How To Boost Your Business With Automated Email Marketing

Email is one of the most influential tools for acquiring and retaining customers. For one thing, your target demographic enjoys it. For example, 51 percent of clients say they prefer to reach brands via email. As a result, it is more popular than any other channel.

Email marketing also has a high return on investment (ROI). Every dollar spent on email marketing generates an average of $35. However, producing and delivering emails takes time, especially as your business expands.

You must automate your email marketing to get the most out of it. Fortunately, several tools make this simple. This post will explain how to automate email marketing and which platforms are appropriate for the job.

What is Automated Email Marketing?

Using pre-programmed procedures, email marketing automation sends the correct message to the right recipient at the right time.

Email marketing automation can be as simple as scheduling an email to send at a specified time. However, email automation is capable of much more.

You can send a single email or a series of emails in response to various triggers. For example, you can send an email responding to a user's action on your website. Modern email marketing automation software relieves you of a lot of manual work by simplifying:

• Subscriber list management
• Email creation
• Message personalization
• A/B testing
• Analytics

Email Marketing Automation's Pros

We've already highlighted the excellent ROI of email marketing and how consumers prefer to be addressed via email. But why do you need to employ an email marketing automation tool?

Here are a few reasons.

Efficiency

Email automation allows you to save time and effort. For example, you don't have to compile and manage your mailing list manually. Let's imagine you want to send an email to a large group of people, but you want everyone to receive it at different times depending on their local time or work schedule.

It would be impossible to send emails manually throughout the day. However, an email marketing platform tool can do it mechanically while working on other things. Many automation tools can even determine the best moment to deliver the email to each list member.

Scalability

If you only have a few users on your list, you can email them your current updates without using an automation service. However, delivering regular emails (containing news, promotions, helpful information, and more) to numerous divisions of an extensive list becomes impossible.

Your firm can benefit from an email marketing automation platform. You may send regular, tailored emails to everyone on your list, no matter how large it becomes.

Increased Customer Retention Rate

Customers have a limited attention span. They may have purchased your goods once, but if they had never heard from you anyway, they would forget about you. Who can fault them? They receive marketing emails, advertisements, and social media posts from various businesses every day.

Maintaining contact with your consumers is difficult without automated emails. Email marketing automation helps keep your existing consumers informed and convince them why they enjoy your product.

Message Personalization

One-size-fits-all emails are no longer acceptable. Only 72 percent of customers claim they engage with marketing communications suited to their interests. It is considerably more accurate for "frequent shoppers." Eighty percent of them will only buy from brands that tailor the experience.

Marketers are aware of this; 69% use some form of email customization. However, to be competitive, you must also tailor your email messaging. An email marketing automation tool can assist you in accomplishing this without adding a lot of unnecessary human effort.

When Should You Use Email Marketing Automation?

You can tailor automated emails according to your company's specific requirements. In addition, you can send any form of email at any moment. Along with that, there are a few essential sorts of marketing emails that we recommend firms incorporate into their email marketing plans.

Emails Regarding Abandoned Carts

On eCommerce websites, about 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. You can persuade some of these customers to return and finalize their purchases. Send them an email to remind them of the item in their shopping basket. Making a unique offer to the customer on that item may attract them to return.

You can accomplish this by combining your email automation platform with website tracking. It's even feasible to send emails based on other site visitor activity, such as seeing a resource on a specific topic.

Newsletters

Regularly sending out newsletters is a great strategy to keep your audience interested. They allow you to combine several pieces of critical information, such as company news, events, promotions, and intriguing content, into a single email.

Email Promotions

Promotional emails are email campaigns aimed at spreading the word about something your company is offering. They could be focused on a new product, a service, free downloading content, or an upcoming event. In addition, they frequently offer discounts or special deals to your subscribers on the product.

Promotional emails can be quite effective at generating interest in your brand. However, they are most effective when you target subscribers who are most likely to be interested in the promotion.

Welcome Emails to New Subscribers

Businesses invest a significant amount of time cultivating current connections, but do you know when a list subscriber is most likely to buy from you?

Immediately after they subscribe.

At that point, they are interested enough in your company to sign up for your mailing list. It's an excellent opportunity to persuade them to convert. Send a welcome email, or possibly a series of welcome emails, to accomplish this. Welcome emails are highly received, with an average open rate of 86.03%. In comparison, the average open rate of a newsletter is 18.76 percent.

Reminders for Events and Appointments

Do you have an upcoming event?

Make sure your audience doesn't forget about it. A few event reminder emails sent ahead of time can help boost attendance. You can also automate individual appointment reminders.

Auto-Replies to Inquiries

When potential customers contact you, they want a quick response. But you're probably not accessible to respond to every email right away. Instead, you may set up an auto-reply to queries using email marketing automation. For example, you could tell the person how soon they can expect a response from a human and point them in the right direction in the meanwhile.

The Most Important Features of Email Marketing Automation Tools

Hopefully, you are persuaded of the advantages of an email marketing automation solution. So, let's look at what email software is capable of.

Email Campaign Development Software

You must first generate an email before worrying about automated triggers and A/B testing. It should be professional in appearance and feature your company's branding. It's also critical these days that it's smartphone responsive.

Fortunately, you don't need any design or coding skills to accomplish this. The best email marketing solutions offer templates that you can customize to create a beautiful, responsive email.

Triggers

A trigger is what initiates an automated email campaign. For example, you may use a time trigger at 5 p.m. on Jan. 20. There are also more sophisticated triggers. For example, an email can be sent automatically when someone:

• Subscribes to your mailing list
• Performs a specific action on your website
• Clicks on a link from a prior email campaign
• Celebrates a birthday or an anniversary with your organization
• Purchases your item

Unlike promotional emails or newsletters, these emails are sent to specific list subscribers appropriately.

Automated Drip Marketing

A drip campaign is a sequence of emails tied to one another. They are often used to guide leads along the customer journey. These emails can be sent on a set timetable. A subscriber joining your list, for example, could cause informational emails about your product to be delivered to them once a month.

The flow of some drip programs is more complicated. For example, the second email in the series may alter depending on whether or not the first email was opened.

A/B Split Testing

A/B testing, often known as split testing, aids in the improvement of campaign performance. An A/B test is when you send different copies of an email to a small test group to discover which one performs the best.

It's standard practice, for example, to send the same email with several subject lines. Other alternatives, such as testing content or photos, may be available depending on your email marketing platform. In addition, there are various sorts of A/B testing software accessible.

An A/B test allows you to choose the best version of your email and allows you to discover more about your target audience.

Analytics and Response Tracking

Email marketing is more than just sending emails. It's all about participation. First, you must be able to see the results of your emails. Are they being accessed? How many people clicked on each of the links?

Email marketing automation tools typically include reporting and analytics to assist you in measuring the success of your emails and improving future efforts.

Email Marketing Automation Tools

There are numerous email marketing automation tools available on the internet. We have picked a few top-tier automation tools for you, have a look at them.

Best Practices for Email Marketing Automation

Once you've decided on an email marketing automation platform, use the recommendations below to make the most of it and learn about best practices.

Create a High-Quality List

Don't just compile a long list of contacts. Instead, concentrate on the quality of those contacts. For example, people who have demonstrated an interest in your company, product, or content are considered high-quality list subscribers.

These are the individuals who are most likely to convert. By allowing subscribers to opt-in, you can build a high-quality list. You can accomplish this in a variety of ways, including:

• Including sign-up forms on your website
• Including a checkbox at the bottom of your forms that says "Add me to your list."
• Obtaining email addresses from users who download an asset
• Having a sign-up station at trade exhibitions and other events

Email marketing automation services include forms you can embed on your website, but these aren't your only possibilities. For example, try one of these lead generation plugins if you have a WordPress site.

Audience Segmentation

Businesses are not always adept at conveying the appropriate message to the appropriate recipient. Nevertheless, many businesses believe they are doing a good job: 59 percent of marketers say that most emails they send are relevant and beneficial.

However, only 15% of consumers say that the bulk of marketing emails they get are relevant and helpful. So, how can you become one of the few brands that effectively target its emails?

It is critical to segment your list. Segments are groups of persons on your contact list who share a characteristic, such as:

• Location
• Language
• Age
• Gender
• Occupation
• Lifestyle
• Interests
• History of purchases
• Stage of the buyer

You can tailor your campaigns to a specific audience's needs and desires by segmenting your email list.

Concentrate on Each Stage of the Customer Journey

The individuals on your list are at various stages of their relationship with your company.

Some people have no idea who you are. These individuals may be on your contact list due to downloading a white paper from your website or completing a form on your blog. Other list subscribers have been receiving your emails for some time, but they have not yet converted.

There are, of course, your devoted customers. Different types of emails should be sent to each of these categories. Make sure that no part of the funnel is overlooked. Sending exciting content to people in the early stages, for example, can teach them more about your company. In the meantime, you can reward your current clients with special incentives.

Keep an Eye on Email Frequency

Have you ever signed up for an exciting email list only to be irritated because you received far too many emails?

The majority of us have.

Sending regular emails to keep your audience interested is critical, but you must be mindful of how frequently you contact each list member.

So, how frequently is too frequently? There is no all-encompassing rule. Examine your email analytics in your email marketing automation program to see how you perform.

It's a red flag if your open and click-through rates decrease while your unsubscribes increase. Examine the results of sending fewer emails.

Avoid using the Spam Folder

You visualize your emails safely arriving in each target recipient's inbox. However, this is not always the case. For example, 11.1 percent of all emails are never delivered to the inbox. Several things influence email deliverability.

If any of the following apply to your emails, they may end up in the spam folder:

• Your list contains email addresses that are no longer active.
• You employ words that are known to set off spam filters.
• Your emails are marked as junk by receivers who do not find them helpful or relevant.
• You're sending too many emails at once.

Run A/B tests on everything.

A/B testing implies continually sending an optimized version of your email campaign. For example, if one subject line in the A/B test just does not resonate with your audience, you will not make the error of sending it to your whole contact list.

A/B testing also allows you to understand your potential clients better to design better future campaigns.

Summary

Email marketing is a must-have for any organization due to its high ROI. And it's simple to do so with the correct email automation system. Email marketing automation can help you create an audience, improve customer connections, and sell products.