Email automation is a powerful tool in email marketing that helps businesses streamline their email marketing efforts, increase engagement, and boost their ROI.
This article explains email automation, including how it works and the benefits it can provide for your business. We'll also guide you through the process of building an email marketing automation strategy in a few simple steps and share the best practices to get the most out of your email campaigns.
Table of Contents
What Is Email Automation?
Email automation is the use of software to automate email campaigns and communication with your customers or subscribers. Automated emails are triggered by specific actions, such as when a customer signs up for your mailing list or purchases on your website.
Email automation eliminates much of manual work reliably and efficiently. For example, you can automate welcome emails to new subscribers immediately after they sign up for your mailing list. These emails can include a warm welcome message, an introduction to your brand, and perhaps an incentive to make a first purchase.
Another example of email automation is sending recommendations of similar products to customers who purchased from your website. By making personalized recommendations, you're ensuring customers will keep your brand on top of their minds and encouraging repeat purchases. In fact, it can boost your average order value by up to 50%.
Email automation can help you save time, increase customer engagement, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
How Does Email Marketing Automation Work?
Email marketing automation is based on the triggers and messages principles, while some providers offer delay between these two steps.
When a subscriber meets the trigger or condition, such as signing up for your newsletter or abandoning a cart, the automation platform will send them a pre-designed email. If the delay is included, the platform will send an email after a certain time.
- Triggers are specific actions, conditions, or behaviors — for example, a user’s registration or abandoned cart. Triggers can also be time-based; e.g., a birthday email on a user’s special day.
- Delay is the time between the trigger and the message.
- The message is a customized email with specific content, images, and CTAs. Depending on your chosen software provider, you can even send SMS and push notifications.
Starting an email automation campaign usually involves these steps:
- Defining the trigger
- Setting the delay time (if included)
- Creating a suitable message that the email marketing automation platform will send to subscribers
Six Steps to Building an Email Marketing Automation Strategy
Essential steps of every successful email marketing automation strategy include:
- Step #1: Plan Each Email Automation Campaign.
- Step #2: Categorize Your Subscribers.
- Step #3: Understand Your Customers.
- Step #4: Conduct A/B Testing.
- Step #5: Encourage Email Subscriptions.
- Step #6: Catch a Passive Subscriber’s Interest.
Step #1: Plan Each Email Automation Campaign.
To succeed in email marketing automation, you must carefully plan every campaign. Create a list of goals for each automation email and ensure you know your audience well based on demographics or behavior, so you can send them personalized messages and determine the best timing for your emails.
Step #2: Categorize Your Subscribers.
Don't treat all your subscribers the same way. Identify and separate them into different groups based on their behavior, interests, or preferences so that you can send them more relevant emails with tailored offerings, educational content, and more.
Step #3: Understand Your Customers.
You can use web tracking and customer profiling tools (for example, Google Analytics) to analyze your customers’ online behavior and send them even more personalized email offers.
Step #4: Conduct A/B Testing.
Instead of trying out one idea at a time, you can send out two versions of the same message, each with different content to test (different subject lines, email body, discounts, emojis, CTAs, etc.).
See which one shows better results, such as more clicks and orders. A/B testing will provide valuable insights about email content that resonates best with your subscribers.
Step #5: Encourage Email Subscriptions.
You can build or expand your email subscription list by offering sign-up forms on your website, but make sure your pop-ups are not annoying — include them on a specific product or informational page.
Step #6: Catch a Passive Subscriber’s Interest.
Retaining your existing customers is much cheaper than acquiring new ones. Create re-engaging email marketing campaigns for customers who haven’t purchased for three months or more. Activate them by sending them promotions and hard-to-resist offers.
If following these steps requires too much of your schedule, you can always outsource email marketing or delegate it to the top conversion rate optimization services that will help convert your clicks and website traffic into profits.
Five Email Automation Best Practices
Email automation can provide many benefits for your business, but only if you follow the best practices of email marketing to make your emails personal and relevant.
Follow these tips to facilitate achieving your email marketing campaign goals:
- Set SMART Goals for Your Email Marketing Campaigns
- Use Clear and Consistent Branding
- Personalize and Humanize Your Emails
- Create Scannable Email Content
- Include Convincing CTAs
1. Set SMART Goals for Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaign goals should always be SMART, and email marketing is no exception. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Specific. Your goal should be well-defined and specific so that you know what exactly you're trying to achieve.
- Measurable. Define metrics you’ll use to track your progress and determine whether you've achieved your goals.
- Achievable. Consider your resources and set realistic and achievable goals.
- Relevant. Your goal should be relevant to your overall business strategy and objectives.
- Time-bound. Specify a time frame associated with your goal and stick to it.
2. Use Clear and Consistent Branding
Clear and consistent branding refers to using the same style and tone of voice throughout all of your messages, as well as design elements — typography, imagery, color scheme, etc. Consistency helps subscribers recognize your emails and build trust in your brand, creating a cohesive brand experience that improves engagement and overall email performance.
3. Personalize and Humanize Your Emails
Although AI-powered tools are increasingly popular, you don’t want your email to sound too generic and like it's been written by an emotionless person or a robot. Make your email sound natural — insert a little wordplay or appeal to readers' emotions.
Your subject line could be crucial for personalization since it is the first thing recipients will see. Make it stand out by using the recipient’s first name or grab their attention by mentioning the product they showed interest in. Using creative language and adding personalization to your email marketing campaigns will make them more compelling.
4. Create Scannable Email Content
On average, internet users spend only about 15 seconds reading a web page; therefore, it is important to create the easily scannable email content.
To make your content scannable and skim-friendly, use one-column layouts for short, simple messages and multi-column layouts for heavier text and images. If your email has long text sections, use headers to organize related content and make your email more readable.
Also, consider whether your email’s layout is compatible with the words you use. Does it suit the information you're presenting? Will it look good on a phone screen? If not, adjust it in time.
5. Include Convincing CTAs
Every email should have a clear CTA that directs recipients to take a specific action. Use action-oriented language and ensure your CTA is prominently displayed within the email so your subscribers know what you want them to do next.
Make your CTA stand out visually by using contrasting colors or bold text. Also, it should be specific and relevant to the content of your email. For example, if you're promoting a sale, use a CTA like "Buy now" instead of the irrelevant "Learn more."
Seven Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation provides the following benefits:
- Personalized Customer Experience
- Improved Retention Rate
- Scalability
- Email Consistency
- Time and Cost Optimization
- Reduced Errors
- Detailed Analytics and Reporting
1. Personalized Customer Experience
Messaging may make or break a brand's image. As Mailchimp, one of the best tools for email automation, points out, customers love personalization. And to drive this point home, Statista found that over 60% of online buyers say they would give up on brands that deliver non-personalized messages.
Email automation tools allow businesses to personalize their messages based on the recipient's behavior, interests, preferences, and previous purchases. Email personalization further helps increase engagement and loyalty and build stronger customer relationships.
2. Improved Retention Rate
Customer acquisition cost is five times bigger than retaining existing customers. On top of that, increasing customer retention by only 5% can increase your ROI by 25 to 95%!
With email marketing automation, it’s easy to stay in touch with your customers, but remember that email copy is equally important as scheduling regular email reminders of your brand. Instead of a brief “we miss you” message, with low chances for success, send personalized email that addresses the customer's needs and interests.
3. Scalability
If you send out emails manually, the number of customers you can reach is limited by the size of employees responsible for email marketing. Suppose your customer base suddenly grows, doubles, or even triples; you will struggle to keep sending out emails on time. This won't happen if you use an email automation tool.
Automated emails can help you scale your email marketing efforts. By setting up a system that sends out emails automatically every time someone signs up for your mailing list through a custom signup form, you won't have to worry about staff availability.
4. Email Consistency
Email automation maintains a regular and reliable schedule for sending emails to your subscribers. With it, you can ensure that your emails are consistently sent out at the same time and frequency to your existing customers or right after registration for new customers.
This way, you will increase the benefits of your email marketing efforts. You can build trust and credibility with your audience, leading to higher engagement rates, and improved overall performance of your email marketing campaigns.
5. Time and Cost Optimization
Cost optimization is one of the most important considerations for businesses of all sizes and niches. Good news — email automation can help lower your expenses.
Email marketing campaigns can be time-consuming and resource-requiring, from designing the email to creating the content and coding the HTML templates. By automating your emails, you can streamline the process and reduce the time and resources required, using existing templates and scheduling emails to be sent at various intervals without constant monitoring.
6. Reduced Errors
As humans, even your best employees can make mistakes. Even if they're using templates or copying/pasting content, they can still make typos or other errors — which is normal. However, email automation can help to reduce errors in your email marketing campaigns and make your emails look more polished and professional.
By automating email campaigns, you can ensure that each email is sent accurately. Additionally, email automation ensures that emails are sent at the right time, which can improve their relevance and effectiveness and the overall performance of your email marketing campaigns.
7. Detailed Analytics and Reporting
Email automation provides detailed analytics and reporting that can help you better understand and improve your email marketing campaigns with data-driven decisions.
You'll get access to information about your email's performance, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, so you can analyze which emails resonate with your audience and which need adjustments.
Email Automation Conclusion
Email automation can be an extremely powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to improve their marketing efforts. By automatically sending targeted and personalized emails to subscribers, your business can save time and resources while improving customer loyalty, engagement rates, and ROI.
However, when implementing email automation, it's important to follow best practices and strategies to ensure success. These include segmenting your audience, crafting compelling subject lines and content and regularly testing and optimizing your campaigns.
If developing and implementing an email automation strategy seems too complex or you’re too busy to dedicate time to this task, contact the top email marketing agencies to help you build brand awareness, increase loyalty, and boost sales!
Email Automation FAQs
1. What is automation in email?
Email automation is the process of using specialized email automation software to send out email marketing campaigns to your customers or subscribers.
2. How do I automate email messages?
You can automate email marketing campaigns by following a few simple steps:
- Buy and install email automation software.
- Build an email list and categorize email receivers according to their interest or online behavior.
- Set automation trigger.
- Create email marketing content.
- Activate your email automation campaign.
3. What is the best email automation software?
Some of the best email automation tools on the market are MailChimp, Omnisend, GetResponse, Wishpond, and Benchmark Email.
