Email Automation: How to Use It To Supercharge Your Everyday Marketing Tasks

As one of the most profitable lead generation tools, businesses and marketers can no longer ignore the benefits of email marketing. 

But, here’s the problem. 

Email marketing is time-consuming. There are too many things to handle, from campaign monitoring and managing opening and closing rates to engaging subscribers. 

So, what can you do? How to manage time yet make profits?

Well, here’s some good news — email automation. 

Top email automation tools like MailChimp or popular MailChimp alternatives such as ConstantContact, and ConvertKit can automate your email marketing from top to bottom. 

So you can keep making sales even when you’re sleeping!

Let’s see what email automation is and how to use it to explode your sales numbers. 

Here we go. Shall we? 

What Is Email Automation? 

The use of pre-defined flows/rules for triggering emails to users at a scheduled time is called email automation. Generally, this involves utilizing any reliable automation marketing tool such as MailChimp, Eloqua, Marketo, etc. 

An automation marketing tool connected with your web analytics can help you determine deep insights about your users, such as their preferences, behavior, legacy sales data, etc. These insights can help you personalize your email communication to increase relevancy and increase engagement to drive traffic to your website. 

Amazing Email Automation Examples To Inspire You

Some great examples of email automation sequences are as follows: 

1. Welcome Email

A welcome email is one of the first impressions a brand/company can leave upon its subscribers. When a user signs up for a mailing list, this event triggers the welcome email for the signed-up user. Sending out welcome emails is an excellent way to thank the subscribers and provide them with more information about the company/product. For example, 

Airbnb welcome email is informative with a clear introduction to their features by including explore homes and explore experiences click-to-action buttons for a successful onboarding experience. 

2. Cross-Selling Recommendations Emails

When a user orders from the website, this event triggers the cross-selling recommendation email. A cross-selling recommendation email is nothing but sending recommendations of products or services similar to the user’s recent purchase.  

Did you know? 

• As per the McKinsey report, cross-selling can increase sales by 20% and profits by 30%. 
• According to Invespcro, personalized cross-sells can make up to 7% of website visits and account for 26% of the revenue. 

3. Cart Abandonment Emails 

A staggering average of 69.82% of online carts are abandoned by users. Cart abandonment email serves as a quick reminder that they never finished checking out after placing some product or service in their cart. Hence, setting up automated cart abandonment emails can lower cart abandonment rates. Other interesting statistics to focus upon is that 45% of receivers open cart abandonment emails, 21% click on them, and 50% of customers who click through convert. 

These statistics summarize that these emails help encourage the users to come back and complete the pending task of checking out, which they might have skipped in the first place without the email itself.

4. Birthday Emails 

Some businesses collect the date of birth whenever a user signs up. ECommerce businesses can send a personalized birthday greeting to build a stronger relationship by using this information. 

Birthday emails effectively boost sales. 

Did You Know?

As per an exciting Campaign Monitor blog,

• You can get 481% higher traction with birthday emails when compared to any promotional emails.
• Marketers like you can open the door for 342% higher revenue per email when you send birthday emails with powerful offers to your customers.
• Want unique clicks? Try sending birthday emails as they drive 179% higher unique click rates when compared to any random promotional emails.

Sending exclusive discount codes or can’t-resist coupons encourages customers to make purchases they otherwise would skip. For example, certain businesses offer exclusive birthday discounts such as Sephora, American Eagle, Krispy Kreme, etc.

5. Reminder Email 

Automatic email reminders are one of the best-automated emails for businesses. The reason is simple –  it reduces the manual effort and hassle of scheduling emails at particular times. Email reminders can be set up for webinars going live or webinar registrations, for account/ service/ subscription expiration, for appointments, or for product launches. 

For example, GoDaddy sends a set of email reminders to the user whose domain name is about to expire. They send email campaigns frequently until the domain name expires, asking them to renew the same. They even provide discount offers to tempt users to renew their domain name. 

6. Newsletters And Blog Update Emails

Email outreach is one of the common ways to promote your content. Hence, regular newsletters and blogs are a part of an effective digital marketing strategy. 

An assortment of automated newsletters can level up your content marketing game, such as daily newsletters, a weekly round-up newsletter, personalized newsletter, etc. 

Repurposing the blog content or sharing new blog content in an automated email sequence can help users stay updated with your brand.

7. Transactional Emails

Organizations use transactional emails to facilitate important transactions requested by the user. As per definition, these are not used to generate more revenue but to communicate important information to the user. 

However, a study proves that transactional emails have an average click-through rate of 4.2 percent compared to 1.5 percent for non-transactional emails.

Transactional emails include communication for order confirmation, payment details, shipping details, order tracking details, password reset, email address confirmation, etc. 

The Benefits of Email Automation 

1. Reduced Manual Intervention

In an effective email marketing strategy, marketers must send out emails to the right person at the right time. However, managing all these email campaigns can become a daunting task at one point in time. 

Hence, the need for automating emails becomes necessary as it reduces manual intervention and saves a lot of time. And that’s the reason why 51% of companies in a survey agreed that they use marketing automation. 

2. Nurturing Leads 

Today’s sales cycles are relatively long, resulting in too many dormant leads. It is necessary to nurture leads and build relationships over time to resolve such scenarios. 

Automated emails are central to the process of building solid relationships with potential customers by sending relevant and engaging content. They help in making prospects more receptive towards the business. 

3. Benefit To The Sales Team

With automated nurturing emails, prospects are kept warm until the salesperson contacts them. Once the prospect is more receptive to the business, it helps the salesperson persuade and convert them into customers quickly. 

4. Increased Revenues

Utilizing automated email workflows can dramatically increase engagement rates and conversion rates, thereby significantly boosting revenue for the business.

Targeted communications can increase the probability of a lead to convert, and this small impact can lead to a more significant impact in terms of revenues.

5. Easily Scalable 

Email automation is easily scalable as compared to manual email marketing efforts. Marketers only need to define a set of trigger rules and email content to maintain the marketing funnel for the users based on their actions.

With email marketing tools such as MailChimp, Eloqua, Campaign Monitor, HubSpot, etc., setting up emails has become a breeze for marketers.

6. Building Customer Relationships

With the help of email marketing tools/ platforms, marketers can cover most of the action-based triggers and send personalized content to the users. 

Informative and engaging content can help build valuable customer relationships and trust. 

7. Maintaining Engagement Apart From Social Media 

With the widespread digital landscape, everyone is on social media, but they do not need to see your brands’ communications in their feed. There could be a chance they might miss it in their feed. Therefore, automated email updates ensure that a user never misses out on updates from your business. 

With that said, it is not that one should ignore social media strategy. Instead, you can add social links in your automated emails to drive traffic to your social handles as well.

8. Detailed Email Testing and Analysis

Most email automation tools/platforms offer features to test different types of email elements, targeting, and segmentation with the help of A/B testing, multivariate testing, etc. Testing other email elements are essential to determine what works best for your users. 

Apart from testing, it is necessary to check important KPIs of email marketing such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, etc. Detailed insights can be pulled easily with the help of automation tools/ platforms when connected with web analytics. 

9. Leveraging Personalized Content 

A successful email marketing campaign requires personalization. Studies report astonishing statistics to support personalization in email marketing:

• 74% of marketers cite targeted personalization as an essential way to engage customers. – eConsultancy
• 53% of marketers say ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers results in moderate to significant revenue impact. – DemandGen
• Marketers see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences. – Monetate

On the most basic level, automated emails help you add the customers’ first names and last names into the email. This only feels much more personal rather than reading:

Dear Customer or Hi there. 

Personalized content encourages recipients to take action, thereby increasing engagement rates.

Make The Most Of Email Automation In Five Simple Steps:

1. Segmentation

In an automated email sequence, it is necessary to segment the users carefully. Try segmenting basis demographics, preferences, purchase behavior, etc. 

Your automation KPIs will showcase beautiful numbers if you segment your users and define personas. As a result, it will prevent sending the same automated email to the wrong audience. It is necessary to send relevant messaging to the users instead of sending the same message in a batch and blast campaign. 

2. Add Personalization

As mentioned above, one cannot avoid the importance of personalization in email marketing strategy. Specifically, in automated emails, try to remove the robotic tone and incorporate simple personalized elements.

3. A/B Testing 

Various marketers perform A/B tests on different email creative elements, subject lines, segments, etc. Performing an A/B test helps determine user preference which directly impacts the engagement rates and, thereby, the conversion rates themselves.

4. Spam Filtering

Prioritization of user actions is an absolute necessity. In general, automated email workflows rely on user actions, leading to spamming if multiple user actions occur within a set timeframe. Hence, be cautious while setting up email triggering rules to avoid spamming in the name of the automation.

5. Measure Results 

One should not set and forget about any automated email workflow. It is necessary to measure results to determine whether the emails are serving the purpose of the campaign or not.

Final Words:

With proper planning, email marketing automation can help increase digital engagement, lead generation, and business performance. And in recent years, email marketing automation has consistently worked in the background for the business, allowing it to concentrate on its other goals. With its tremendous benefits, you must utilize email automation in 2022 to its full strength.