Implementing Email Marketing Automation Into Your Strategy

Companies continue to seek ways to improve the customer experience as user expectations and needs increase. Automation tools allow businesses to save time but still maintain the quality of their communication. According to recent studies, marketing automation, on average, drives up to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. 

One of the most effective automation tools to save time and effectively reach customers is email marketing automation. Email automation eliminates the need for marketers to send out hundreds (thousands, millions) of manual emails every time a prospect shows interest consistently, a customer abandons a cart, or a business launches a sale, allowing them to scale and streamline email marketing processes.

Let’s dive more into email marketing automation and how it can save your business time and resources, while effectively targeting prospects and converting customers.

What is email marketing automation?

Email marketing automation is a way to automatically send timely, relevant, and personalized emails to individual contacts that are triggered when contacts either take a specific action with your business or when you determine to send a mass email to a large list of contacts. Email marketing automation can help you deliver a great experience to your first email subscriber and even your 10,000th as it automates your conversations with your users for you. It saves you time because you can schedule mass emails in advance, or you can create workflows that allow you to create the email campaign logic and strategy in the backend beforehand and continues to trigger additional automated emails based on their previous interactions (or lack of actions) with your business.  

How does email marketing automation work?

There are two different ways to use email marketing automation. One way is to schedule emails in advance to a large number of people. Typically we see this type of email automation with newsletters or weekly digests. Instead of sending a separate email to every single user that enters your CRM, you can schedule one email that gets scheduled out to your entire contact list in advance. Not only does this save you time, but you can also segment your audience based on the content and decide to send, or not send, to certain contacts in your CRM to ensure you’re only sending relevant content to the right people.

The more segmented your emails are, the more personalized your content, and the more likely your users will convert because you’re providing relevant information and solutions to their challenges. In fact, studies show that personalized emails have 2.5 times higher click-through rates, and are 6 times more likely to drive a conversion. 

The second way to use email automation is with workflows, which is all about triggers and actions. A workflow system lets businesses send automated and relevant email messages to contacts based on their previous engagements or demographic information. By tracking the leads’ activities when they engage with your brand, marketers can gather insights and use them to set triggers that will send the most relevant messages. When a particular event is triggered, a specific email or set of emails is sent to each recipient. 

The length of an automated email series depends on the number of marketing actions the business wants to automate. As a result, the marketer can be as creative as they like when it comes to the type of content they send to subscribers.

Benefits of email marketing automation

Personalize your customer’s experiences

90% of consumers find personalized content very or somewhat appealing. Automation allows you to send a series of automated emails to grow relationships with your customers and grow your business. Use personalized tokens that pull contact information stored in your CRM, like name or company, etc, previously collected from interactions like submitting a contact form. A simple personal touch, such as using their name, company,  location, or the products they looked at or previously purchased, will significantly increase loyalty and foster a relationship to form an emotional connection to your product. 

Optimize marketing teams and save time

Through automation, work is completed quickly, and productivity rises. According to a survey of information workers, 59% said that they could save at least 6 hours a week if the repetitive aspects of their job automated. With email automation, email lists automatically compile and messages automatically schedule out. With the time saved, your team members can use that time to focus on other vital tasks, such as in-depth customer relationship building or additional workflow building for continued segmentation.

Improve your customer retention rate

Creating a new customer is much more expensive and time-consuming than converting an existing one. With email automation, you can keep in touch with a customer better than ever before. By scheduling your messages automatically you can ensure your customers don’t go too long without hearing from you, and you can be sure that the copy you’re sending them is relevant to their needs based on the information you’ve collected from previous interactions to maximize its impact. This can also resolve with the use of workflows that send out when the customer reaches the appropriate goal, such as downloading a resource or booking a demo. These details can be stored in your CRM so you can continue to collect more information about each individual customer and your customers as a whole.

Scalable marketing strategy

When you send out an email series manually, the size of your staff limits how many customers you can reach. When you send automated emails, however, you can scale your email marketing efforts. Whenever someone registers for a mailing list on your platform using a custom form, your platform will send a message to you. With email automation, customers automatically integrate into your system as soon as they take any of the actions you track. As a result, your plan knows what messages to send next without adding to the demands of your limited resources.

Effective segmentation

It is important to only send relevant messages to your subscribers based on their needs with providing a personalized experience. According to MailChimp’s study, segmented email campaigns have 100.9 percent higher click-through rates and 14.3 percent higher open rates. Segmentation offers options to divide your subscribers into specific criteria such as location, industry, product purchased, and first touchpoint, to name a few. When integrating email marketing automation into your CRM you can find that there are limitless options for continuing to segment your audiences. The more segmented your audience, the more segmented your content can be, and the more effective your messaging will be to help move users down the buyer’s journey.

Increase product usage

Email automation allows marketers to use personalization from past customers to push new products. Customizing marketing messages in this way results in open rates increased by 26%. It is also notable that emails with personalized messages are six times more likely to generate a transaction. For example, a customer who receives a product that is geared towards their needs with their name included is more likely to purchase the product. 

Email marketing best practices

Workflow Tools

An email workflow is a series of automated emails that send based on the subscriber’s contact information, behavior, or preferences. These emails work together to accomplish a goal, like onboarding a service or purchasing a product. Based on triggered personalization, email workflows allow marketers the opportunity to send messages to the right people at the right time and help guide them through a customer journey. Each workflow includes a series of nurturing emails that help the subscriber to convert.

Design a branded email template

Starting the process of sending emails can prove to be difficult at first. With the help of email templates, your company can easily create emails without having to spend tons of time recreating the wheel. Email templates also allow a company to come off very uniform, professional and create brand awareness. Especially in HubSpot, there is a way to create automated emails through a template. 

Offer discounts strategically

Offers are a strategic way to capture new customers from users that have submitted information through forms on your website. Many people abandon shopping carts due to high shipping costs. If you want to entice reluctant spenders, you can offer discount coupons and promotional codes. If used properly, this is an effective strategy; however, the trick is not to overuse it. Discounts are usually perceived as a bonus by customers, so they might expect them more often if you offer them too often, they might expect them more often.

Nurture leads

Fifty percent of leads generated by organizations are qualified but not yet ready to purchase. The challenge in nurturing leads is motivating them to purchase with the least amount of time spent. Setting up automated lead nurturing emails can be a great way to accomplish this. Once you have the list set up, you can send automated emails to your audience regularly that send additional information that person would need to help them move down the sales funnel.

For example, if you have not heard from one of your customers in a while, you could send an automated email that’s triggered based on a certain time since their last purchase, or a certain time since they last engaged with your website. By sending additional personalized information, you can entice your unengaged users with a reason to re-engage with your business and become loyal customers.

Next steps

Automation opens up the world of possibilities for companies to expand their business. Through the use of email marketing automation, companies can nurture customers at the right time with the right content. It also gives more chances for the company to receive insight into their customers. Email marketers at Pyxl know how to set up automation to ensure your company’s success. We’d love to work with you – let us know how we can help!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022