Email Automation in a Nutshell

Email automations are a powerful and efficient way to get more out of your marketing.

Use automation to increase:

• sales

• retention and

• recall of your brand

Using automations can save you valuable time on important, but repetitive tasks letting you concentrate on additional value-added activities.

Email automation is the most effective way to engage in email marketing because it enables you to send out messages to your customers at designated times. Unlike one-off campaigns, automations can be left running in the background, taking repetitive tasks off your plate. You can welcome your new subscribers, reach out to people who abandon their online shopping carts, and win back lapsed customers.

How automation works

Email automation is the ability to send time or action triggered emails to subscribers with relevant information. Automation is useful for a variety of different marketing purposes. Whether it’s a triggered workflow that helps nurture new leads, birthday greetings that add a personal touch, or automated blog updates that take the legwork out of staying in touch with your audience — email automation makes email marketing more efficient, personalized, and relevant.

N.B. Automation is designed to engage with the audience, so transactional emails like “thank you for your order” or “your order has been dispatched” whilst triggered and automatic do not fall under the umbrella of automations.

What can you do?

1) Connect with new contacts

Automation is a simple and effective way to make a great first impression. So reach out to your newest subscribers to help keep them engaged and improve retention rates where you cultivate a long-lasting relationship.

• Introduce yourself with a single mail or a short series to help them get to know your company and offering in a bit more detail.

• Say Happy Birthday or Anniversary with a simple date-driven campaign

• Create an on-boarding series with helpful information and resources so they know all they need about your business.

2) Upsell and cross sell

Whether you are an e-commerce business or not, email can be a great way to expand your reach.

You can nurture your customers to encourage purchase of add-on services or upgrades.

You just need to put yourself in the mindset of your buyer with you recommendations – so your suggestions are both revenue generating and service orientated, helping your customer ensure they have everything they need.

You could sweeten the deal with exclusive discounts or offers, again which make your customers feel valued.

Whether your business is e-commerce enabled or not, you can achieve success with incremental sales by focusing on these on-going opportunities.

3) Boost loyalty

The customers that support your business are the lifeblood of your success and growth, so it is important that they know they are valued.

It is 5 times more costly to attract a new customer, so it is a no-brainer that keeping your existing customers happy, loyal and making repeat purchases is critical to business success.

So what from marketing automations make sense here?;

• Thank your first time customers and offer a discount to encourage their next purchase.

• Reward your best customers with an offer, discount or download so they know how much they are appreciated.

• Respond to subscriber updates. Automatically send an email to subscribers who join (or leave) a group in your list. Provide a sample of the new content they’ll be receiving, suggest other groups that might be of interest, or collect feedback about their experience

5 ways to maximise the power of your email marketing using automation.

4) Win customers back

Automation can be a powerful asset for businesses during all stages of the customer journey, but can be especially helpful for re-engaging people who haven’t interacted with your brand recently.

• Win back lapsed customers. Create an email or series of emails to encourage lapsed customers return to your store or re-engage with your campaigns.

• Showcase your latest products to customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while, or offer an incentive to potential customers who have signed up for your list but haven’t bought an item from your store just yet.

• Improve email engagement. Automatically reach back out to subscribers who don’t open or click a link within one of your email campaigns.

5) Promote your event

If your business invests time and money into running events, meetups, or webinars, then getting people to attend is critical to driving a positive return on investment.

Unfortunately though, even if you get a large number of registrations only about 50% of those people will actually end up attending.

A great way to increase this is to send people reminder emails in the lead up to the event, and then a series of follow-up emails after the event.

• Once a person has registered for a webinar or event, they receive a series of reminder emails in the lead up to the webinar or event time encouraging them to attend live.

• Then, after the webinar or event has concluded, they automatically get sent the slides and access to the on-demand version of the webinar.

Most importantly:
Don’t forget to test, optimise and repeat what works.