Email Marketing Automation — Essential Practices and Benefits

Source: Pixabay

Email marketing automation is a crucial feature of modern email outreach tools. It enables you to create and send personalized emails to highly targeted audiences based on specific timing and conditions.

As opposed to one-off campaigns used for immediate effect, automated email sequences enable you to create and nurture relationships with your customers. Automated email marketing can help you minimize the time and effort spent on reaching out to every single user that abandons a shopping cart, subscribes to your mailing list, performs a specific action on your website, etc.  

Email marketing automation can significantly improve your business processes. According to Emailmonday’s statistics overview, automated email campaigns can:

• Boost the number of generated leads by 80%

• Increase lead conversion by 77%

Using automation features to create an email marketing campaign isn’t complicated, but the process requires a certain amount of effort to be executed successfully. The tools can help you speed everything up, but you are the agent that sets the campaign in motion, tracks the results, and improves different aspects to ensure the best possible outcome for your business needs.

Types of Automated Email Campaigns

In terms of automation, the types of emails you can send can be categorized into two groups:

1. Drip emails

2. Event-based emails

You can set them up as separate strategies or combine their efforts. An event-based email can engage with a prospect and drive them to subscribe to your drip email campaign. This enables you to continually send valuable content in line with a specific action that a user has taken.

Drip Emails

A drip email campaign is based on sending sequenced emails during a specific timeframe. This approach is most often used for people who subscribe to your mailing list because they want to receive regular reports and updates. It’s an efficient solution for moving them further down the sales funnel.

This isn’t the only benefit of email scheduling. You can use it for a wide range of purposes, such as re-engaging old leads. Let’s say that you’ve got a list of leads that you haven’t contacted in a while. If you’ve got a sales event in the near future, you can schedule multiple emails to pique your contacts’ interest and try to bring them back into the fold.

You can try the following approach which revolves around three crucial emails:

1. The first email should be sent three days before the event. Invite your prospects to meet you at a specific time on the day of the event

2. The second email should be scheduled one day before the event. Ask something like: “Are you coming tomorrow?”

3. The third email should follow a day after the event. Set it up to be sent to everyone who didn’t respond to the second email. Say something like: “We’re sorry that yesterday wasn’t good for you”

The first email will probably not get many responses. The second email can spark your prospects’ interest, particularly if they’ve got nothing scheduled for the day of the event. You can book a meeting in either case. The third email can make your contacts feel like they’ve missed out on an opportunity and motivate them to respond. 

All three emails must contain the kind of content that the recipients can gain value from. If your email can help them or provide them with something they need, it’s likely to convert them into customers.

Event-Based Emails

Event-based emails are triggered by relevant events and specific user actions. Such automated emails are practical because they remove the necessity to track user behavior manually and create individual emails for every occasion. Companies most commonly set up:

• Welcome emails

• Onboarding emails

• Follow-up emails

• Abandoned cart emails

• Milestone emails

• Recommendation emails

It’s up to you to determine what kind of action — or lack of one — warrants an automated email response. Here are some situations when an event-based email can make a difference:

Combining the Two Automated Email Types

You can both schedule and set up triggers for emails that serve different email marketing purposes. Here’s how you can create an effective onboarding sequence:

1. Set up a welcome email for new subscribers

2. Schedule an email with a link to a video that introduces your top products to be sent a couple of days later

3. Set up an email with a coupon to be sent a week later to the subscribers that watched the video

4. Set up a different email to re-engage with the subscribers that didn’t see the video

The Benefits of Sending Automated Email Campaigns

Source: Pixabay

Email marketing automation provides a wide range of benefits for businesses. This covers multiple stages of the marketing process — from engaging with new prospects to leveraging your relationships with primed customers and improving your bottom line.

Here are the most significant benefits of an automated email campaign:

1. Nurturing leads

2. Boosting your revenue

3. Segmenting your lists

4. Personalizing your messages

5. Boosting brand awareness

6. Saving time to focus on other tasks

Nurturing Leads

Lead nurturing is a crucial practice because you cannot expect prospects to turn into customers right away. Some marketers think that their high-quality content and top-notch products are enough to drive people to convert. 

Research has shown that approximately 50% of the leads you’ve generated may be qualified, but they aren’t ready to make a purchase yet. The fact that they’ve downloaded a free guide from your website doesn’t mean that they’re prepared to get in touch with your sales representatives.

You need to build a relationship with them by determining their interests and providing them with valuable information. You can schedule and automate emails that will create the perfect customer journey, providing the resources for learning all that one should know about your business. This will help customers decide when they’re ready to invest in your product or service.

Boosting Your Revenue

As we have previously established, automated email campaigns can boost your conversions significantly. The more leads you can turn into loyal customers, the bigger your revenue figures will be. 

Segmenting Your Lists

A lot of email marketing software enables you to segment your contact lists and create highly targeted audiences. Segmentation can be done according to parameters such as:

• Behavioral patterns

• Demographics

• Psychographics

• Firmographics

With some tools, you can automate the process through self-segmentation. Whenever a user takes a particular action, they will be added to a list based on a specific behavioral pattern. This will enable you to understand their interests better so that you can tailor your messages accordingly.

The better you segment your contact list, the more targeted emails you can send. You can provide each group with highly relevant information. As a result, you’ll improve lead engagement and make your email campaigns more successful.

Personalizing Your Messages

List segmentation goes hand in hand with personalization. You can set up your emails so that specific fields are automatically filled with the appropriate lead information. Email marketing tools can extract these details from their databases and uploaded spreadsheet files. 

As a result, your emails can address people by their name. Depending on the tool, the message can contain other personal information, such as:

• Job title

• Location

• Industry

• Company name

This kind of personal approach is essential for creating strong relationships with your customers. People like being treated as individuals, and they will appreciate an email that makes them feel like they’re communicating with a human being instead of an impersonal corporate structure.

Boosting Brand Awareness

Automated email campaigns can make your marketing efforts more consistent. All the emails you send will look equally professional and reach your target audience at the right time. This will help your company leave a better impression as a responsive and coordinated organization.

Every email that provides valuable information to your recipients makes them more aware of your brand. By building a relationship with them this way, you’ll earn their loyalty and make it easier to sell them your product or service.

Saving Time to Focus on Specific Tasks

By automating most of the email marketing processes, you can focus on specific tasks that need a human touch. This includes:

• Writing and organizing high-quality copies

• Coming up with compelling subject lines

• Ensuring that your emails have impeccable designs

• Creating effective calls-to-action

Testing Your Emails

Source: Pexels

When you’ve set up your automated email campaign, you need to test it. This will enable you to see which aspects of your emails can produce the best results. The most commonly used method is A/B testing.

A/B testing — also known as split testing — is based on sending two variants of your email to two selected groups simultaneously. The first step is deciding what you’re going to test. You need to focus on a single aspect to get more accurate results. Your test can be based on:

• Subject line

• Call-to-action

• Headline

• Body text

• Closing text

• Text layout

• Images

• Specific design element

• Personalization feature

When deciding what to test, consider the hierarchy of different elements. You’ll want to test the most important aspects first. Your subject line is one of the most significant factors, which affects the recipients’ decision on whether they want to open the email. The CTA and headline are crucial attention-grabbing aspects that have an impact on the conversion process. You can check what kind of effect your images, layout, and specific design elements have later.

Choosing the Test Groups

To get the most accurate results on how successful your email campaign is with a particular target audience, you should test it on the entire list. There are other situations where it might be better to use limited groups for your A/B testing. 

If you intend to test something drastic — such as a shocking subject line or a controversial piece of content — the best course of action might be to show it to a smaller group. The number of your recipients still needs to be substantial. Depending on the size of your contact list, you should ensure that at least a portion of your contacts gets to see the particular aspect in action.

If the email presents your audience with a limited-time offer, your goal is to get the optimal conversion rate. In this case, you should run the test on a smaller audience. Once you’ve found out which of the variants works better, you can send it to the rest of the contact list.

You should split your test groups randomly. Creating groups based on specific recipients will bring you less accurate results.

Determining What Constitutes Success 

Aside from choosing the aspect you want to test, you also need to determine what constitutes a successful email marketing campaign. Look at the performances of your previous marketing efforts. 

Are conversion rates your primary focus? If the best rate you’ve got thus far has been 15%, you’ll want to aim for a higher percentage. You might be testing the campaign to find out how many recipients open the email. In that case, you’ll be looking for a greater open rate than your previous campaigns have had. 

If your A/B test doesn’t show the improvement you’re aiming for, you’ll want to run more tests with different email variants.

Why You Should Try Our White-Label Email Marketing Automation Software

Choosing an efficient email marketing automation tool with little or no restrictions is crucial. If the solution you are using is primarily focused on creating and sending automated emails, you might want to look for other complementary tools.

This includes lead generation tools that enable you to create actionable lists of prospects. You can benefit from gathering contacts from different sources, such as website domains, social media networks, and databases provided by email marketing software companies.

The good news is that we at Sell SaaS have got you covered. We offer a software bundle that contains tools for different email marketing purposes. 

You can try our email campaign creator. It enables you to create high-quality email and newsletter campaigns via its simple online editor. You can automate the way they are sent with the tool’s autoresponder feature. This includes both drip and event-based campaigns. You can track your results and determine how successful your emails are when it comes to deliverability rates.

Lead Generation Tools to Complement Your Automated Email Campaign Efforts

Our autoresponder works well with the following lead generation tools:

What makes our offer stand out is that all our tools are white-label digital products. This means that you can brand them and resell them at a price of your choosing.

Become our partner, and start earning 60% of what you sell. The more lucrative your SaaS business venture is, the more revenue goes to you. When you reach our top tier, 80% of all the sales will be yours.