber lists at the optimal time for their location and activity.
Email marketing automation is a fantastic tool if you are looking to improve your marketing strategies. Using data, segmentation and targeted content, you can create compelling and effective emails for all stages of the customer journey that increase conversion and build long-lasting relationships. With the right combination of strategy, creativity, data-driven decisions and experimentation, you will see your future email campaigns soar.
