When a visitor first signs up for your online form or creates an account on your store, you know you have to send a welcome email. But doing this manually every time you get a new subscriber would be pretty time-consuming. Instead, you would set up welcome email automation that would automatically send out to your newest subscribers.
That is an example of automated email, which is preferred as a triggered email or behavior-driven email. So, let’s take a look at what email automation is and why we should use it!
What is “Email Automation”?
Email automation is a way to set up emails that are sent to the right people with the right message at the right time without any manual work. When you link your website analytics with your email marketing system, you can target the receiver based on behavior, preferences, and purchase history. Then you can personalize each customer journey and increase the relevance of your automated campaigns.
Benefits of email automation
Automation is changing the way that all types of manual work which your business must be done.
Personalize your customer
An accurate marketing campaign is all about reaching specific audiences. Personalization makes it easier for your business to keep effective communication with your targeted groups of customers. Furthermore, lately, researches indicate that customers love personalization.
- 90% of customers find relevant content very appealing.
- 2019 report shows that 72% of customers only respond to marketing messages that target their interests.
- The trending kind of personalization experience that businesses use is email.
With email automation, your email will be sent according to customers’ specific actions, without doing any extra efforts.
Save time
A recent survey shows that automated email marketing can increase employee productivity:
- 69% they could reduce wasted time by automation
- 59% could save at least 6 hours per week if they use email automation effectively.
- 72% would use the saved time to focus on higher-value work.
Moreover, with email automation, you could less spend time manually compiling email lists and scheduling messages. Instead, you could spend that time focusing on more important tasks, such as branding awareness or deepening customer relationship building.
Increase customer retention rate
It is much easier now to sell to existing customer lists than to find out new ones. With automation, you can build the relationship and keep in touch with them better than ever before.
An email with a subject line likes “Hey, we haven’t heard anything from you for a while. Back to our shop now!” is more likely to end up in the trash.
Instead, you can use this example message likes:
“Dear/Hey John, it’s been a while since your last purchase. We’ve missed you! Use code [HELLO] to receive 20% off. Shop our new stuff now!”
Make your marketing strategy available
With email automation, you can measure your email marketing efforts. When you’ve set it up so that your system will send a pre-built email every time your visitor signs up for your mailing list via a sign-up form. It is not necessary to make sure that you are available to do it.
With email automation, customers automatically integrate into your system as soon as they make any specific actions that you can track. What messages that your system should send to them depending on their behavior.
Best practices for your email automation
Like the above, email automation offers plenty of opportunities for your business. Here are some tips to optimize your email automation strategies.
Figure out your customer personality
The first step in implementing your automation is understanding who your customers are and which problems they are experiencing. Each of your buyers will behave and interact with your business differently so that it is really important to segment them into small groups. For example, there is a difference between prospects who are doing market research and retention customers who are ready to re-pay for your products or services. If you are still wondering about how to segment customers effectively, spend a minute learning this.
Get your messages right
Even if you create the perfect automation workflow, you are unlikely to see the results without the relevant messages. Your sending messages must match with your target prospect’s goals and where they are in the journey to become a paying customer. For instance, have they ever known about your brand before? Are they intentionally paying for their goods in their abandoned cart? Which features are they wondering about before paying for their abandoned cart?
Do not set and forget it
As you know that marketing automation has the prospective to save time in the long-term marketing strategy, but you do not be intended to leave the automatic system to do all the work and hope for the best. It is important to keep your key metrics under observation to make sure you are on the way and help you to figure out any things for improvement.
Ask for feedbacks
Online reviews are a massive source of voice-of-customer language. When people leave their reviews on your products or services (positive or negative), they usually include information like:
- What did they like about your product?
- The specific problem that they solved by using your product.
- Other things they wished the product included but does not.
Seem like your product could be really useful, right?
Moreover, when that feedback is shown to your visitors, maybe it could lead them into prospects or even first-time buyers if they feel like your products or services, which your customers review, could resolve their problems.
Furthermore, with customer feedback, you have a chance to improve your products and services to adapt to each demand and expand your business in the foreseeable future.
Email automation is the most effective way to scale personalized one-to-one communication and gain social proof.
If you are looking for an effective email automation workflow to optimize your business and save time, take a look at ManySales.
Start with the basics
If you are still a fresher to email automation, you should start small strategies by determining your existing activities that could benefit from automation. You could set up a series of onboarding emails, for example, sending messages like welcome emails to new subscribers or birthday emails to mark special events.
When you understand clearly the goal of your email automation strategies, you can move to the more complex ones, such as workflows that send email reminders with the right message at the right time for customers to purchase their abandoned cart.
Some examples of automated email messages:
Triggering a welcome email when new subscribers submit their information via your sign-up forms.
Although your store is an ECommerce store, a lot of your prospects will not be ready to make a purchase. If you can capture their interest with a sign-up form to get their email, what should you do with that one?
Welcome emails seem like thank-you letters of your business sent to your first-time visitors for subscribing to your store. There is no rule forcing you to send a welcome email, but recent surveys show that:
- Welcome emails get 4 times more reads and 5 times more clicks than traditional marketing emails.
- More than 74% of prospects hope to receive a welcome email when they subscribe to a mailing list.
- They generate as much as 320% more revenue per email than other promotional messages.
When you get a new subscriber, sending out a warm welcome can help turn them into first-time buyers without any extra difficulty.
Launching an abandoned cart email when you want to motivate customers to come back to your shop and complete their purchase, to recover your revenue.
As a result, about 70% of eCommerce shoppers abandon their carts for many reasons, such as high shipping costs, too complex account register, or concerns about the security after paying purchase, etc.
Abandoned cart emails can help you recover your potential lost revenue. You can set up a relevant and timely email reminder to remind customers about their cart and encourage them to purchase by giving free shipping or exclusive offers based on your understanding of customers.
Step up your growth with email automation
Now, you should better understand what email automation is, why you should use it, and some tips to optimize your business with automation workflows.
Let’s move to the next step: How to get started with email automation.
