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What is Email Marketing Automation?

We ask the question about Email Marketing Automation. There are a lot of important aspects that make up Online Marketing. In fact, not only do you have to be aware of the various online marketing strategies, you have to master them in order to be successful with any online campaign.

Sure, some marketers would like to focus much of their efforts on Social Media and Content Marketing as that is where all the fun is seemingly at. But Email Marketing to this day still remains a hugely important strategy in a marketer’s arsenal. Not only is it a fairly simple concept to grasp, you can even automate it with the right tools so that your emails could practically sell themselves.

How Email Marketing Automation Evolved?

To reiterate, Email Marketing has been around from the 1990s just as long as we have had Microsoft Windows and a Hotmail account. The basics of an Email Marketing campaign is simply a string of emails sent out in a series. This may or may not hit the radar of the reader as it is the same message for all subscribers on the mailing list. Fundamentally, this has not changed but with the more smarter use of platform features it really has become possible to segment personalise and truly make your content the most engaging it can be.

In order to automate your E-Mail marketing efforts, there are a few things that you have to understand first.

What is Email Marketing Automation?

The shortest way to describe email marketing automation is that it is simply your email marketing campaign done on autopilot. When we think of email marketing, we think of a person sending the same email to a list of people subscribed to them.

For example, it might want to inform you are about to post something new on your blog or at your YouTube Channel. For businesses, email marketing works also be informing their subscribers of new products, services, limited offers, and events.

Automated email marketing follows along the same principles but, this time, everything is done automatically. Using a set of triggers that the subscriber does upon reading your email, an email marketing tool will do all the heavy lifting of email marketing for you. And the best part about this is that you would get the same results and more from automation but at a considerably reduced amount of mental and physical effort on your part.

What Does Automation Look Like?

When it comes to email marketing, automation should come in two main types.

• Time-Based -This kind of automation is where your email content is delivered to your subscribers base on factors like set time, dates, and intervals. For instance, a new subscriber of yours can be sent a series of introductory emails which they will receive every week or 3 days, depending on how you have set your automation up.

For many, this is the more basic form of automation as there is a clear schedule for when your email content is going to be distributed. And since it is basic, it does not really allow for further customization.

• Behavior-Based – The more advanced form of automation, behavior-based automation is a system where your emails are automatically sent to a subscriber if they perform certain tasks.

For instance, a subscriber clicks on a link provided in one email or completes a transaction on your main web page. These acts will serve as a trigger for your email program to send a separate email confirming that the subscriber has done an act.

Aside from confirming an act, you can even use behavior-based automation to offer something special for that specific subscriber as a reward for performing an act. This may come in the form of links that lead to a discount or access to yet-to-be-released content.

What about Transactional Email?

Before anything else, it is important that one learns the distinction between email for transactions and ones for purely email purposes. Transactional email may share some similarities with behavior-based automated email in the sense that they are triggered only upon the performance of certain acts.

For instance, a customer might order something from your website and has gone through the payment process. After clicking the Finish button, they might receive an email a few seconds later confirming the transaction and containing details that they might need to secure the items later on. In essence, transactional emails are sent to specific individuals for the confirmation of a transaction.

Marketing email, on the other hand, is sent to a wider array of people that includes customers and prospects. They have a purely commercial and promotional focus, seeking to compel people to do something other than affirming that they already have done something.

That does not mean that transactional emails cannot be automated. In most cases, you’d rather have a program do these for you especially if your online sales page is quite busy. But, for the purposes of this article, it is best to focus on automating your email marketing campaigns.

So Why Bother with Automating Your Email Marketing?

This is a question commonly raised since it especially deals with the very nature of emails. If you think about it, emails are not exactly young, hip, and exciting. Compared to newer forms of communication like texting, social media messages, tweets, and other forms of content, emails feel rather outdated.

But despite being the oldest form of online communication right now, emails remain one of the channels with the strongest potential lead generations out there. This is due to the fact that many people still do use their emails for a number of important transactions in the online world.

If they want to sign up for something like in Facebook or Twitter, they’d have to provide their email. If they want to purchase something, they’d have to provide their email. And so on and so forth.

The point is that people still go to their emails to get information and to do some tasks. As such, when you automate your email marketing, you enjoy from three benefits.

• Saving Time

Imagine that you have to personally create and send an email welcoming a new subscriber that just recently signed up. One might be okay but a hundred can be stressful.

And imagine having to manually monitor whenever someone just subscribed to your email list. You’d be stuck looking at your computer screen for all day long when you are supposed to do something else important.

An email automation program can help you do all your email marketing campaigns campaigns. This way, you can maintain some form of communication with your subscribers without having to stop everything else that you are doing.

• Exact and Accurate Delivery

As was previously illustrated, having to manually respond to all actions done by your subscribers is time consuming. Also, there is the fact that not all of your subscribers belong in the same timezone that you operate in.

With an automated email system, you can make sure that your subscribers get the information that they need about you on the right time according to their local timezone. So, for example, if you’ve set for an email to be published at 8 am on December 24, 2021, everyone in your email list is going to receive that email on that time and on that date, depending on where they are in the world currently.

• Better Click-Through Rates

By its own, email marketing already enjoys from a high open and click through rate compared to other forms of online marketing. However, with automated marketing being delivered at a timelier pace and containing more relevant messages, those click-through and open rates would increase by threefold.

As of 2016, and in a research commissioned by the Epsilon Email Institute, automated email messages have an open rate of 50.4% compared to standard messages while also enjoying a click through rate of 106.4%. Again, all of this can be attributed to the nature of urgency and importance contained in email marketing that compels a person to open almost every bit of mail they get online.

These are but the major benefits that can be expected if you use an automated program for your email marketing efforts. There are also some other advantages to be experienced but these vary from one program to another. Either way, automating your email marketing strategy can make things all the more convenient for you.

And with that out of the way, it is time now to learn how one should go about automating their email marketing system.

The Automation Process

Automating your email marketing system is not Rocket science. You can actually do this if you have the right tool on your hand like ActiveCampaign, Drip, and GetResponse. In fact, the interface of these programs should help you set up the automation process pretty easy. Most times the time taken is not so much about putting your vision down but creating the vision of how workflow in your business works.

Regardless of your program of choice, the automation process will always involve the same steps. Here they are:

• Setting Up the Email

First and foremost, you have to understand that email marketing can further be classified into two groups. These groups can be used either in tandem or you could focus on one over the other depending on your overall goals.

• Trigger Email – As was previously stated, email can be triggered on time or through the performance of an act.These emails are the easiest to make as they contain rather generic yet still actionable information.

Some forms of Trigger Email can be used to target specific people which include:

1. Newcomers
2. Cart abandoners
3. Friends of subscribers
4. Long-time subscribers

For instance, a trigger email can be sent to people who have reached a milestone in their subscription to you like being a subscriber for half a year or a year or having been there right from the beginning.

• Drip-Feed Email – This type of email are sequential in nature and are delivered based on a time frame that you yourself has specified. And, if you use them right, these types of email can lead to potential for extra income.

This is because Drip-Feed email are targeted towards people who already subscribed to your list. As such, you don’t need to convince them further to be part of your brand but you might have to give them extra “little pushes” to do a transaction.

In the same vein, they can also be used to target cold leads, people who showed interest in your offerings but failed to follow through for one reason or another.

An important thing to remember with Drip-Feed email is its frequency. When setting this up, the intervals between emails should not be short that it could be considered spam or too long that the reader eventually loses their interest for whatever you are offering them. Also, they must a adopt a tone persuasive and urgent enough to allow for a click-through.

• Segmenting Your Subscribers

A common mistake email marketers make is in giving everyone the same message at the same time. Although that is technically the point of email marketing, it still would be better to cater to the different needs of your subscribers.

Fortunately for you, almost every dedicated email marketing program out there allows you to categorize your subscribers and provides their own subsets of triggers which activate specific messages for each classification.

How you classify your subscribers is something that only you alone must figure out. However, for the best results, it is best to base your classification using the following classifiers.

• Location – In online businesses and marketing, you have to come to terms with the fact that your operations are never going to be limited to a local sphere.

As such, you have to identify from where most of your subscribers are coming from as this can dictate the type of time triggers that you will use. And aside from that, this tells you when they are the most activate so you could time your messages right.

• Industry – If you operate in multiple industries, it is unavoidable for you to encounter people coming from different backgrounds. This might even affect the nature and content of your email marketing. For instance, you might use a different email for people coming from this industry and another email from those coming from another.

• Product/Service Purchased or Not Purchased – This is essential in identifying at what point of the customer conversion process your subscriber is. Some subscribers might need a little bit more convincing in order to complete the sales process and this should be reflected in the email that they are to receive.

And then there are the Cart Bailers, the subscribers who actually picked something from your sales page but did not bother to complete the transaction. They might need an extra bit of convincing to complete the next transaction through special offers.

• Mode of Entry – How exactly did these people came to know about you? From where did they see your content? A person’s point of origin relating to how they became subscribed to you will help you in identifying the kind of message and offers that they need to be exposed to with your email marketing.

There are also other qualifiers that you can use to classify your subscribers. The point is that you should never treat all of your subscribers similarly to get the most out of automating your email marketing platform.

• Personalizing Your Messages

This goes without saying but you should never have the same message sent to all of your subscribers. Sure, they might contain information that is useful but it does not connect to them on a human level. If you insist on doing those one-message blasts for all of your subscribers, you can be certain of getting more than a handful of unsubscriptions.

So, how do you go about personalizing your emails? That really depends on you and the kind of people you are corresponding with but automated emails tend to take 7 distinct forms.

Welcome Mails

This type of email should be sent out to anyone who just subscribed to your email list. The contents here are pretty straightforward as you are just thanking them for subscribing and telling them what to expect in the future.

Thank You Mails

This email is sent out whenever a subscriber of yours does something that you asked be it a transaction, a donation, or anything else. As is apparent, this email invokes a sense of gratitude on your part which is necessary in maintaining a long-term relationship with these people.

Online Course Notifications

Supposed that you are running an online learning course and would like to entice new students or inform enrolled persons of your upcoming lesson. You can send an automated email to drip-feed your modules to anyone who has subscribed to your email list. It is one way of inviting new people to come join in on the lessons while giving your enrolled students a chance to mentally prepare themselves for what is to come.

Re-Engagement Mails

Email of this type is sent out usually for subscribers that have been inactive for quite a while or failed to complete a specific task. Re-engagement mails can be tricky to set up but you could do so by setting up a combination of time-based and behavior-based triggers.

For example, you could use a time spanning since their last visit to the site as a trigger. Most websites would use something in between 3 to 6 months. Or perhaps a person enrolled at an online course has missed a few classes. You can use this as a trigger for the sending of this email.

The Upsell

Targeting people that have been long-time subscribers and regular patrons of your brand, this email is ideal for doing a bit of upselling to them or sweetening a deal that you have offered to them. Mails like notifications of discounts, sales, and even offers of exclusive looks at yet-to-be announced content fall under this category. Upsell mails work well if you set up a few time-based triggers combine with behavior-based triggers like multiple frequent purchases.

The Cart Bailer’s Email

As the name would give away, this automated email is targeted towards individuals who fail to complete the sales process on your website. What’s a cart bailer, exactly? These are people who have converted into your customers and have started a sales transaction with your business.

To put it in other words, they liked something you are offering and have placed these items in a virtual cart. But, for some reason, they never followed through with the purchase thus bailing on their cart.

Cart bailer emails are not just there to remind people to do something for you. In fact, you must entice them with a specific offer so they get intrigued or motivated enough to complete a transaction the next time. Perhaps a limited offer or a discount would do the trick.

And then there is the timing of the mail. You must do this in no less than 2 days but no more than 3 after the cart bail. This way, the person still remembers what they failed to do and you don’t sound desperate.

The Subscription Renewal

The premise of this email is rather simple: You’d rather not lose subscribers for any reason at all. This is quite true if there is a monetary element in becoming subscribed to your list. And even if subscription is free for your brand, you’d rather not have the size of your audience decrease. Unfortunately, cancelling of subscriptions tend to happen, either willfully or automatically.

This is where the renewal email comes into play as it can inform the recipient that their subscription is about to terminate and they must renew it on or before that date. Setting up this email is rather easy as you only a time-based trigger for such. However, you’d rather not set the trigger to a few days before the cancellation.

At best, set the trigger to a good week or two before the date of termination. This way, the recipient gets informed of the upcoming termination and prepare accordingly.

Provided that your triggers are set up properly, each of your different subscribers would receive the information they need through highly personalized automated messages with the program that you are using. If done right, you should be able to continue communicating with your subscribers while attending to other important matters.

Automation Strategies to Remember

There are a lot of options available when it comes to automating your email marketing plan. And with that comes an even wider margin for error.

Do not worry, though, as automating your email marketing is not as difficult as you would think. In order to get the most out of it, you have to take all opportunities presented to you through employing some strategies like the ones below.

• Having More than One Channel

In as much as people came across you and your brand through different means, you should also more than one means of communicating with them. Multi-channel Email Marketing is one of the best ways to maximize your ROI for each channel you set up while also doing some form of cross-market promotions.

You can make your email marketing multi-channel by investing in more than one automation program. Perhaps one program can be focused on providing SMS messages to your subscribers, another for Facebook message, and another for Udemy and other websites.

Just be mindful that this does increase your expenses as a lot of automation programs do require their own monthly subscriptions. However, this is one of the best ways to expand your reach across the Internet.

• Gather (and Use) Data Effectively

The key to properly segmenting your audiences is knowing who they are in the first place. And you cannot do this if you don’t do some research in the first place.

Gathering information from your subscribers can be tricky since people nowadays are quite protective of their private data. However, you can make this easier by asking the right kind of questions to your would-be subscribers.

Some programs like Omnisend and ActiveCampaign allow you to set up specific fields and questions that get you the information you need without being too intrusive.

Aside from gathering information, you should also know how to use it properly. Information like birthdays, location, and phone numbers, for instance, can give you various opportunities to set up specific triggers and email channels. The more personalized and timely your emails are, the greater the chances that people will respond to it.

• Keeping the Relationship Alive Post-Sale

Convincing a person to convert into a customer and complete a sales process is a challenge in itself. But making that person come back for repeat transactions is an even worthier objective. Also, there is the fact that retaining customers is a far cheaper task than having to acquire new ones.

This is why you should invest in creating upsell emails as well as bail and re-engagement offers for your customers. They already have an experience with your product and, provided that such experience was good, convincing them to do a repeat sale should not be difficult.

This is why you should set up specific time and behavior triggers to target subscribers who have been inactive in their relationship with the brand. Perhaps you can compel them to do something beneficial for both of you the second time around with the right re-engagement approach.

To Conclude

Now that you understand what automation brings to you and how to set it up, you should have no problems in turning your email marketing system into a self-sustaining and responsive platform. Of course, your choice of automation program will also matter as apps like ActiveCampaign, Drip, and Intercom are considered the best for their user interface and the tons of set up options that they offer.

Regardless of your automation software of choice, however, you should remember that a good automated email system is one that knows when and how to attract and re-engage subscribers. So as long you keep the system diverse and responsive, you should be seeing some significant changes in subscriber engagement and, of course, your sales figures.