Over the last few years, marketing processes have become increasingly advanced. Email marketing, as well as email automation, are no different. In fact, the global email marketing industry was valued at $7.5 billion on 2020 and is project to increased to $17.9 billion by 2027, according to a report from email marketing platform Litmus. Aside from Litmus, there exists a plethora of email automation platforms including, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, Bronto, HubSpot, and many more.
So, what exactly is email marketing automation and how does it help marketers reach their targeted audiences? As part of Americaneagle.com’s annual event dubbed the Americaneagle.com Forum, Digital Marketers Caroline Letzel and Lucas McChristian taught us just that.
The What, How, Why, and Benefit of Automation (with Examples!)
Email marketing automation is the use of specific workflows to collect contacts during a specific action or time period, and then send them related, specific, and/or personalized content based on unique triggers. The real power behind automation is just that… it’s automated. It works to accomplish a variety of goals including automatic engagement, relationship nurturing, increased revenue, reduced errors, and much more.
Email marketing, as a whole, is all connecting the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
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3 Steps to Make the Most Out of Your Automation
1. Implement Trackable Triggers
Step one to setting up your automation is to understand your users, how they interact with your site, and where you can interact with during the process. When do you interact? A download, form submission, member or subscription/newsletter sign up, a drop off in a conversion funnel, browsing habits, and more. It’s highly important that you get use your website tracking snippet tool so that you can monitor how subscribers move from your email to your website – and what they’re looking at. It’s also important to segment your email lists on website behavior and only send to verified recipients.
2. Maintain a Clean List
Maintaining a healthy contact list is crucial to an optimized automation strategy. To ensure your list is clean, make sure to regularly review and remove hard bounces, opt-outs, unengaged users, and role accounts (like sales@, marketing@, etc.) This help you to increase send speed, create more accurate lists and results, increase your reputation as a legitimate business, and increase engagement performance.
3. Measure Success
Measuring your success (or lack-there-of) is very important. Ensure you are tracking opens, clicks, click-through rate, bounces, unsubscribes, revenue, orders, traffic, etc. Then, based on your metrics and performance, revisit your design, subject lines, timings, and triggers every few months. What worked yesterday, may not be working today, so it’s important to identify areas of improvement for all of your sends.
Types of Automated Emails
1. Welcome Emails
More than eight out of 10 people (approximately 88%) will open a welcome email, generation four-times as many opens and 10-times as many clicks as other email types, according to HubSpot. The goals of sending this type of email are to welcome a new contact to your mailing list, set expectations, and/or offer tips, tricks, or other useful information about your brand. It increases awareness, loyalty, and drives additional brand benefits.
What should be included in your welcome email series?
- Brand introduction and a thank you
- Expectations about information
- Useful links
- Benefits of creating an account
- Next steps or follow-up action
- Incentive
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2. Abandoned Cart Emails
The average cart abandonment rate across all industries is 65.57%. It’s even higher on mobile at 85.6%. These statistics prove that abandoned cart emails are necessary to push the customer to the next phase. The goal of these types of emails is to re-engage a customer who is considering a purchase and give them a clear, simple way to complete their revenue. It also helps gain otherwise lost revenue.
Trigger abandoned cart emails when a cart has at least one item in it and the customer has left the page. Sending three emails is considered best practice and will result in the most reclaimed conversion. If the customer completes their purchase or their cart is empty, be sure to remove them from the automation flow.
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3. Purchase Re-engagement
The cost of acquiring new customers can be four to six-times as much as retaining old ones. This is where purchase re-engagement comes in. The goal of these types of emails is to re-activate contacts and invite them back to your site. To do so, utilize segmented lists to target inactive contacts based on purchase history. Consider sending two to three emails within this series and set up list additions so the customer within the “re-engagement” flow will be isolated and not sent other marketing messaging.
In addition to the three listed above, there’s are multitude of email automation types to consider utilizing. For example, subscription updates, contact re-engagement, birthday, first-time purchases, browse abandonment, and more.
Conclusion
Email marketing automation is a powerful tool that enables your business to stay in contact with your customers and keep them up to date. It not only allows you to save valuable time and resources, but it also offers a high return-on-investment. If you’re not sure how to use email marketing automation to your benefit, let Americaneagle.com help you. We’re experts in email and have a staff dedicated to helping your business increase conversions.
Contact us to get started.
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