Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy that has been around for a long time now. This is because emails let you reach your target consumers with your message 24/7. And most consumers check their emails daily. Further, email converts better than most other marketing strategies. And email marketing has an ROI of 4400%.
Email marketing automation involves automatically sending emails to your subscribers and prospects, based on triggers or schedules. It provides a way for your emails to carry the right message, reach the right people at the right time- without repeatedly performing the tasks.
You need to link your email marketing platform with your website analytics to target audiences based on their preferences, behavior, and purchase history. After this, you can increase the relevance of your messages by personalizing the individual customer’s experience.
Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation allows you to
Scale up your marketing strategy
Sending out an email series manually restricts the number of consumers you can reach. And if your customer base multiplies, your limited resources won’t be able to handle it. Here is where automation helps. Your platform will take up the duty of sending an email each time someone subscribes to you or performs an action that you have set as a trigger.
Personalize your customers’ experiences
Personalization appeals to customers. Studies say that 90% of consumers find personalized content attractive, and 91% of them are more likely to buy from brands that provide customized offers and recommendations. With email marketing automation, you can create and send a series of personalized emails that target the consumers’ interests.
Increase your marketing team’s productivity
Automation eliminates the manual compilation of email lists and message scheduling. This, in turn, reduces repetitive tasks and time wastage. The time thus saved can be allocated to focus on more productive work, such as customer relationship building.
Enhance your customer retention rate
Customers love hearing from you frequently, and when they do it, they want your messages to be relevant to them. Automation allows you to schedule periodic and personalized emails easily. This improves your customer retention rate.
Email Marketing Automation Tools
NotifyVisitors
NotifyVisitors is an effective marketing automation software that lets you plan, organize, manage, and evaluate your marketing tasks. Its attractive email marketing automation features include segmentation, contact management, lead nurturing, campaign management, and marketing analytics.
Its email segmentation tools are advanced, and let you group your contacts based on age, location, and online behaviour. Its marketing analytics tools provide you with the detailed data analytics of your marketing campaigns. It allows seamless software up-gradation and easy data migration. It has a Gmail extension, which allows you to work outside of your Gmail account.
Contactually
Contactually is an email marketing tool and CRM, designed especially for real estate professionals. It centralizes your contacts so that you can derive the most value from your business relationships. Its CRM platform collects contacts from various sources, including your website, email inbox, and social media profiles based on how you work (sphere of influence, current clients, new leads, etc.).
It also gathers maximum possible amounts of information to lead you throughout your messaging. And you can intelligently schedule emails with its Best Time to Email feature. Other than email marketing, it also includes features for lead management, customer segmentation, interaction tracking, campaign management, and contact management.
Contactually is user-friendly and super-smooth. It has a clean interface and helps prioritize your day’s schedule with its daily dashboard. It allows broker-level administration to boost adoption and increase agent productivity.
Intercom
Intercom is a Conversational Relationship Platform (CRP). Its email marketing tool is designed for sending automated email conversations directly in an app. This is especially useful when you are instructing your users/customers on how to use your app. For it gives them the necessary assistance at a place they most likely would look for.
Intercom’s email marketing includes other features like email auto-responders, CAN-SPAM compliance, list management, template management, event-triggered emails, A/B testing, mobile-optimized emails, drip campaigns, Dynamic content, reporting/analytics, and more. This tool is favored for its ease of use, and suite of features.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a leading marketing automation tool across various tasks, including email marketing through automated workflows, split testing, lead scoring, Dynamic Content, drip campaigns, web visitor tracking, segmentation, analytics/ROI tracking, etc. Its suite of tools facilitates optimizing your marketing based on data, thus converting your visitors into leads.
Its email marketing automation tool is easy to use. It allows the flexible management of lists. It has email templates, which can be customized with its drag and drop interface. The tool allows you to choose from many conditions, actions, and triggers to send apt emails to the right audience at the right time.
BenchmarkONE
Formerly known as Hatchbuck, BenchmarkONE is another reputed sales and marketing automation solution. Its email marketing automation tool enables you to upload or create documents. It uses tags to optimize messages, just like Gmail does. You can create tags and allocate those to specific contacts based on their interests and the funnel they are currently in.
It then allows combining emails into campaigns that are delivered as per the scheduled times. It monitors the customer interaction with your email, awards scores for their activities, reads the email, visits your site, clicks on a link, downloads a document, etc. You can direct further marketing efforts with your prospects as per these content scores.
Marketo
Marketo is a top-tier overall automated email marketing solution. It is advanced, yet an easy- to- use the system. Its triggered email campaigns help you to move forward with assurance. These campaigns can be robustly designed based on more than 40 customer behaviors. It provides you with the flexibility to construct your emails to meet your exact needs.
The tool’s market segmentation capabilities, Revenue Cycle Modeler, and SFDC integration simplify the process of identifying each individual’s stage of the buyer journey in your marketing database. This allows you to implement and run smarter marketing campaigns.
E-goi
E-goi offers something beyond mere email marketing automation. It enables you to split your email campaign by sending out updates via voice message, SMS, or even fax. Its suite of email marketing features includes auto-responders, A/B testing, drip campaigns, image library, customer web surveys, template management, event-triggered emails, CAN-SPAM compliance, reporting/ analytics a lot more.
E-goi is super easy to use and works with tags for contacts. It also offers incredibly good marketing segmentation choices. The tool is ideal for digital agencies, entrepreneurs, web developers, bloggers, and marketing departments. You can use it in English or Spanish. It offers a free version as well.
LeadSquared
LeadSquared facilitates the streamlining of lead scoring by automating email marketing services and integrating them with sales activities. This increases the efficiency of your online marketing. Its CRM management platform combines email marketing, social media integration, segmentation, mobile access, document storage, lead scoring, a reminder system, and many more.
LeadSquared is intuitive and extremely user-friendly. It empowers you to create different campaigns for different contacts and shoot emails at a single go. The reporting is accurate and informative. It provides you with an email opening and clicks rate. Further, when a prospect clicks on a link sent through email, his web browsing history becomes auto-linked to you. So, based on their behavioral data, you can target your prospects.
How to Drive the Best Results with Email Marketing Automation?
Below given are a few tips to help you make your automated email marketing strategy more effective.
Segment your contacts
Most email marketing automation tools offer segmentation features. These allow you to divide your subscribers based on specific criteria like their geographic location, product or service bought, product or service not bought, one-time buyers, frequent buyers, prospects, etc. Segmenting them likewise allows you to send them personalized emails, making them take action in your favor.
Track responses
Each time you send an automated email, your customer responds in a certain way. Many email marketing automation tools empower you to track these responses. These responses include
- Whether the email got delivered to the user.
- Whether the user views the email.
- Whether he or she opens the email.
- Whether he or she clicks through to your website.
- Whether he or she purchases the product or service suggested.
- Whether he or she uses an offer.
- And whether he or she continues browsing once they enter your site.
By learning the user behaviour related to the above, you get to direct your next move accordingly. For instance, if you find that your recipients aren’t opening your offer emails, you should try a different tactic. Maybe a different subject line will work.
Set up trigger emails
Trigger emails are those emails sent when your subscriber performs a particular action. The triggers for these automated emails generally include-
- Welcoming /getting started with your service or product/ onboarding
- Referring to a friend
- Abandoned cart
- Milestones such as join dates, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, etc.
Offer discounts prudently
Offering discounts do help in selling your products and services to a significant extent. For, these entice reluctant spenders to buy. However, overusing these can lead your customers to receive discounts more often, which will not be profitable for you. So, offer discounts in a well-planned and wise way.
Automate drip campaigns
Some people become your customers only after interacting with your brand several times. Drip campaigns involve steadily “dripping” useful content about your brand, industry, or product to your prospects and customers. Automating email drip campaigns ensure that only those prospects who have shown interest in your brand receive your emails. They can be slowly led to buy from you.
Link your emails with customized landing pages
To ensure a seamless transition between your email and your landing page. You can do this by matching your email with your landing page regarding content, design, and CTA. Such a consistency across your marketing materials makes the email receiver comfortable to click through. It also facilitates familiarizing your contacts with your brand.
A/B test your emails
A/B testing is not only for landing pages, CTA buttons, website photography, etc. but also for your emails. That is why you would have found that most of the tools that we presented in the previous section offer a feature for A/B testing emails. This would help you determine which email version generates higher conversions from your target audience.
Combine automation with analytics
Email automation allows you to send personalized messages to each contact, a new visitor, a prospect, or a loyal customer. Customer analytics gives you data about how each customer interacts with your brand. By combining automation with analytics, you can polish the way you target each contact with that exceptional personal touch.
Focus on building relationships
Email marketing automation tools empower you to keep a record of your contact preferences about interest, frequency of communication, incentives, etc. It also lets you know their behaviour across different marketing channels. This knowledge helps you deliver relevant and personalized messages to them.
This also conveys to them that you understand them well and respect their tastes. This will build trust, which in turn will build relationships. Slowly, you will be able to gain their loyalty and turn them into your brand advocates. So, make email marketing automation a part of your customer retention strategies.
Now that you got to know what email marketing automation is, how your business can benefit from it, what are the different email marketing automation solutions available in the market, and how to drive the best results with those, let’s conclude this write-up.
Just like any other automation, email marketing automation can also free you up from many repetitive tasks. This would save you a lot of time which you can put to more productive use. There are many automation solutions available in the market for email marketing.
Do choose one that would suit your needs. And once you are set to launch your email marketing automation, implement our valuable tips mentioned in the previous section. This will help you make the most out of your email marketing automation.
