Personal connections form the foundation of the strongest relationships. Relationships that lack a personal connection are typically short-lived and fruitless for both parties. In marketing, the same is true. 72% of consumers claim to engage with personalized messaging alone, according to SmarterHQ. But how can the personalization be done at scale? Automation of email marketing here.
A series of triggers along the customer journey is used in email marketing automation to send the customer a personalized email on demand. Every email is carefully chosen for each touchpoint to advance the customer through the sales funnel naturally.
⭐What Distinguishes A Drip Campaign From Automated Email Marketing?
According to popular belief, a drip campaign and automated email marketing are frequently confused. Although subtle, the differences are substantial. The approach and content of a drip campaign are different from automated email marketing in that they are predetermined but not in the same way.
Drip campaigns are mass emails sent to all customers regardless of where they are in the customer journey. They are emails with broad messaging that is scheduled for regular intervals. A drip campaign, for instance, might contain an email promoting a sale or a new product launch. No matter where customers are in the sales process or how much they have already interacted with the brand, they all receive these emails.
On the other hand, automated email marketing is a series of emails that are only sent when certain requirements are satisfied for every customer. These automated email series are tailored to the journey of each customer and their specific needs and interests.
Here is an email workflow that demonstrates automation in action. The email is customized in response to a user action or indication of specific interest.
1) Select A Tool For Email Marketing Automation
The tool you use serves as the cornerstone for your email marketing automation, so it’s crucial to pick one with capabilities that will help you succeed. Uncertain of where to begin? The following are the main characteristics you need in an email marketing automation tool:
- Email automation features – The ability to automate emails based on customizable triggers is the first and probably most obvious feature. This crucial feature is lacking in many email platforms, or their automation only has very limited customization options.
- Personalization — If the information presented above is any guide, the capacity for personalization is essential not only to email marketing automation but also to business growth. Personalization is made possible through customer relationship management (CRM) software tools. Your ability to nurture leads more skillfully after integrating your CRM will help you grow.
- Powerful real-time analytics — How can you tell if something is effective? Analyze the numbers! How do you determine where your growth opportunities are? Analyze the numbers! Any process will have a limited long-term impact if there is no way to track key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Simple-to-use and adaptable email templates — Email marketing automation saves your team time that can be better spent building customer relationships. But if you want to save as much time as you can, you need templates that are beautifully made, simple to use, but still highly customized. Utilizing a tool with ready-made, easily editable templates is key. This will guarantee design appeal and enable the creation of a pertinent template for each use case.
- Dynamic list segmentation — The effectiveness of personalized email automation depends on the segmentation of your email list. Each distinguishing quality of the subscriber should be reflected in the segmentation. Without clearly defining and segmenting these characteristics, the automation tool lacks a basis for personalizing your emails. So it’s crucial to have a tool that can create dynamic subscriber lists.
- Ecommerce integrations for transactional emails — If you run an online store, you must be able to send transaction-specific emails to your existing customers. It will be, at best, challenging to create timely emails if your email marketing tool doesn’t integrate with your ecommerce platform (i.e., Shopify). Creating highly targeted marketing campaigns is challenging without thoroughly understanding your customers on the same platform.
- Mobile device optimization –According to Adobe, 81% of people check their email on their phones, so user experience should not assume mobile optimization is automatic.
2) Divide Up Your List Of Subscribers
Everything else you’ll do in email marketing is built on a segmented subscriber list. You should create a variety of list segments based on customer information like location, gender, interests, or the devices used.
For dynamic segmentation, your email automation platform should ideally enable you to create custom fields and integrate them with your e-commerce and CRM systems. You can enter specific information into custom fields that will determine subscriber segments. This will enable you to segment your subscriber list according to the most significant factors to your target audience. You can send out massive campaigns that are still individually personalized for each user experience by using dynamic segmentation through integrations.
3) Establish Automated Processes For Each Phase Of The Customer Journey
It’s time to have fun once your list segments are set up! At this point, you can begin developing campaigns to send tailored emails to various customer journey stages.
- Lead Generation
The key to nurturing leads is developing connections. Building these connections on a personal level and addressing the needs of potential customers. Because of this, it’s crucial to locate an email service provider (ESP) with an API that can deliver highly personalized emails.
Additionally, automation saves your team time while maintaining a personalized experience regarding following up with prospective leads. Thanks to automation, your sales team will spend less time sending out repetitive emails and more time closing deals.
- Welcome Brand-New Clients
When a lead becomes a client, it’s time to express your gratitude. We’re not referring to the standard confirmation email but something unique for every user. Each welcome email sent using email marketing automation should in some way recognize the uniqueness of the recipient.
- Boost Product Adoption
Showcasing value and encouraging action are the main strategies for boosting product adoption. Both of these goals are achieved by email marketing automation by sending consumers highly personalized content.
You can curate emails using email marketing automation to highlight the information that each customer will find most useful right away. Additionally, customers act when they discover value.
- Gather Feedback
The best way to improve a product and gather social proof is to ask your customers for their opinions directly. When meeting their needs, you’re largely taking a chance if you never ask your customers what they want. Additionally, potential customers are most interested in whether you fulfill your brand promise when it comes to them.
- Surprise And Delight
With email automation in marketing, you can “surprise and delight” customers each time they interact with your brand or take action — for instance, by sending them a thank-you email after they make a purchase, a birthday surprise, or a “just because” surprise.
- Promote
Email marketing is owned media is one of its biggest benefits. If you want to advertise something, you don’t have to be concerned about social media platforms not showing your advertisement. Your marketing platform, email, give you access to your customers directly and a complete picture of where they are in the customer lifecycle. And you can make those promotions highly targeted using automation and a segmented email list based on CRM integrations.
- Boost Brand Loyalty
Brand affinity is comparable to the emotion you experience when meeting a special person. They are attractive, share your values, and give you a sense of completion, excitement, and understanding. Brand affinity is essentially how consumers feel about your company.
And what better way is there to win someone’s heart than to send them personalized love emails? It just doesn’t have the same impact if someone sends the same generic email to you and a few thousand other people. But everything changes when it’s personal and emphasizes important brand pillars you relate to. Automated email marketing makes it possible for you to do that.
- Regain Lost Clients
Customers occasionally leave. It never is enjoyable, but it does occur. They stop buying because they believe your company or product is no longer relevant to them. Reminding them of the benefits of your product is now a challenge. Based on dormancy triggers, it’s simple to follow up with every customer at scale using email automation.
4) Compile Data And Improve
After launching a few automated email campaigns, you can start identifying customer engagement and behavior patterns. Several factors that affect statistical significance will determine the number of emails you should send before attempting to spot trends. These elements could be the sensitivity of the elements you’re testing, the audience size, the content’s diversity, and the industry.
How should you analyze the results of your campaign? Utilize a dashboard for email analytics that can provide you with a thorough overview of each campaign component and how it affects your marketing efforts.
⭐Expanding Your Company At Scale
While “email marketing” is practised by all, email marketing automation is not. Companies differ because email marketing automation makes it possible to tailor every customer’s experience on a large scale individually. People engage when they feel seen, and they convert when they engage.
Uncertain of where to begin? Not to worry; we’ve got you. Visit our starting email marketing guide for more information. Or you can send them right away using our simple drag-and-drop email templates and marketing automation system.
