Marketers continue to take advantage of how effective email marketing is in promoting their businesses. However, the technology around us is changing, and for email marketing to remain successful, it needs to adapt to the changing times.
One such technology that smart companies have started using more and more is email automation. The reason for this is simple: automatic email campaigns not only offer content on time to prospects and customers but it also provides personalized and highly relevant emails to recipients.
All of these things result in more emails being opened, links being clicked, and revenue being generated.
To give you a better understanding of how automated email campaigns can benefit marketers, let’s take a look at what email automation is, its importance, and how you can grow your efforts with it.
What Is Email Automation?
The concept behind email automation is to deliver action or time-triggered messages to certain recipients that contain relevant content. Automated emails are sent out to users depending on specific actions they have taken, which is why they are also called behavior-driven emails.
These automatic messages can be as simple as birthday greetings or a whole series of workflows that are designed to nurture potential customers. Many marketers have found that email automation significantly makes email marketing a more personalized customer experience while ensuring the content is relevant to their target audience.
Furthermore, automating email campaigns is an efficient approach in communicating with prospects and existing customers. These campaigns are designed to provide content to followers who are genuinely interested in receiving updates from a specific brand or business.
How Does Email Automation Work?
There are many tools available today for automating emails, and we’ll talk about those later on. Although each email automation tool is unique, they all follow a standard process on how automatic emails are triggered and sent.
Here’s an example:
- A user arrives at a landing page, fills in a form, and checks the box stating that they would love to get free home guides.
- The user’s information is added to the company’s email marketing database for processing.
- All users who signed up on the landing page and said they wanted free guides are separated (segmented) from the others who just filled in the form.
- Company marketers then get to work developing an email campaign that incorporates users who want to receive their guides through rules and triggers.
- A few days later, the user receives an email that contains a short e-book about home organization.
This example is just one of many ways marketers today can incorporate email automation in their email marketing campaigns. A few other methods involve basing email triggers on the age, location, and even gender of mailing list users.
Why Is Email Automation Important for Email Marketing?
There are many reasons why email automation is important for email marketing. Here are a few:
It Opens Up a Company’s Ability to Scale
The goal in email marketing is to communicate with a target audience what your company has to offer by sending users personalized messages. Perhaps the best way to ensure that this process becomes scalable is by eliminating repetitive, manual tasks.
Think about having to send hundreds, if not thousands of emails to subscribers or bring in staff just to keep track of activities that match your triggers.
With automated email campaigns, the size of your email list won’t be a problem especially if you can scale and automate at the same time.
You Can Develop More Personalized Email Content
The second most important benefit of email automation is that you get to personalize the content of your messages. When you make your emails more personalized, you can improve your open rate tremendously and provide other advantages as well.
Some of the ways you can personalize automated email campaigns are by:
- Using email segmentation lists
- Sending emails based on specific trigger actions made by subscribers
- Asking for the names of subscribers when signing up
Make Sure Your Subscribers Stay In Your List
Apart from getting new people to subscribe to your email marketing campaign, another equally difficult aspect is getting them to stay. There’s simply no guarantee that everyone who signed up to your mailing list is going to stay forever – some will eventually unsubscribe.
Thanks to automated email marketing campaigns, you can improve your ability to retain subscribers by sending messages during pre-determined periods. These periods can be as soon as they sign up to your mailing list or even have messages sent out after a few days.
Taking advantage of email automation to automatically send emails can help keep people engaged with your brand for longer.
Email Marketing Automation Is Cost-Effective
The cost-effectiveness of email marketing automation is especially felt by brands that are maintaining a huge email list. The main reason is that the cost to keep everything intact in such lists is high, and with an ideal email automation tool, you can cover part of that expense by leveraging automation to drive more sales.
Many marketers have found that automation in their email marketing campaigns can increase the profitability of their overall efforts.
Great Email Automation Tools
The best email automation tool that a marketer can get is one that offers them a smart combination of features that can help improve their email engagement without breaking the bank.
No matter how well you prepare your email marketing strategy, the lack of automation can severely limit your ability to reach today’s digital audience. But with the tools and features to streamline email automation, you can give your business the capabilities it needs to perform.
Here is a list of great platforms that can provide the email automation you need:
MailChimp
All email marketers know about MailChimp simply because it has been a leading email marketing platform for many years. With a free plan, you can perform some basic email marketing actions such as email scheduling and creation here.
Creating emails on MailChimp is straightforward with the help of their Content Manager. This manager lets you store photos and files that you can easily access later on. Furthermore, you can set up automated emails at vital stages in your sales funnel so you can send out welcome emails, confirmations, and reminders when needed.
But what makes MailChimp great for email marketing is that it provides users with smart recommendations that offer valuable insights on audience segments. The data provided by this feature can help optimize your email marketing efforts.
ActiveCampaign
For email marketers looking to dive into email marketing automation and make the most of its features right away, ActiveCampaign has what you need. This platform provides users with automation designed for enterprises at affordable rates.
Their plans let you access features such as intelligent segmentation, website tracking, dynamic content, and lead scoring. You can even take advantage of its built-in CRM so you can connect your digital marketing data and create automated workflows for follow-up sales messages.
Many marketers consider the overall features of ActiveCampaign to be quite powerful. Most would recommend using it for brands looking to run targeted, automatic email campaigns.
MailiGen
MailiGen is an email marketing tool that offers ease of use at cost-effective price ranges. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial and give its features a try to see how they work.
People can create awesome and responsive messages through the drag-and-drop editor of MailiGen and increase the effectiveness of their campaigns with its email automation.
The great thing about MailiGen is that it can be integrated with other eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento. Users can also keep track of their campaign performance by accessing the visual charts and detailed reports that are provided by the platform.
SendGrid
The email delivery service known as SendGrid advertises itself as a platform for building memorable connections through smart email marketing. It offers automation triggers for your emails so you can save time and money on having to develop each message in your campaign.
SendGrid lets you monitor the overall performance of your automated email campaigns, including the metrics of individual emails you send. Everything can be tracked in one dashboard so you can easily identify problems or opportunities to improve your campaign.
Whether you want to create an awesome onboarding series to welcome users, nurture your event attendees, or follow up on leads, SendGrid has the features for you.
HubSpot
HubSpot is known for not only providing email automation features but also world-class offerings for businesses looking to leverage a comprehensive sales and marketing platform. Everything you need can be found here, including email marketing automation, landing page optimization, and CRM.
Although some might think that HubSpot leans more towards being a jack-of-all-trades type of email platform, it does excel in one thing, and that’s in providing data.
With the information provided by HubSpot, email marketers can improve their newsletters and email campaigns while taking advantage of email automation.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor lets marketers create high-impact messages easily through their drag-and-drop editor with no technicalities involved. You can select from the various premium templates available or even place your website URL directly so you can automatically import everything about your brand to your messages.
What makes Campaign Monitor different is that it offers an intuitive visual journey designer where marketers can create timely emails that ensure recipients stay engaged. Messages that are sent at the right moment not only help reduce the time needed in creating and publishing campaigns but also drive more revenue in the long run.
Furthermore, Campaign Monitor offers robust automatic email triggers that will send messages according to the actions of your audience. Activities that can be based upon include making a donation, buying a specific item, and signing up for a free download.
Omnisend
Another great email automation tool marketers can use today is Omnisend. This marketing platform can conveniently integrate with your communication channels so you can maximize your omnichannel approach as much as possible.
The free plan lets you get started with using its email capabilities so that you can see how your email marketing campaigns will stack up to its features. Automation comes standard with Omnisend, wherein you can set emails to be delivered based on specific behavioral triggers. You can even schedule the sending of your messages according to the most convenient time for your recipients.
The comprehensive audience insights provided by Omnisend let you create more relevant email content, guaranteeing increased engagement. It also lets you design attractive email newsletters with features such as the product picker where you can choose all related products to include in your messages.
Besides all that, you can also choose to incorporate promo codes and gift cards into your email campaigns if you want.
Zoho
People searching for a robust suite for email marketing may be interested in giving Zoho a try. The solution provides email marketing and automation, email hosting, forms, and surveys, among others.
The email marketing features of Zoho provide users with the ability to send unlimited emails while providing access to their CRM software.
Most people choose Zoho because of their wide variety of automation workflows as well as access to autoresponders. Triggers can be based on actions such as signups or certain dates, with all workflows seamlessly connecting with the built-in CRM.
Zoho has fairly reasonable pricing for their plans that makes them an ideal option for small companies.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue used to be just a transactional email service but has now expanded to provide marketers with a comprehensive newsletter tool with email automation. Besides the paid plans, users can sign up for a free demo of the system that allows them to access automation while limiting their email sending to 300 messages per day.
Some of the automation features you can find with Sendinblue include sales reminders, goal-based campaigns, SMS-based marketing campaigns, and lead scoring. There’s also the transactional email feature that lets you send messages to readers such as invoices and order confirmations.
Merchants who are budget-conscious and want to start small can try Sendinblue as it not only can be obtained at a reasonable price, but also lets you run complex automated email campaigns.
How to Grow Your Email Marketing With Email Automations
There’s no doubt by now that email automation offers endless possibilities in improving current email marketing strategies. To give you an idea of how you can grow your business with the right email automation tool, here are a few tips to consider:
- Send automated welcome emails: Making a solid first impression to new leads is crucial in email marketing which is why implementing welcome emails in campaigns is necessary. As soon as someone signs up to your form, you want an automated message sent out to them acknowledging their action. Include something of value in the email to make a positive first impression among recipients.
- Provide valuable content as an incentive: Having a healthy mailing list is essential in any email marketing campaign, which is why retaining subscribers while attracting new ones is important. With email automation, you can grow your lists by offering an incentive to users when they sign up. Some examples of incentives can include free e-books, guides, or discount codes.
- Segment your recipients automatically: Segmentation continues to play a key part in effective email marketing, so you want your email automation tool to self-segment your lists accordingly. You want to divide your contacts based on their previous actions, past purchases, or what they like about your products. Proper email segmentation will lead to increased content relevance and campaign performance.
- Automatically send out cart abandonment reminders: Cart abandonment is a common occurrence with online merchants, but reminding users about the products within these carts might encourage them to continue with their purchase. You can try using positive customer testimonials, recommend top products, and give discounts to bring them back.
- Automate how you nurture your leads: Email marketing campaigns that have proper automation features can be configured to send out automated emails to guide prospects through their buying journey. With automated lead nurturing, marketers can monitor the engagement of each subscriber and automatically send the right messages based on what they do or not do.
- Ensure contacts stay engaged: Keeping your readers engaged with your emails is essential in maintaining a successful email marketing campaign. When you can set your triggers to send messages based on specific areas of a customer’s lifecycle, you’ll be able to maintain relationships within your list without having to micromanage each contact manually.
The Takeaway
Email automation can benefit marketers tremendously by helping them automate numerous email marketing activities that would otherwise have to be done manually. Compared to traditional campaigns, email automation lets you run your email marketing efforts in the background while you work on other important tasks.
Email automation is beneficial to marketers as it allows them to scale, continue engaging leads and customers, and develop more relevant content for their subscribers.
This article should also help you weigh the importance of using the right email automation tool to streamline your email marketing processes.
