5 steps to get started with email marketing automation
E-mail has become the basis of the marketing strategy of many companies. It's a cost-effective way to stay in touch with your customers and prospects and reach them directly through your marketing message. In addition, it offers excellent ROI and is highly traceable. If you're already aware of these benefits for your business and want to take it to the next level, you may be ready to make the leap into email marketing automation. Let's look at some of the basics of this strategy.
What is email marketing automation?
Email marketing automation is a marketing strategy that delivers the messages to the right clients at the right time. This calendar is linked to specific triggers, such as dates or actions taken. When you use this strategy, every email your company sends is tailored to the needs of the person receiving it. Email marketing automation makes communicating with your audience more effective and efficient, saving you time so you can focus on other important aspects of your business.
What are the benefits of email marketing automation?
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing automation is in the name: it's automated! Taking the time to put some of your marketing efforts on autopilot can lead to greater efficiency and free up time for other important tasks related to running your business. You'll gain better insight into how your campaigns are performing and how emails are impacting your sales funnel.
Research shows that personalized emails have higher engagement levels and perform better than non-personalized emails.
Don't worry, customizing your emails doesn't mean you have to send a unique email to each of your contacts. Once you start creating your strategy, we'll go into more detail about customization. First, let's look at how to decide if you're ready for email marketing automation.
Is email marketing automation right for me?
Email marketing automation is a fairly advanced tactic. If you already regularly send emails to your customers and prospects through an email service provider and want to further customize your strategy, you may be ready for email marketing automation. If you're new to email marketing in your business or just getting started, check out Sending Marketing Emails Effectively to get started. Come back to this article when you feel good about your email strategy and are ready to take it to the next level.
How to build your email marketing automation strategy
Email marketing automation may seem daunting now, but it doesn't have to be. Here are five steps to get started.
Identify your audiences
You may have multiple audiences you want to automate emails to: your current customers, prospects you connect with, or vendors you work with, to name a few. Take a look at how you keep track of information about your audiences. If you already have audience segments in your messaging service provider, you're on the right track. Be sure to categorize your contacts based on their relationship to you, so you can segment them and send them relevant messages. If you need help segmenting your email list, check out the Beginner's Guide to Email Segmentation Strategy.
Determine which automated emails you want to send
Some of the emails you send may relate to how your audience already interacts with you. For example, if you have a signup email available on your website, you'll want to have a thank you email sent whenever someone new signs up for your mailing list. It is an automation that you are going to put in place. You can also consider adding new touchpoints to help build your relationship with your audience.
Other automated emails to consider:
- New product launch announcements
-A reminder email when it's time to make an appointment
Tracing your automated email ideas with old-fashioned pen and paper can be helpful, especially if you're creating multiple emails in series.
Describe the content of each email
It is important that automated emails are personalized. You can keep it simple: Research shows that the most effective marketing emails are between 50 and 125 words.
It's not a lot, so make sure every word counts and fits the reader's needs. What should they know?
Along with what you'll write for each email, think about which images to use and which links to include. If a particular page on your website is relevant to the content of the email, be sure to include a link to it. If you don't have a relevant website page to link to, consider creating a dedicated landing page.
Create your first automated email campaign!
The process for doing this varies depending on the messaging tool you are using. Each of the triggers you identified in step 2 will need to be added to the emails you create. If you're a salon that sends an appointment reminder to your clients every six weeks, you'll need to have each client's appointment date in your email system and then trigger an email six weeks later. This step may take some time, but it will be worth it in the end!
Measure your results, test and adjust
Take a second to congratulate yourself: you just saved your business a lot of time by automating your email marketing! But just because it's automated doesn't mean you have to forget about it and never touch it again. It's important to pay attention to what works and what doesn't. Take note of a few key email marketing metrics and track them over time:
-Open Rate: How many of your emails are actually opened?
-Click-through rate: How many of those who opened your email clicked on any of the links you included?
- Deliverability: Are your emails actually reaching inboxes?
- Unsubscribe rate: Is your content relevant or are users choosing to unsubscribe from your emails?
If you notice trends in any of these metrics, whether positive or negative, it's time to dig in and see what you can learn.
Email marketing automation is by no means easy, but the results are worth it. If you're feeling overwhelmed, consider starting with just one automated email. You'll learn a lot from this first one, and soon you'll be adding more. Over time you surrender
Take into account all the advantages that this marketing strategy can offer!
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