Have you heard about email automation? Or, have you heard about it, but just the name sounds too intimidating to explore further?
In today’s article, we’re going to look at how automation leads to an increase in customers, growth for your business and improved revenue.
We’ll take some of the mystery out of email workflows and automation so you can get busy with your email marketing.
Here’s your email marketing guide.
Defining Email Automation
Let’s get rid of the mystery. Email automation is the best way to engage your customers because it allows you to send out a string of emails at just the right time.
With email automation, you let your email service provider do the heavy lifting for you. For example, if a customer places several items in their shopping cart and leaves, you can target them and reach out to remind them they left something in their cart.
Often times, this encourages their follow-through.
Email automation allows you to develop a closer relationship with your customers because you can maintain communication and increase brand awareness.
The email workflow is so important to your marketing strategy as seen in one study that shows 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase.
If that isn’t enough reason to start your email automation today, take a look at a few more reasons:
- Email marketing is still one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. In fact, email is not dead, but growing.
- Email marketing provides a higher return rate for an investment of less time than more traditional forms of marketing. Automated emails save even more time.
- Email marketing allows you to provide consistent branding and messaging to your customers.
- Email marketing improves customer engagement and retention by allowing you to segment lists and set workflows to target people with the right information at the right time.
Now, let’s look at some times when you can put email automation to work for you. Here’s your email marketing guide.
Subscriber Welcome Email
You have an email sign-up form on your website. That’s great. But, what happens after a subscriber signs up?
If you do nothing until it’s time to send your next newsletter, that’s not so great.
Every person who signs up for your email list through your website or social media should be greeted with a welcome email. When set up through automation, this requires nothing from you.
The subscriber signs up, and your email system sends a welcome email. It’s easy and a great way to welcome your subscriber to your community.
New Customer Welcome Email
While many people believe the sale is the end goal, that just isn’t true. You want to leverage the whole lifecycle of your customer. You want them to come back again and again.
To that end, once someone purchases from you, they should receive a welcome email followed by several other emails.
You can offer them a discount on their next order, a free gift or an exclusive sale. Other options are to ask them to do a product review or complete a survey.
Lead Nurturing Email
Let’s say you have a free buying guide on your website for a product you sell. The website visitor has to provide their email address to download the product.
This is a potential lead – in fact, it’s a highly qualified lead because they’ve actually traded something of value – their email address for your buyer’s guide.
Once they’ve provided you their email, they should also go straight into an automated series of emails.
For example, if they downloaded a hot tub buyer’s guide, you can set up a workflow of emails to go out to your customer over a series of several months with information about hot tubs.
You’re basically leading them down your sales tunnel with the hot tub sale as the final goal.
Re-Engagement Email
How about the customer on your email list who hasn’t opened or clicked anything in your emails in a while?
It’s time to re-engage them and remind them why they signed up for your emails in the first place.
You can set up a trigger to set emails in motion. For example, if Joe Smith hasn’t clicked a link in your emails for four months, you can send them an exclusive offer, special event info or an invite to come back for another look.
Abandoned Shopping Cart Email
For those of you running eCommerce businesses, this is vital. You want to set up email workflows that trigger when a customer adds an item to their shopping cart but never completes checkout.
You can set a series of emails to remind them of their shopping cart and even a discount such as 20% off or free shipping to encourage them to complete the process.
Event Information Email
When people register for your next event or webinar, they are certainly interested in what you have to say.
Create an automated workflow to reach out to these customers in the weeks and days leading up to the event.
You can communicate information such as registration confirmation, important things to know, log-in info if online, and location info if in person. You can also set emails to go out after the event thanking the customer for attending, providing links to recordings/videos and another offering a survey for feedback.
Final Thoughts
Your email database is one of your most valuable assets. But, it’s only as mighty as you make it.
Once you’ve gotten the lead, and someone has signed up for your email list, you’ve got to do something about it. It’s time to nurture your leads.
Set up your automated workflows and make them work for you. Manage your leads properly and watch your profits rise.
Automated workflows help you group your leads based on certain characteristics and behaviors. They enable you to use smarter tools to reach your leads with the information that counts.
Now that we’ve de-mystified the process, you can use email automation to increase the quality of your leads, shorten the sales cycle and improve your bottom line.
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Image: Annie Spratt
