What is Email Marketing Automation?

Regardless of the number of your company’s customers, one of its main priorities and engines that help the business prosper is keeping customers engaged. It goes without saying that staying connected and making an ever-changing audience happy can sometimes be challenging. 

Marketers worldwide try their best to transform prospects into customers, earn loyalty, boost satisfaction, and promote further purchases. To do so, they need to offer meaningful interaction across all marketing and communication channels. 

Without resourceful content, a personal approach, and an attractive brand personality, you might turn into another annoying marketer whose emails will most likely end up in the spam folder. To avoid that and build solid, long-lasting relations with customers, you should implement marketing automation processes as a part of your daily working routine. 

According to the Marketing Automation Survey by Social Media Today, 75% of all businesses already employ some form of marketing automation for their lead generation. And 75% of those users consider marketing automation the most suitable channel for email campaigns. 

These numbers are not surprising, as long as we have seen a rapid increase in automation use in multiple marketing areas in recent years. Though some sectors stayed stable, email marketing automation usage jumped from 40% to 55% from 2021 to 2022. 

Source: Ascend2 | The State of Marketing Automation 2022

Email marketing automation is a sequence of emails automatically sent to your prospects or clients thanks to a carefully crafted marketing automation campaign. Based on how your audience interacts with your company, its interests, and its characteristics, you can make a plan and send those emails at the right time to the right person.

For instance, you can send a welcome email to someone who has just subscribed to your newsletter or ask a client why they left the shopping cart without executing a purchase. 

Automating email marketing processes helps marketers, sales reps, and a company in many different ways. It saves time and gives possibilities to focus on other essential issues, improves ROI, increases brand awareness, and more. Let’s look at what email is marketing automation, how it works, the different kinds of it, and how it can improve your marketing strategy. 

How Does Email Marketing Automation Work?

Most businesses have a clear-cut buyer journey and an understanding of their sales cycle. Automating can significantly upgrade this step-by-step process via content-related newsletters or sales promotions. According to the Epsilon Email Institute, triggered emails have a 70.5% higher open rate and 152% higher click-through rate than generic email newsletters. 

Even though it may all seem a little confusing, the nice thing is that email marketing automation services are easy to use and give you access to advanced features. Here are simple steps of email workflows:

• Choose and install an email automation tool: There are many tools available on the market nowadays, and the trick is to pick the one that best fits your company and responds to the objectives you have set up.
• Segment your customer list: Everything you do regarding email marketing deals with a segmented customer list. Generate various segmented lists based on information like geographic location, the prospect’s hobbies, likes, dislikes, or even the mobile devices they use. E-Delivery, Phonexa’s robust email marketing solution, offers a behavioral segmentation feature that can improve and manage your email lists by tracking how your leads react to your emails.
• Set up an automation trigger: Choose a condition or action point that will trigger the launch of an automated campaign (new customer signup, a birthday, purchase, product discount, etc.)
• Launch comprehensive email campaigns: This process includes designing email templates that will likely attract prospects’ interest and stimulate further actions. So be creative, use call-to-actions buttons, educational content, and discounts.

Why Should You Use Email Marketing Automation?

Adopting marketing automation can make the customer outreach processes much easier and significantly speed up their implementation. The benefits you will get using email marketing automation:

Time-saving in the Long Run

While a good part of the work is in the hands of automation processes, you can focus on contacting leads and helping fix their problems individually, improving the product they sell, or brainstorming ideas for the new campaign. 

Email Personalization

Up to 36% of shoppers confess they want better personalization when receiving emails. What you’re creating with automated email needs to be far from spam to be effective because your audience has subscribed to get premium, tailored content. When people feel a personal approach in emails they receive, they might be ready to share more details about themselves, thus helping your segmentation processes. 

Personalization can be effective if you thoroughly grasp your audience and the type of content they need. You cannot compose each email individually, but you can still personalize it. 

Improvement of Customer Relations

Marketing is not only about generating new leads but also nurturing current customers. It takes less effort than approaching new prospects and costs less, and retaining existing customers is six to seven times less costly than acquiring new ones. 

Once a customer has purchased a product from you, you may already assume some of their interests. Setting up an automated email campaign to promote similar products and tagging relevant buyers might be a great idea to increase interest in your brand and improve engagement with current customers. 

Source: Propellercrm

Customer nurturing campaigns through email marketing automation help drive traffic to your website and increase conversions without having to spend too much time and effort. Once your audience is defined, and templates are ready, you can let the software do the rest of the work for you. 

When it comes to creating prospect relations, things look a bit different. You can identify potential prospects based on the links they click in emails or the web pages they visit within your website. 

Analyze the spectrum of their interests and send them tailored emails with time-sensitive promotions and special offers for the items they just looked at, or that might grab their attention. They don’t have to buy from you immediately, but once they become ready to make a purchase, your company’s name will probably stand out. 

Detailed Reporting

It’s hard to talk about the success or failure of a particular campaign when you don’t know the exact numbers. The numbers allow you to determine the reason, see the mistakes, and understand your customers better. Before choosing marketing automation software, make sure it has comprehensive reporting features. 

Data and analytics on your efforts will tell you which email marketing strategies are succeeding. A real-time reporting dashboard detects areas that need improvement and campaigns that turn out to be profitable. Using LMS Sync, Phonexa’s lead analytics software provides options for your company to expand and generate more income. Sharing these data sets with team members in real-time helps make marketing more transparent.

Additionally, while automation platforms can personalize each message with your contacts’ names and company information, some advanced solutions take behavior-based automations one step further and automatically create segmented lists based on specific consumer actions. Reports give your business insight into click-through rates and average reading time. 

Why Shouldn’t You Use Email Marketing Automation?

Personalization is a topic of high importance in marketing. And it’s absolutely crucial when it comes to automated emails. Although you can personalize your emails based on previous research, there is a certain degree to which you can do it. To personalize your approach, you need to segment your customer list. Including someone in a segment only indicates that a person possesses specific characteristics, and it does not make emails individual yet. 

Automated emails work well when you want to address a group of people of the same age, live in the same area, or have visited the same webpage. Thus you can create a good impression by providing them with personalized content. But what if you need to treat them individually?

Imagine the customer sent a complaint about the purchased product or service. The initial answer could be an automated email asking them to wait while you are processing their request. The following answer should only be individual, apologizing for the inconvenience and offering help, explanation, or reimbursement, depending on the situation. If you want the customers to move further along the customer funnel, you need to use an individualized approach in such cases.

Email Marketing Automation Examples

Automated emails allow you to interact with your target consumers in various engaging ways in response to specific trigger actions.

Here is a collection of the most popular automated email marketing cases representing best practices. Your team will thank you for generating highly-qualified leads, improving an overall customer journey, and simply making their work easier by using some of these examples as a guide.

Welcome email: According to the 2015 State of Marketing Report, these are among the best-performing kinds of emails. About 72% of marketers consider them to be highly effective. 

A welcome email is the first interaction with a new subscriber. This email’s goal is to welcome the new member to the group, motivate them to engage with the business, introduce them to the brand and provide them with information about what they can anticipate as a future member. 

A welcome email is the first step in what is supposed to be a solid and long-term relationship. It all comes down to presenting your brand, establishing expectations, and demonstrating the company’s worth.

Onboarding guide email: In addition to welcoming new subscribers, you also have the chance to create a good impression. Let customers know how your brand can help them solve their problems. For example, include links to your best products, most visited websites, or other valuable data. Explain how to make the most of your service by creating a short tutorial. Write some emails that the email marketing software will send out according to your subscribers’ behavior.

Survey and feedback request email: Asking customers to take a survey can help on many levels. It gives an idea of what they think, whether they took your course or downloaded a manual. Now you may get insightful feedback to implement adjustments or to use as testimonials in the future. 

Thank you email and order confirmation email: These emails can be combined in one or sent separately in sequence. They may include the confirmation number, shipment status, payment information, and other purchase details. They provide the buyer with assurance about their online orders. 

Upsell and cross-sell email: These marketing strategies stimulate customers to purchase more products. Cross-selling is the practice of offering additional items together with the client. So you can create a list of goods that can be sold together, set up an automated email, and have it sent right after customers’ orders.

Re-engagement email: Your clients may stop showing interest in your company for various reasons, and you will likely not know it. It can be because they got disappointed or indifferent to your products. Or they forgot about your company. If they haven’t read your emails in a couple of months, it is worth taking a chance and re-engaging with the client. Ask them whether they want to keep receiving your emails, and offer a special discount.

Cart abandonment email: It’s very frustrating for any marketer to see an abandoned product in the shopping cart, mainly because the client was already so close to the final stage of the purchase funnel and left it. A follow-up cart abandonment email is sent to these clients to remind them of the items in their shopping cart. Include a picture of the item, the cost, and shipping conditions. 

People leave shopping carts with unpurchased products for various reasons, but the typical one is that they aren’t quite ready to buy. Even if a customer isn’t ready to buy right now, you can still keep them interested in your brand with an automated email. 

Sometimes, there is no way to get clients back to their abandoned carts. Though, there is one last resort. Everyone enjoys a good promotion, so check whether you can get them back by proposing a temporary cut price. 

Promotion, rabat: Automating the distribution of seasonal discounts and limited-time sales can save much time and effort. Create retargeting emails, countdown emails, teaser emails, promotion emails, and more. 

Educational email: Information is power. We have all heard this phrase. Delivering valuable educational content helps turn prospects into clients and clients into active buyers at each level of the sales funnel. Customers will likely purchase if they are well-informed about the company and the product. In fact, 85% of customers say product information and pictures are important when deciding which brand or retailer to buy from. 

Educate them via automated emails. You need to know how engaged your leads are and if they are aware of the advantages they can have by purchasing your product. Based on the level of their engagement with the brand and awareness of the product, provide them with related instructional materials and promotions so that you can step-by-step guide them to the final stages of a consumer buying process. 

Milestone email: By sending milestone emails on special days, you can remind your clients that they are highly appreciated. It can be their birthdays, the anniversary of their sign-up, their first purchase, or any other significant day. Such an email marketing automation strategy adds a touch of uniqueness and makes them feel special. To provide this service, you must keep track of all critical dates in your mailing list, set the date triggers, and let the email automation tools do the job for you. Therefore, you build customer loyalty and improve customer relations.

Want to give it a unique touch? If you know your subscribers’ birthdays, set up birthday emails with a special present to be sent out at the beginning of the month. You may also use milestones like anniversaries, successes, and other occasions. But here comes the question, how do you get this data? Use your landing page or sign-up form to ask them about the particular dates. 

Customer complaints replies: We have all been in those shoes; when we need to complain about a particular product or service, we want to be heard. Every customer deserves attention and care. But the longer they wait for an answer, the bigger their impatience grows. Since you can’t check your email inbox constantly, it’s just not realistic to be able to reply to every complaint immediately. What you can do is build up an automatic email assuring the recipient that you are making efforts to address the problem. The customers will know you are paying attention to their issues, and they will receive a response in a short while.

Improve Your Marketing Processes With Email Marketing Automation

Lead creation, lead nurturing, sales conversion, and the development of brand evangelists are just a few benefits that email marketing automation can provide for the company. Once you reach a certain scale, it can also help to improve customer experience through more personalization that is impossible through manual methods.

In addition to all that, your marketing and sales teams will be granted a lot of time that automation will save them, giving them a chance to concentrate on tasks that are complicated to automate, such as focusing on customer complaints and setting up new marketing campaigns.

Creating automated and dynamic email workflows is a straightforward process once you have the correct email automation software. These email automation examples demonstrate how various trigger events may be used as the foundation for sending resourceful and creative emails.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does email marketing automation work?
Email marketing automation is a comprehensive marketing tool that enables you to use automated processes to deliver the correct message to the right person at the proper time. This tool is handy for lead nurturing and, eventually, for generating sales from both current and future clients.

What is an example of marketing automation?
Sending out surveys to ask for feedback on products and services, welcome emails, confirmation emails, cart abandonment emails, educational emails, onboarding emails, and thank-you emails. These are often sent out in response to triggers like purchases or updates to a program, website, or product.

What is the best email marketing automation platform?
Many email marketing automation platforms are available, including Mailchimp, Hubspot, MailerLite, Moosend, and ActiveCampaign. 

What are the benefits of email marketing automation?
There are many ways your business can benefit from using email marketing automation. This process saves marketing and sales teams time, personalizes customer approach, segments leads, increases ROI, etc.  So many companies implement it as a part of their marketing automation processes.

How effective is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is beneficial to all sizes of organizations. In addition to many other facets of digital marketing and sales, it nurtures leads, aids in client acquisition, and offers cross- and up-sells. Marketing automation improves marketing effectiveness by enabling marketing teams to work more efficiently.