Email Automation
Automate your email communications, craft stunning email campaigns, and stay connected with your contacts and customers through personalised newsletters.
Why You Should Use Automated Email Marketing
Email automation can help nurture leads and foster stronger relationships with your subscribers. By sending automated emails triggered by specific actions, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a free resource, you can quickly and easily communicate with your audience and provide them with valuable information.
Email marketing automation eliminates time-consuming tasks, such as preparing email lists, sending generic messages, or scheduling events manually. This gives marketers and salespeople more time to work on projects that require their attention (or cannot be fully automated).
Email marketing automation is centred around workflows, a predetermined, triggered set of actions you direct your automation software to take.
Without email automation, your marketing team misses significant opportunities to nurture and engage your target audience and contacts. Email automation uses predefined rules to send personalised email messages based on the specific actions a customer takes or doesn't take.
For example, a customer who just completed a purchase may receive an automated email from the store suggesting other products they may like.
Another typical example would be receiving an automated email reminding you to check out the items in your virtual cart after you leave a website without making a purchase. Email automation helps convert leads into customers, delight existing customers, and encourage activities like greater product adoption, upsells, evangelism, and additional purchases.
Email Automation and Marketing Statistics Marketers Should Know
Email automation is the most frequently used marketing channel, with 65% of marketers utilising it. 71% of B2B marketers also use automation in their email marketing efforts. The number of email users worldwide is expected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025, more than half of the world's population. In 2022 alone, 333.2 billion emails were sent per day.
Email automation lets you send personalised messages tailored to your audience's interests and preferences. With the help of data and analytics tools, you can target specific groups of people based on their behaviour or demographic information and send them messages that are more likely to resonate with them.
So, what are some examples of email automation in action? Here are a few:
When someone signs up for your newsletter or creates an account on your website, you can automatically send them a welcome email introducing them to your brand and providing useful information.
The Benefits of Automation
Let's take a deeper look into some of the ways email automation can benefit marketers.
1. More Seamless Workflow
Email automation is a useful tool for marketers to send emails to all of their customers quickly and efficiently. This allows marketers to focus on other important tasks while ensuring that their customers are satisfied. 49% of sales and marketing professionals consider time savings of repetitive tasks as one of the top three advantages of automation. Another advantage, listed by 45% of professionals, is the improved efficiency and return on investment (ROI).
2. Better Customer Experience
According to recent studies, 43% of marketers believe that the biggest benefit of using marketing automation is improving the customer experience. Automated emails can be used to send messages to customers that they will love, such as incentives, helpful reminders, and onboarding content. By staying in touch with your customers regularly, you can establish a stronger relationship, increase customer retention, and generate more leads.
3. Improved Email Segmentation
Segmenting email recipients based on attributes, behaviour patterns, and engagement levels leads to increased engagement, open, conversion, and click-through rates as automated emails make it easier.
4. Fewer Errors
Even if you are using pre-existing templates or just copying and pasting content, there is always a chance of making mistakes. However, email automation offers a solution to this problem by allowing you to map individual user variables onto relevant portions of your templates. This feature enables you to send personalised emails in no time, without any errors.
There are several email automation software on the market today — the key is selecting the best option for your business and goals.
We are a Diamond HubSpot Partner and we will work through the following steps in this section by looking at HubSpot's Marketing Automation tool.
Determine to whom you want to send your emails. For example, you might use lifecycle stages to group your email recipients — for an upsell campaign, you send emails to existing customers who have not purchased a particular product yet.
Your email marketing tool should be able to help you efficiently segment your customers ahead of your campaign using the criteria you've decided upon.
Your email marketing is only as good as your strategy — so ensure you know exactly why you're contacting these individuals. Do you want them to buy something? Learn something? Do something?
Once you answer this question, you can figure out the messaging you need to take them from where contacts are currently to where you want them to go.
You also have to plan for what happens when you succeed.
For example, imagine a 10-email series to get prospects to request a consultation. Prospect A converts within the first email. If Prospect A continues to receive emails telling them to do what they've already done, they'll get frustrated.
Enrollment criteria refer to the qualifications that must be met for a contract to be entered into a workflow.
Suppose you're using HubSpot Workflows. You can create personalized, automated email workflows that can get triggered in a number of different ways.
This can look like a contact added to a list, submitting a form on your website, clicking a link in an email, viewing a page on your blog, clicking on one of your ads, or becoming a marketing-qualified lead.
If you were manually emailing these contacts, what would you do? Think of your email marketing workflows as blueprints outlining each action your tool will take.
For instance, specify which actions you want the software to take in HubSpot. Examples of automatable actions are:
- Sending an email.
- Scheduling an email (and/or delaying it).
- If/ then email branching.
- Updating and syncing all email and contact data to your CRM.
By this point, you know how many emails you want to send, the general messaging you'll include in the emails, and which groups of customers the emails are going to.
Now it’s time to ensure all of your email campaign assets are created and available in your email automation software so you can add them to campaigns.
Some things to consider implementing into your workflow publishing process are:
- Looking at your list of enrolled contacts for errors.
- Ensuring the number of enrolled contacts is what you'd expect.
- Considering your workflow chart and use cases.
- Checking your "Send" settings.
In HubSpot, you can test your workflow to ensure the automation you plan to set live works as intended.
Once you're happy with the workflow, set it live.
Mistakes can happen, so monitor for anomalies. Don't be afraid to adjust as needed to resolve issues or improve the performance of your email automation workflow.
Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing automation increases efficiency and gives your team back valuable time that can be spent on customers and other work that requires their attention. Additionally, the process helps optimise your email marketing strategy and personalise email content to increase its effectiveness among your target audience and customers. Increase your Email Campaign Opens and CTRs with CRM automation.