Automated Email Marketing: Complete Guide

Introduction

Email marketing has been around for a long time now. Even with such widespread use of social media, email communication still holds its place as one of the most effective channels for marketing your business in this constantly evolving world.

Every company has been involved in some kind of email communication with its audiences and it’s obvious.

This guide covers everything from planning your automated email marketing strategy to implementing it and growing your business with the best automated email marketing tools.

What is Automated Email Marketing

When you sign up to receive newsletters from a website or one of your favorite blogs or email updates from a store, you are giving that person or business authorization to send you emails.

While you’ve permitted the person or business to give you updates, it is their responsibility to give you exactly what you signed up for.

Automated Email Marketing is an extremely efficient digital marketing strategy which involves the use of automated emails to promote products and services while also developing relationships with the potential clients or customers.

Effective email marketing helps convert prospects into customers, and one-time buyers into regular customers. 

AUTOMATED EMAIL MARKETING BENEFITS

If you are not convinced how important automated email marketing is, here are some benefits of email automation that will make you incorporate it into your marketing strategy.

According to @ry_solutions on Twitter, “A lot of marketers realize that their email marketing campaigns could be more specific. Enter an automated marketing system which allows you to reach customers at any stage of the buyer’s journey and respond to reservations they may have with relevant content.”

PERSONALIZE YOUR CUSTOMER’S EXPERIENCES

By automating your emails, you can personalize the content you are sending to suit whoever you are sending it to. Automated email marketing allows you to automatically insert your customer’s name and some other details into the email.

Reading an email addressed to “Dear Peter” rather than “Dear User” or “Dear Customer” feels more personalized. Doing this means your clients are much more likely to read your message and take required action.

MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR MARKETING TEAM

With most businesses, there are always time and budget constraints. One of the most significant benefits of automated email marketing is the efficient use of time and budget.

With email automation, your marketing teams can spend less time on compiling email lists and scheduling messages manually, allowing your team to spend more time focusing on other pressing issues like building relationships with your customers. Email automation increases productivity.

IT MAKES YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY SCALABLE

Using automated email for your business’ marketing strategy means you can easily set up rules to guide each user through your platform based on their actions.

This is faster and effective as it allows your customers to integrate automatically into your system as soon as they take any of the set actions, thereby taking away the pain of checking frequently to see which customer made a purchase and emailing them all manually.

IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER RETENTION RATE

Email automation is your most powerful marketing channel in this ever-growing business world. Automated email marketing is also one of the best ways you can adopt to strengthen your relationship with customers.

According to research by J. Hogan and H. Feirertag, the most common reason why businesses lose their clients is because they lack customer contact and relationships. As a matter of fact, their lack of relationship building accounts for about 65% of lost customers.

But with email automation, you can stay in contact with your customers, send personalized messages to them, send customer gifts and messages on special occasions, educate and add value to your customers, and above all, create personal, one-on-one relationships, as email is the most effective channel to improve your customer retention rate.

How Automated Email Marketing Halps To Grow Your Business

WELCOME NEW SUBSCRIBERS

As a marketer, your first email campaign should welcome new subscribers and then introduce your brand.

You need to craft a few sentences that introduce your brand, what you offer, how you are different from other brands, what you have in common, and reasons why they should be excited they subscribed to your campaign.

Your welcome email automation should be great and easy to understand. And if you offer your subscribers incentives in exchange for their email address, make sure you set up email automation to actually give them the incentives in the email.

And also, while welcoming new subscribers, make sure you set the right expectations. Although setting the right expectation still balls down to welcoming and introducing your brand to your subscribers.

INCREASE PRODUCT USAGE

Before your prospects will be converted into actual buyers, they need a confirmation that your product is exactly what they need.

Therefore, it is advisable to increase product usage as it will help grow your business. An example of a way to increase your product usage to offer free trial periods for your users.

GATHER PRODUCT FEEDBACK

It is nearly impossible to satisfy all your customer’s desires. That is, you can hardly build products that will be useful for your customers if you don’t understand what they want exactly.

A proven way to get to know what your customer’s pain points and needs are is by asking them directly.

INFORM YOUR CUSTOMERS OF UPCOMING EXPIRATION

One of the most ideal ways to ensure you don’t lose customers is by informing them of upcoming expirations.

Be it their accounts, subscription or even your own policy. Send them emails campaigns, informing them of upcoming developments.

OFFER CUSTOMERS A BIRTHDAY SURPRISE

One of the most common automated emails you can send to your customers is a birthday email. Sending them a birthday surprise makes them feel you value them and have their special occasion in your heart.

You can offer them birthday offers that will encourage them to make a desired action.

SEND APPOINTMENT REMINDERS TO CUSTOMERS

Repeat business is critical to the growth of any business. One of the best ways to turn your customers into repeat clients is by sending them emails, reminding them of your business.

NURTURE YOUR LEADS

Automated email helps nurture your leads, as it is said that over half of the leads you generate are qualified but not ready to purchase your product or service yet.

Sending automated series of nurturing email campaigns can be of great help in nurturing your leads, and making sure your business is on top of their mind.

PROMOTE YOUR NEW BLOG POST

Blogs are part of a business’ marketing strategies. So, if you happen to run a blog, you can promote each new blog post you publish by alerting your subscribers and customers with automated email campaigns, luring them to click through.

CREATE AND EMAIL COURSE

Offering email courses on a selected series of topics which will be delivered via a series of emails can be an effective way to capture your subscriber’s attention and educate them. This in turn helps grow your business.

11 Tips For A Better Automated Email Marketing

With automated email campaigns, it is possible for you to automatically deliver a sequence of emails to your target audience, thereby making it possible for you to build relationships with your subscribers no matter where they are located.

You can deliver a series of content that will keep your audience engaged. But how do you get started? Read on for 11 tips on ensuring a better automated email marketing.

SEGMENT YOUR SUBSCRIBERS

This is one of the first email marketing strategies to take as far as automated email marketing is concerned. This strategy allows you to break down your subscribers list into smaller segments based on some specific criteria so as to send them relevant and personalized emails.

Segmenting your subscribers is an established way of increasing your email open rate, your click-through rates, and reducing the number of people that unsubscribe themselves from your list.

Segmenting your subscribers also makes it much easier for you to know the messages and subject lines that will drive your email marketing subscribers to engage themselves with your email campaigns.

How do you segment your subscribers? There are no right or wrong segments.

You can group your subscribers based on specific criteria such as their:

• Location

• Job position

• Responsiveness and lots more

WRITE GREAT SUBJECT LINES

Automated email campaigns require great subject lines even though they depend on the recipients’ actions. The subject line of your email campaigns should be influenced by your content and the segment your subscribers fall to.

For a better automated email marketing, your subject line should stand you a chance of grabbing the reader’s attention, and get them to continue reading your content. It is essential to add a bit of sense of urgency when crafting your subject lines.

This will encourage your subscribers to take fast action to grab your offer while they still can. In order to increase your open rates and engagement, you can personalize the subject line of your content.

PERSONALIZE YOUR MESSAGES

When possible, ensure you add personal elements to your emails. Most email tools allow you to input short codes that will be replaced with the subscriber’s name or details when the email list is sent out.

Personalizing the messages you send to your subscribers can go a long way in establishing and fostering a relationship.

You can also segment your messages to specific portions of your subscribers. If by chance you have a business that works with multiple industries, you can decide to send out different versions of your content to your audience, with each email providing particular information about each industry.

STRUCTURE YOUR EMAIL FOR SCANNERS

It should be clear by now that most people consume online content differently than other media, they do not take their time to read up email campaigns like a book. They rather scan through the email to look for elements that interest them.

However, the window of time you have in order to capture your audience’s attention is very short. For you to get your message across to them, you must ensure you structure your automated email campaign for people who would just scan through.

You can also use elements like images, headlines and infographics to capture their attention as they scan through and draw their attention to your copy.

OFFER DISCOUNTS STRATEGICALLY

Discounts are a great way of attracting and retaining customers. Study shows that about 82 percent of people are likely to come back to someone who offers them consistent deals.

Another study shows that about 90 percent of subscribers are more likely to use coupons and discounts they receive via email.

SO, by offering discounts to your subscribers, you stand a chance of converting them into leads and also retaining the ones that have already purchased from you.

CONTENT YOUR EMAILS TO CUSTOMIZED LANDING PAGES

A landing page is really not different from any other page on a website except that they are meant to be found directly from your emails and newsletters. The mistake most marketers make is link their email campaign to a boring landing page.

To yield your desired results, ensure you design your landing page to suit the email campaign you are developing. In terms of transition, your landing page must match your email campaign’s content, design and call to action.

CREATE AUROMATED DRIP CAMPAIGNS

What are drip campaigns? Drip campaigns are a set of emails that go out automatically based on specific user actions or timelines.

Drip campaigns enable you to stay in touch with your subscribers based on some certain events, e.g. how often someone visits your site, when they signed up on your platform, etc.

While the main goal of a drip campaign is to keep your users engaged with your product, you can set up your automated drip campaigns for welcoming and onboarding, nurturing leads, unsubscribes, engagement, renewals, courses and lots more so as to help you get your relevant information to your subscribers.

USE A CALL TO ACTION BUTTON

When you set up an email marketing campaign, one of the most important components to include is the call to action button.

Call to action buttons are the buttons you use in email campaigns to direct your users to somewhere outside of the email (usually online application or a website) where you can convert them to your leads.

SO, when creating your email campaign, ensure you include a call to action button, as it increases your chances of taking your desired conversion action.
However, to write a perfect CTA in your email, you need to consider what people want from you.

SPLIT TEST YOUR EMAILS

Split testing, also known as A/B testing is the fastest way to figure out what your audience likes, which makes you optimize your email campaigns accordingly.

Split testing is also the only way to statistically prove which campaign brings you the most accomplishment.

Many marketers are not familiar with split testing yet. It involves sending two versions of your email campaign to different sample groups on your list.
The email with the most opens and clicks will then be sent out to the rest of your subscribers. Any email automation tool you choose to use should give you the ability to split test your emails in order to determine the one which is likely to bring you the most success.

TRACK RESPONSES TO COLLECT MORE INFORMATION

Response tracking is an important part of campaign management. When real life responses are collected and measured, it provides a better understanding of how the timeframe of a campaign affects its success.

Therefore as a marketer, ensure you track the responses of your subscribers so as to collect valuable information.

It also enables you to know if the previous emails you sent were opened and read by the receiver. It can also let you know the kind of approaches that move the audience.

ANALYZE YOUR RESULTS

The goal of every marketer is to increase sales, retain customers or deliver information. For you to have an effective marketing campaign, it is essential to develop a routine of monitoring the results in order to analyze them.

You need to know the percentage of messages that you sent actually arrived at your subscriber’s inbox, the number of emails that were viewed by the recipients among the emails that were successfully delivered, the amount of users that actually opened it, the amount of users that clicked your call to action, and lastly, the amount of people that took the action you wanted.

14 Best Automated Email Marketing Tools

EMAIL LIST BUILDING TOOLS

1.OPTINMONSTER

Speaking of marketing tools in the industry, OptinMonster is the best email automation tool that allows its users to collect group email addresses into segments based on the user’s activity, inactivity, geographical location, and lots more.

OptinMonster lets you set up magnificent lead generation forms which are sure to help you grow your email list.

2. RAFFLEPRESS

RafflePress is one of the best email automation tools that helps you turn your visitors into brand ambassadors.

As a result of this, you are guaranteed to get more website traffic, email subscribers and social media engagement faster without paying for ads.

This tool is one of the easiest ways to grow your email subscriber list using contests and giveaways. With RafflePress, you stand the chance to host these contests on your own blog and social media platforms.

This development makes it flexible enough to build campaigns for all of your favorite marketing channels. Its pricing starts at $49/month if you pay annually, but you can get a lifetime license for $449!

3. HUBSPOT

HubSpot is a marketing, sales, and service software that helps foster your business without any compromise.

It is constantly ranked as one of the top marketing automation tools across a spectrum of tasks. One of the most useful ways you can implement Hubspot is by adding automated workflows to your email marketing strategy.

HubSpot can definitely be one of your best assets for sales and marketing overall, not just email marketing.

Its CRM platform has all the tools and integrations necessary for sales, marketing content management and customer service.

HubSpot does have several marketing automation tools for free if you’re on a budget. However, its paid plans range from $50/month for the Starter plan to the Enterprise plan starting at $1200/month.

4.INTERCOM

Intercom is a help center that helps you build relationships with your customers.

Thanks to its mobile application, Intercom lets you as a marketer send automated emails directly in the application if you are trying to educate your users about your app.

This amazing feature gives them assistance where they are most likely to see it.

5. BENCHMARKONE

This tool is a sales and marketing software that helps marketing agencies and small businesses propel relationships with their customers.

Thanks to its simple and easy to use CRM feature, benchmarkONE lets you know who your hot prospects are so that you can focus on selling your product and services.

BenchmarkONE offers the chance to send beautiful emails that engage and delight your subscribers to take action.

6. E-GOI

E-goi is one of the best email marketing software in the industry today. Thanks to its free templates, it lets you save hours daily by automating your email marketing campaign and spend more concentrating on your business.

This tool can break up any email campaign simply by sending out updates via SMS, voice message or even fax.

7. ACT-ON

Speaking of an email automation tool that empowers every marketer to be a growth marketing hero, Act-On is the ideal tool that helps marketers execute amazing marketing strategies.

Act-On also helps integrate different inbound, outbound and lead nurturing programs for large companies together to maximize their return.

8. LEADSQUARED

LeadSquared is a complete marketing automation and CRM software that helps businesses organize lead capture, lead management, sales management and analytics in one place.

As the name implies, LeadSquared simplifies the lead scoring process by automating email marketing services and combining them with sales activities.

9. SAP SALES CLOUD

SAP Sales Cloud, formerly known as CallidusCloud is an email list building tool that helps with lead qualifying.

The SAP sales cloud technology automatically identifies promising leads while removing the ones that are deemed to be unqualified.

SAP sales cloud helps businesses connect and guide their customers throughout their buying journey. It accelerates sales performance, thereby helping the sales team spend more time on the best deals.

10. MARKETO

This tool is inarguably one of the best overall email automation services in the industry today. Marketo gives businesses the ability to trigger email campaigns.

11. AWEBER

Aweber is a kind of email marketing tool that lets you follow up the subscribers you just added to your email list instead of bombarding them with a bunch of past emails.

This feature allows you to get subscribers up to speed in a hurry.

You can also group your subscribers into segments based on what they opted in to on your website using the “ad tracking” feature + OptinMonster.

12. CONVERTKIT

This amazing tool allows you to send targeted autoresponders to your subscribers based on the way they interact with your emails with Automation Rules.

ConvertKit has blueprints that you can use to rapidly create autoresponder sequences.

13. ACTIVE CAMPAIGN

With this amazing tool, you can automate the entire cycle of a subscriber or customer, thereby improving customer experiences.

ActiveCampaign lets you create drip emails that are driven by your subscriber’s behavior, history, location. Interaction, and lots more.

14. MAILCHIMP

This tool allows you to send drip emails to follow up based on your website activity or inactivity, and many more.

Mailchimp Groups can also be used with OptinMonster to send drip emails based on what the subscriber opts in for, or even based on checkboxes that the user selects while filing your opt-in form.

15. KLAVIYO

This is an email marketing platform that was created for ecommece businesses. Klaviyo is a tool that lets you listen, analyze, and act on your client’s data.

It is a tool that helps in brand building, it helps in making progress faster and also helps in expanding your reach.

Desired Outcome

Irrespective of who you are, whether you are a B2B or B2C brand, or perhaps you are just a marketer, email automation can help you save a lot of time, rake in better results, and at the same time improve your return on investment.

Automated email marketing is not a new concept. If done right, it can help you communicate and engage your users better.

When you adopt an email marketing automation strategy for your business, you are on course to improve your customer engagement, save time and money, re-engage with past customers, reduce errors and spam, nurture leads and prospects, and above all, increase your brand reputation.

Final Thoughts

Of all the available opportunities to grow your business and increase brand awareness, automated email marketing is still one of the most impactful and cost-efficient means of marketing.

As a marketer, there are some other things competing for your time and resources. However, setting up automated email campaigns without having to spend more time working on them manually can yield your desired results.

So, take some of the ideas presented to you in this guide, implement them in your business and you can have them rake in some revenue for your business for ages. Click here for your free email marketing plan!