Email Automation to Overhaul Your Campaigns: The Ultimate Guide 

Email has always been a popular channel of communication with marketers. With all the hype surrounding social media, email did see a competition of sorts, but yeah, email was King and will always be. 

With the rise of artificial intelligence, automation mechanisms have taken email by storm. Because it’s not just about automation in terms of sending, but it’s about sending the right message at the right time to the right person. 

Now, why make a big deal of it? If you want your subscribers to grow and take an interest in your products/services, you need email automation to lead your marketing campaigns with precision. 

So, let’s learn how to articulate email automation and generate the results we desire. 

What are the Benefits of Email Automation? 

The first thing we need to lend our ears to is the reasons why we need email automation – the advantages it offers. So, here are a few reasons why we prefer email automation. 

• Time and Resource Efficiency 

Automation saves time without any doubt. You will also need fewer human resources to run your campaigns. Manually sending emails, especially triggered emails, to your subscribers, can be a tedious task- almost impossible. But when you automate your emails, you only do the hard work once; the later stages ease their way out. Also, if you have a campaign planned and need to send out emails at midnight for a different timezone, you won’t have to stay awake along with your emails.

• Personalization and Customer Engagement 

If you receive two emails – one that greets you with your name and the other that even misspells your gender – which one would you love more and go on to read further? Of course, the one that has been personalized, right? With automation, you can eventually boost your customer engagement by making people feel heard and important. 

• Improved Targeting and Segmentation 

You can’t fit all your subscribers into one list. Either you can manually segment your audience based on specific demographics like age, gender, location, etc., and their interests and behavior, or you can sleep on it. But with email automation, you can sleep peacefully knowing that your audience segments are properly defined. This will improve your email targeting in folds. 

How to Get Started Started with Email Automation 

To start off on the right track, you need to follow a few guidelines on email automation. They are simple to absorb. 

1. Choose the right marketing platform. 

With the right marketing platform, you get easy access to email automation according to your needs. Choose the one that has a simple user interface, offers robust analytics, and has advanced features you might need to expand. 

2. Set up your email subscribers list. 

Build a strong list by promoting and urging people to subscribe. You can use your website to collect emails, and your social media profiles or even conduct webinars and other events to bring in more people to learn about your business. Remember, it’s quality over quantity any day and every day. 

3. Understand automation workflows. 

Put your marketing goals and objectives on paper. Start with the specifics of nurturing leads, gaining new subscribers, or re-engaging dormant ones. Then create a workflow for each of them and let automation take its course. 

Now, let’s understand the workflows of email automation that generate the most revenue and engagement. 

What Are The Types of Email Automation

1. Welcome Emails 

Welcome emails are friendly hellos to build rapport with your new email subscribers. A research revealed that welcome emails have 86% higher open rates than standard emails. So, keep it cozy and concise so that your customers can learn more about you and what you have in store for them. 

2. Drip Campaigns for Nurturing Leads 

Drip campaigns are based on user inputs, like a series of love letters. It has a dynamic feature that changes your emails with an automation mechanism. You can send emails that your users are looking for based on their interactions with the preceding emails or your website. You can introduce your products/services and related offerings with the help of drip campaigns. 

3. Abandoned Cart Emails 

Email automation helps in targeting customers who leave items in their cart without checking out. You can craft a compelling series of messages to remind them of the reasons why they need to buy them quickly. You can send a lucrative offer or a coupon to encourage them to checkout as a last option, though. You can also mention that the stock might end or the offer might end at the designated time. All of this is possible with email automation with little effort. 

How Do You Create Effective Emails With the Help of Automation? 

• Crafting Compelling Subject Lines 

Keep your subject lines concise and enchanting, be they automation emails or any other. A research revealed that subject lines with 6-10 words have a mammoth 21% open rate. That’s very impressive, given the number of emails sent and received in a day. You can throw a hint of what is inside without revealing too much. Maintain secrecy but keep it relevant. Your audience should not be disappointed after opening your emails. 

• Designing Visually Appealing Emails 

A recent study conducted by HubSpot revealed that 64% of the respondents prefer HTML-based emails that have rich text, images, and other interactive elements instead of plain text emails. So, keep your email layout clutter-free and make it responsive to fit all screen sizes. 

• Writing Persuasive Copy 

Your words should resonate with your audience. Research by Nielsen Norman Group suggests that people tend to scan emails rather than read every word. Break your copy into short paragraphs, use bullet points, and get straight to the point. 

Every word counts and every interpretation matters. So, let your message be clear and persuasive so that your audience knows what exactly you are trying to convey. Most people skim through the emails, so you can structure your email copy in bullet points to stay in their good books. 

• Incorporating Calls-to-Action (CTAs) 

After you have captured their attention, it’s time to strike the final blow – the CTAs. Give your CTAs an ample amount of whitespace to help them stand out in your email layout. Keep it central and give them a good contrast in parallel with the background color. Also, keep a tab on your landing pages so that your audience doesn’t bounce off. Have relevant information and tell them what exact action you want them to take. 

But all of that and more is only possible when you segment your audience into different groups. 

Segmentation and Targeting

Segmentation is bound to increase revenue. That’s because not every email can be meant for everyone. People have different likes and dislikes, different buying habits, and different mentality when it comes to buying online. So, when you target your audience with specific emails that cater to their needs and preferences, they are more likely to buy from you. 

Segmentation allows you to create distinct groups and sub-groups of people based on their age, gender, location, purchase history, wishlist, engagement, etc. This helps you figure out what they are most interested in and what they are likely to purchase, eventually boosting your chances of conversion. 

The data you need is with you. With the help of analytics tools, you can learn about how and when they interact with your website and create touchpoints around that. This will also help you build your sales funnel. Then, with the help of personalization, you can speak their language to them, recommend products they would like, and use dynamic content to run drip campaigns while keeping your targeting very specific. 

But you are bound to face some challenges to attain perfect results. So, let’s look into those…

Common Challenges in Email Automation and How to Overcome Them 

1. Spam Filters 

You need to focus on a reputable email service provider if you want to avoid spam boxes. For that to happen, you have to keep your subscribers list clean and avoid trigger words like “free,” “discount,” etc. Try using emojis in your subject lines to appear friendly. When you happen to send the same emails to every subscriber of yours, those who won’t relate to it will send it to their spam box straightaway. So, to avoid that, take the help of segmentation for your automated emails. 

2. Unsubscribes 

It is better to ask your audience to unsubscribe if they don’t want to receive your emails instead of sending your emails in the spam box. This will safeguard your sender reputation score. Because with automation, the frequency of your emails tends to increase with time, and some of your subscribers won’t like to receive more than one email from the same sender in a day or a week. So, provide a clear link to unsubscribe at the bottom of your emails so that they can find it easily. You can also ask for feedback to learn the reason why they are leaving.

Key Takeaways 

Email automation isn’t just a trend anymore. It has been central to the success of marketing campaigns in current scenarios. It has the ability to elevate customer experience, and that too in a quick time. You can put this strategy into action to boost engagement and conversion rates. We hope that, with this guide, you can achieve your marketing objectives seamlessly with automation.