Email marketing has always been one of the most important marketing channels for businesses, but in the past few years, it has evolved into something far more sophisticated. Among the many different ways to automate your marketing efforts, it’s certainly one with the most tangible benefits. Sure, newsletters and email blasts can still be considered a way to keep customers informed, but if you are not maximising your efficiency by using email automation, then you are missing out.
When you set up an automated email workflow to be triggered by users’ actions, you open the doors to a new level of personalisation. Users will receive emails on time and containing content that’s super-relevant to them – always. This eventually leads to greater open rates, enhanced conversion, and more revenue.
But before we delve more into the myriad of advantages email automation can offer, let’s take a closer look at what it actually is.
Email marketing automation is the technology that lets you design an email campaign which automatically, and periodically, sends personalised messages to customers. Every customer’s actions are tracked, and as soon as they meet a pre-defined trigger, they are dispatched an email which targets their specific interests.
For instance, let’s say you want to send a welcome email to everyone who registers via your landing page. Instead of manually sending emails to every person, you can just set up an email automation workflow which dispatches a welcome email as soon as someone hits “sign up”.
Or, let’s say you want to automatically send a follow-up email to anyone who abandons a cart at your store. All you have to do is create an abandoned-cart-workflow once, and your email automation tool will always send a personalised email to anyone who triggers it. Cool, isn’t it? More than that, it’s incredibly efficient and productive.
Building any good relationship takes time and effort. You can’t divulge all that makes you great on the first date, and you can’t expect to click instantly with every person you meet. The key is to take it slow. Email automation helps you do that while building customer relationships. You can nurture customers by sending them triggered emails, based on their levels of engagement, or site visits etc. at different stages of the buying cycle. Your sales team will never again contact a lead at a “bad time”.
Email automation tools track all of a user’s interactions with the company. It also knows where a lead is from, what designation they have, and what age group they fall in. It uses all this information to always formulate emails that are relevant to the recipient. For example, you can easily set up an email campaign to send reminders to everyone from New York, who have registered to attend your seminar.
Sending email campaigns and keeping track of a lead’s interests manually can be tiring and inefficient. By automating and streamlining repetitive tasks via carefully defined triggers and workflows, you are able to enhance your efficiency and focus on other, more pressing customer matters.
Sales agents hate nothing more than cold leads. Thanks to email automation, they can approach people who are actually interested in making a purchase, and strike while the iron’s blazing hot.
Email automation yields insightful metrics you can rely on. From open rates to customer-retention rates, you can have access to all kinds of metrics that elucidate the level of interest your customers are showing in your company. Use this information to devise marketing strategies for the future.
Email marketing automation is a must-have for any business that takes customer relationships seriously. Are you one?
