How to get started with email automation

Automation is getting more and more linked to email marketing success.

Not only does email automation help build better customer relationships, but it also frees up a ton of time and energy. This means you can work strategically and devote your time to what matters most. It’s also the fastest solution to scale one-to-one personalized communication and transform leads into loyal customers.

Now when you’ve understood more about the email automation concept, then it’s time to explore what things you need to consider before setting an automated email campaign lived.

Recap about email automation

Email automation is the process of sending out emails to your subscribers and prospects automatically, based on a scheduled timeline or pre-defined triggers. The triggers are generally correlated with your subscriber’s information or action. Once you’ve chosen

automation, added content and set particular sending criteria, all people in subscription lists would receive your message accordingly.

In practice, email automation can be used to follow up on interactions with your email readers. These messages serve a particular purpose in the customer journey and your Customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. Therefore, running an automated email campaign can help improve subscriber relationships, boost conversion rate and better user experience.

Identify your automated email campaigns

There are many applications of email automation. Check out our list of common automated email campaigns that you can start sending immediately today to help grow your business!

1. The welcome email:

This kind of email normally reaches the mailbox when a consumer completes his subscription process and automatically joins your opt-in list. Through it, you can introduce yourself, all while learning your audience’ needs and preferences.

As building customer relationships is always important for every business, a warm welcome email can help you make a great first impression and forge a connection.

Here’s how to spice up your onboarding messages:

• Greet new members to your community and give them a taste of your brand personality.
• Encourage them to discover more about your company or content.
• Inspire customers with a bonus.
• Guide the audience on what they should take next. For example: make the first purchase to get a 10% total discount.
• Let them know where to follow you on social media.

Welcome message of Kate Spade

2. The abandoned shopping cart email:

Research shows that nearly 70% of eCommerce shoppers leave the site after adding items to their shopping cart.

When your customer decides to add items to the cart, it means he has a strong intention of purchasing. This is a sign you shouldn’t ignore. To not lose these potentials, you can send an automated message to encourage them back to complete the purchase.

To be effective, your abandoned cart emails should:

• Remind people what they’ve left behind.
• Offer a discount.
• Notify the audience if the product is low in stock or if a sale is about to expire.
• Add personalized product recommendations to give them more options.

Cart Abandonment Emails of the Old Farmer’s Store

3. The birthday email:

Based on Experian, birthday emails generate a 481% higher transaction rate than other marketing emails. Therefore, sending birthday emails is a great strategy to grow customer loyalty and positive brand sentiment.

To make this possible, you can set the automation flow based on customers’ birthdays, which can be gathered easily through sign-up forms.

Here are some tips to make your birthday email stand out:

• Write it under the tone of friendly, delightful and warm.
• Provide them with a surprising gift.
• Craft an intriguing email subject line to boost open rates.
• Ensure your email design POPS! As customers might receive many email messages on their special day, make your email stand out to gain their attention.

Happy Birthday from Puma

4. Order follow-up email:

As a merchant, retaining loyal buyers to your shop is always crucial.

To enhance your customer experience and keep them continuously engaged, updating your customer’ purchase through automated email is one of the best after-sale-service strategies.

There are some post-purchase email examples that you can set automation with:

• Order confirmation: it should be sent immediately after your audience making a purchase to brief them about their order.
• Order fulfilled confirmation: this campaign can be used if you want to notify buyers when their items are ready to be delivered.
• Shipping update: you can inform customers of their shipment status and conduct a survey to understand them much better. To gain more feedbacks, it’s better to create order follow-up messages that send automatically a few days or weeks after they’ve made their purchase.

ASOS Order Update Email

5. Re-engagement email:

Based on the study of Salesforce, 63% of marketers believed that re-engagement campaigns are “very effective” while 45% of recipients who had received win-back emails read subsequent messages.

By sending a re-activation message to your inactive readers, you’ll see who is still involved in your brand and is likely to generate some immediate sales!

To get you inspired, here are a few awesome ways to rekindle inactive customers:

• Write subject lines with a sad note (e.g. “We are missing you :(“, “Is this a goodbye?”, etc.)
• Offer help for some common issues.
• Send discount offers on your merchandise for breaking the ice.

Starbucks customers win-back campaign

What to consider before building an automated email campaign?

It’s not enough just to know the categories of emails you can set automation, or even brainstorm ideas about possible campaigns. What counts is that mastering the fundamentals so that you can have a solid foundation to build upon.

Whether you create custom automation or use one of ManySale’s pre-built options, there are a few things you should think about before getting started

• Build your audience list: As you can’t send an email with a blank in the receiver’s name, identifying who’s your target audience is the first step. To not attenuate your email campaign, you can segment groups based on your subscribers’ interests — or their particular behaviour- and develop automation that is tailored to each group.
• Create your trigger: As mentioned earlier, every email in your automation can have its unique trigger. Hence, you can either use ManySales automation whose trigger is defined for you or custom your own automation.
• Identify your writing tone: A key to successful marketing automation is to produce content that doesn’t sound like a machine. It’s way better to communicate your messages in a natural way while ensuring your brand’s unique voice and tone. Also, in order not to let your email campaign fail, remember to avoid some common content mistakes.
• Set your sending time: You can schedule the timeframe and days to send out your email campaign. Right after the initial triggering action? The next day or week? It’s your call.

Bring the plan to action

Now that you have a better handle on how to get started with email automation. It’s time to move to the next step of creating a completely automated email campaign. However, setting up email automation is not always easy as it seems and there perhaps many faults that you can catch during your process.

If you’re having no idea about it or having problems with your email automation, let’s dive deeper with us and find out it in the next episode.