Keeping your audience engaged on an ongoing basis is essential to creating a continuous—and frictionless—relationship. Establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with your leads requires more than a one-off email blast and hoping for the best. To create an effective email marketing strategy, it’s important to establish goals, identify triggers that indicate individual interests, and identify the most effective call-to-action (CTA) methods at your disposal.
From sending welcome emails to creating email sequences that boost sales, marketing automation can be a powerful tool to grow your business.
Read on to discover how you can take your email marketing efforts from good to great using automation.
What is Email Automation?
Email automation is one of the most common email marketing strategies used by marketers. It consists on setting up an automated series of emails with a specific event as a trigger, such as visiting a specific web page or reading a specific article. The software used to create these email sequences is referred to as an email marketing automation platform.
Automated emails allow you to broadcast the same message or offer to all or a subset of your subscribers at one time. This can be especially helpful when you have a limited amount of time to send emails to your list. For example, say you are promoting a new e-book or webinar related to marketing. You can send the same promotional email to your entire list or a segment of your list, to help save time.
Why Should You Set Up Email Automations?
While marketers have been using email automation for years, recent advancements in software and email marketing strategies have given the tactic a new life. Now, marketers can create sequences to match almost any scenario and automate a variety of email communication, from customer onboarding, to lead nurturing, to product delivery, and beyond.
Automation is one of the best ways to make the most of your email marketing efforts. When you set up a series of automated email communications, you are able to get in front of your leads again and again, without having to re-invent the wheel each time. This can help you improve lead engagement, boost sales, and earn more revenue from your existing customers. By setting up automated emails, you save time, boost engagement, and get more value out of your existing marketing campaigns.
Email Automations Best practices
Email automation is meant for building relationships and nurturing leads, so make sure your messages are consistent and authentic.
Create a Welcome Sequence
A welcome sequence is a series of campaigns meant to welcome new leads into your community and make them feel special. It’s an excellent way to welcome new subscribers, while also providing them with helpful information and building a relationship with them so they become long-term customers.
Know Your Audience to Keep Them Happy
You must understand your target audience in order to successfully automate your communications. Automations with personalized emails should develop as a way to care for your customers’ needs. Take advantage of your customer data to tailor your email campaigns to meet their interests.
When developing your automated email ideas, consider whether or not they will stand out the most and boost your customers’ engagement. You should attempt to position yourself in your customers’ shoes and consider things from their perspective, not simply pushing for sales.
Create a Relationship Between Your Brand and Your Audience
Email marketing is all about building a relationship between you and every customer. This can be done through consistent communication, and an email sequence is the perfect candidate for this job.
Create Captivating Content
Your campaign content must be appealing to draw in new customers and keep existing ones. Customers will remember creative subject lines and email ideas that are both compelling and engaging. By creating an email campaign around an intriguing subject, your emails will generate more sales.
Nurture Marketing Campaigns
Nurture marketing is a type of automation that boosts lead conversion by nurturing new customers over time. It involves creating an onboarding sequence that improves the experience of new leads and helps you generate more sales.
Email Automations No no’s
Although automation is powerful, it doesn’t give you an excuse to be lazy. Here are a few things to avoid when creating your email automation sequences:
Broadcasting the Same Message to All Subscribers
While it’s tempting to send the same exact email to all of your subscribers, it’s not always the most effective approach. With segmentation, you can tailor your message to your audience based on what you know about them.
Creating Too Many Sequences
While setting up multiple email sequences can help you get more out of your email marketing; it can also create a sense of spam for your subscribers. Be strategic about which sequences you choose to create and try to avoid creating too many.
Cheap Content
Automation is just one part of the sales cycle. It can’t sell your customers on something they’re not interested in in the first place. Always make sure you’re using quality, educational content in your emails.
Faulty Triggers
When designing your email automation sequences, make sure you’re using triggers that are likely to be found on your various channels. Avoid using an overly broad trigger that’s easily found on every channel, such as “visited website,” and instead, choose something more specific to that channel.
Poor Design
Your sequences should be designed to be visually appealing, easy to navigate, and fast. Avoid creating sequences that require your leads to click 10 different buttons before they can read your content.
Excellent Tools that You Can Use to Improve Your Email Automations
Although you can create your own sequences from scratch, you can also use pre-built sequences from a variety of email marketing platforms. These services will help you create effective email sequences, such as welcome emails and sales emails, with a few clicks.
Here are some tools that you can use to create effective email automation:
Hubspot
HubSpot is a full-service digital marketing platform that takes an inclusive approach to marketing automation. The platform enables marketers to create personalized experiences that drive more sales. HubSpot’s email automation features include email sequences, email rules, and RSS feeds.
Klaviyo
This platform features a wide selection of email tools that make it easy to create a sequence, send out emails, and monitor the performance of each sequence. Klaviyo’s email automation tools integrate with other marketing tools, such as website analytics tools, marketing automation tools, CRMs, and marketing automation tools.
ActiveCampaign
When it comes to email automation, Active Campaign’s built-in triggers span a range of options. The platform is easy to use and offers built-in automation tools that make it simple to create email sequences. Combining Active Campaign’s email marketing capabilities with other marketing tools creates a comprehensive marketing strategy that ensures your business is represented in the best light.
Email automation is a great way to stay in touch with your audience. However, it’s important to send the right message at the right time and always monitor the deliverability for each of your automated email marketing campaigns. With the right tools and best practices in place, you can make sure your emails get delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.
When used properly, email automation is an effective way to nurture leads and create relationships. Automation also makes it easier to share information with your contacts, and it can help you build a larger following by engaging your audience on a consistent basis.
Now that you’re aware of the benefits of email automation and have seen the various best practices in action, what are you waiting for? Get started with these techniques in order to boost your engagement and grow your audience.
