Email Marketing: Why Automate at All?
The main reason behind automation, not just when it comes to email marketing, but across all industries is to streamline some of the more repetitive actions associated with your business.
If you are looking at email automation as a way to streamline your company’s email marketing efforts and to boost overall return on investment, it is imperative that you take the time to understand what email automation really is, and the benefits associated with it.
On a basic level, email automation comes down to efficiency.
The primary reason you will want to automate some of the repetitive tasks associated with your email marketing infrastructure is to ensure that your employees’ time and efforts are efficiently distributed across all departments in order of priority.
In this article, we will take a holistic look at what email marketing automation is and the benefits and uses associated with it.
Benefits of email automation
As I mentioned before, the main reason behind automation, not just when it comes to email marketing, but across all industries is to streamline some of the more repetitive actions associated with your business.
Doing so will help you reduce the opportunity for human error, reduce your overhead costs, and so much more.
For the most part, automating some of your email messages/campaigns will go a long way to:
Streamline your marketing processes
One of the major benefits of email marketing automation is the ability to visualize and build panoramic customer journeys. You are able to create a series of emails that will help walk every single customer through a customized process designed to anticipate and remedy any issues they may have and educate them about your brand in the most thorough way possible.
Increase customer lifetime value through up-sells and cross-sells
Other than serving as a means by which you can help provide quality, effortless customer service, email automation when executed in an optimal fashion can be one of the most effective tools in your sales toolbox.
The ability to get in front of the customer, via email with your brand messaging can provide you with a powerful sales platform.
You can help convert more free trial users and upsell existing customers through the attention you will commend with your ubiquitous messaging.
Targeted Marketing
Through the use of the various tools and features most email marketing platforms provide, you will be able to speak directly to each customer's unique needs and wants. You will be able to deploy ultra-targeted messages.
These customized messages will help provide your customers with the world-class support they have come to expect, and also help increase their spending with your company.
You will be able to inspire increased spending on your customers’ part by providing a message of value that resonates with each individual customer on a granular level.
Automatically follow-up with leads
According to a study on the Harvard Business Review, you are 60x more likely to qualify, and subsequently, close a sale if you follow up with a lead within an hour of them expressing interest in your product or service.
And since it is almost impossible to respond to a slew of information requests or free trial users as quickly as possible, it makes sense to employ the use of some of the various email marketing automation tools out there to help keep up with incoming leads.
You will be able to build and deploy, via triggers, responses to leads to help qualify them, and set them up for the next step in your sales process.
If you operate a software business, you can send out automated welcome emails with video demos on how to use your platform to help your free trial users get the most out of your system before they upgrade to a paid account.
Analytics
Email automation and the associated tools and features will help give you an overview of the effectiveness of your marketing efforts as far as email is concerned. Your reporting dashboard will give you great transparency and insights as to which email messages are resonating with your audience, which campaigns are leading to greater conversation rates, and so on.
Armed with this information, you will be able to better streamline your email marketing and overall marketing strategy.
Streamline customer service
Transactional emails are great for helping prop up your customer service apparatus. These types of emails automatically go out to website visitors after they perform a specific action or set of actions.
Some actions that are best paired with automated transactional emails are newsletter signups, downloading an eBook, or making a purchase.
Your email automation system can be set up to send out “Thank you” messages, transactional receipts, and many more.
Some transactional emails present a great opportunity for small business owners and marketers to attach promotional messages to encourage users to make purchases. This type of email marketing automation system has proved highly successful: businesses can generate up to 6x more revenue from transactional emails than other email types.