Have you ever ordered an item online and gotten an order confirmation email? If you answered “Yes,” you have been on the receiving end of email automation.
This is one of the most common examples of email automation. It serves an important purpose: building trust with a customer. It’s telling the customer you are paying attention, and you’re getting to work. The hard part for the customer is over, and now they can relax while you handle things. Great! What if the customer didn't make it through the entire purchasing process? What if they abandoned their cart? If you’re Target, you send customers an email one day following an abandoned cart with the subject line, “Your cart is calling, and it wants you back!”. I don't know about you, but I usually forget about my abandoned cart and revisit following the email reminder. Let’s dig deeper into the benefits of email automation and tips to propel your email marketing to the next level.
What Are The Benefits Of Email Automation?
It Saves Time
One of the main benefits of email automation is, well, it’s automated! There is some initial effort involved in setting things up, but aside from that, there isn’t much time spent. Without it, you would need to manually respond to every email to keep up with engagement from subscribers. Imagine each time you get an order for a product or a request for a service, having to manually type out a response or to manually send a receipt; that would get exhausting. With email automation, you create the templates one time and they do the hard work for you.
Make sure that the automated email is strategic. You wouldn’t send a blog update after someone signs up for your newsletter, you would send a welcome email to introduce yourself. The appropriate content being sent at the right time is really what leads to conversions. Timing is everything.
It Provides a Better User Experience
If a user signs up for your newsletter, it’s a big deal! Let them know you care about them. You can send an automated “Welcome” email telling them you are excited that they are along for the journey. Personalizing automated emails is key to a positive user experience. You can tailor the personalization based on the specific user action. By personalizing the template, you can connect with your new subscriber from the very second they sign up. While this may be your first opportunity to sell a product or service to a user, be careful not to seem intrusive. This lead may not be ready to go straight into a sale and they may need to be nurtured a bit longer. Let's say you're selling jeans; in the "welcome" email, instead of flooding the body with links to your products, ask the user what their style preferences are. Do they prefer slim fit or wide-legged jeans? Quick surveys like this provide so much benefit to both parties. By understanding what the user likes, you can curate targeted ads specific to those preferences, and the user doesn't get bombarded with content they're not interested in. It's a win-win!
It Improves Customer Retention
Marketing to an existing customer is easier and more cost-effective than trying to convert to a new one. It pays massive dividends to remarket and it's not difficult to do. If they've made a purchase, then they're already bought in but sometimes they're easily forgotten about. Email automation makes it effortless to check in on customers and remind them that you're still there. There are tons of ways to do this. You can set up a discount-triggered email sent to customers who have purchased that item in the past. Make sure your email fulfills a need. If not, it will likely go unread or end up in the trash. "We haven't seen you in a while, we thought you may be interested in this discount on one of your favorite items" is more likely to be read than "15% off, act now!". Be tactful, and keep things personal.
It’s Cost Saving
Less time spent writing emails means more time to focus on growing your business. Email automation helps to scale your marketing efforts. You need less manpower to manage email automation than you would if you were responding to every user's action through email. Either this completely removes the need for one or decreases the amount of time they need to spend on engagement.
Tips For Email Automation Success
Email automation can take trial and error, but below are some tips to help aid you in creating effective templates.
Plan it out
Map out every action an individual can take within your website. This can be anything from filling up their shopping cart to signing up for an email newsletter or registering for an event. You should create an email template for every action a user could possibly take. Once you have mapped out the list of actions and created the template, you need to find the trigger point for the email to be sent. Let’s look at the user action of registering for an event. Once the user has filled out and submitted all of the necessary forms, you want to have an automated email sent immediately after to their inbox stating that their registration for the event has been confirmed and the details of the event are clearly laid out. Now, the user has their receipt for registering and they have a way to look at the details of the event if they forget. A hidden gem is that they may even take a screenshot of the email confirmation and post it to their social media; which would give your business more exposure. Be sure to jazz the template up with your branding! It's really important for the triggered actions to depend on the customer's position in the conversion funnel. The email you send to a potential lead visiting your site for the first time is much different from the email you send to a lead who has already shown intent to purchase.
Focus on the structure of the email
You have to consider the format that appeals most to readers. Is your email scannable, or is there too much information overwhelming the reader? Most people are using their smartphones to read their emails on the go. You only have a second or two to catch their attention once they've opened the email. Make it count. Set up appropriate headings that are formatted to stand out and guide the reader to the most important piece of the email. Place the call to action strategically. It's usually not effective to insert a call to action at the end of an email. The reader may never get there. People love images if they're positioned correctly within an email. They love to look at them and they love to click them. Place your call to action within an image to increase clicks.
Pay attention to metrics
You can track and measure the analytics of the emails in most applications like MailChimp or CRM systems. Determine the key metrics for your specific campaign. We recommend starting with the open rate. The open rate is the percentage of people who opened the email that it was successfully delivered to. Once you have good data and have established a high open rate, check out the click-through rate. The click-through rate is the percentage of people who opened the email that clicked through it. The click-through rate can be impacted by the copy, subject line, images, and more. Looking at each metric separately can help you determine small details that you may need to alter. It's important to set up a monitoring schedule so you can re-evaluate the outcome of your automated emails and adjust from there.
Email automation can drive revenue and reduce costs if done correctly. If you are unsure how to set things up, shoot us a message. We’d love to help!
