With these benefits in mind, you probably want to step up your email automation game. To help you through this challenging process, we’ll walk you through six steps towards powerful email automation. So, let’s get things rolling!
Choose a robust email marketing automation solution
There are plenty of email marketing automation solutions available in the market for automated email marketing. Some capabilities and pricing plan structures are similar among email service providers. This doesn’t mean you’ll leave things to chance, though. You’ll want to perform thorough market research to find the email automation platform that best serves your needs, objectives, and budget. However, there are essential aspects to consider before deciding on your preferred email marketing automation solution. Let’s check them out:
- Flexible pricing. Maybe you won’t need to sign up for an expensive enterprise plan with every advanced capability right off the bat. That’s why it would be better to opt for a solution that lets you start small and scale up your email marketing as your business and target audience grows.
- Ease of use. Setting up automation workflows gets time-consuming if you invest in the wrong tool. Make sure the software of your choice has a user-friendly interface and drag-and-drop editor that allows you to tweak your automation quickly and easily. So, a short learning curve is what you should be looking for.
- Built-in automation workflows. Once you get all warmed up, you might want to set up a workflow from scratch based on your specific requirements. However, built-in automation recipes for every occasion do the heavy lifting for you. All you need to do is add, remove, or edit workflow parts as you see fit.
- Integration options. The whole point of investing in email automation software is to save time and effort. So, the ideal solution should offer tons of integrations with third-party applications so that you have everything under one roof, from content marketing tools to CRM options.
- Free trial period. Researching the best email automation solutions will get you so far. But you have to take it for a test drive to determine whether or not it suits your needs. Pick an ESP with a sufficient free trial period that includes most of its features to test its capabilities.
Determine your objectives
As with everything in life, your email marketing should have a specific objective. Before anything else, you must determine the end result you want to achieve with your automated emails or sequences. Ask yourself - and your marketing team - why you want to contact recipients. Are you after more sales or generating more leads? Do you want to educate them on your value proposition or urge them to purchase? What is the action you need them to take after reading your email?
Having solid goals helps you focus on the right aspects, make data-driven decisions, and avoid spamming subscribers with irrelevant content. Remember your objectives should be realistic and measurable. Otherwise, you’ll have no way of knowing whether or not your emails made the desired impact. Let’s say you dispatch a social media campaign that brings new subscribers to your email list. Setting up a welcome email campaign to educate them on your unique value proposition is a no-brainer, right?
Once you’ve determined your marketing goal, it’s time to start working on it. Defining your email objective helps you form a clear picture of your email campaign and decide on a wide variety of elements. Some of them are:
- Email and sequence types
- Email copy and design
- The recipient segments you’ll target
- The intervals between each email
- Key metrics that define success
- Desired results and future actions
After you have all these elements figured out, it’s time to move on to the execution part.
Segment your recipients
As we have already pointed out, there’s no automation without list segmentation. Subscriber segmentation and email automation are among the most effective strategies for email campaigns, 78% and 71%, respectively. Now imagine you send a product recommendation email presenting a sunglasses collection to a recipient living in a snowy location. Not exactly the timely email content you’d wish for, right?
Recipients usually ignore email messages that feel irrelevant. And that’s not even the worst-case scenario. You’d be surprised to know that delivering irrelevant email content to recipients is among the main reasons behind unsubscribes or spam complaints.
To dispatch valuable and customized emails, it’s essential to divide your audience into segments based on their demographics, preferences, behavioral data, etc. Marketers need to deeply understand their target audience to create personalized automation workflows that deliver email material their recipients appreciate. And if you want access to more customer data, you could incorporate a survey into your emails to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Or perhaps it’s time to reconsider your sign-up forms and add more custom fields according to the information you need.
Select the right triggers
A trigger is a condition or event that will set your automated email or email sequence in motion. You can take advantage of several actions and occurrences, from a new sign-up on your list to an abandoned cart or a recipient’s anniversary with your brand. For instance, you set your automation to be activated when a website visitor decides to join your list. Then, an email is dispatched to welcome the new member and perhaps offer a first-time incentive or some type of onboarding material.
Once you set the right triggers up, your recipients will receive dedicated emails depending on the action they perform or the event that sets your workflow in motion. Most ESPs also allow you to decide on specific conditional steps, such as filtering contacts based on certain criteria or waiting a specific time before dispatching the email campaign. Such conditions make your email automation as effective as possible, further improving the email experience.
Create and activate your automation
By this point, you have decided upon the most crucial parts of the planning process. Time for the creative part! It all comes down to the email creation process and carefully thinking about each component. Does your subject line draw attention? Is your call to action straightforward and actionable? Is your email copy clever and to the point? Does your email feel cluttered with large blocks of text or too many visual elements? You should consider these factors beforehand since they could make or break the performance of your automated email campaign.
After making sure every email asset is in its place, you’re almost ready. All you need is one final check to ensure everything within your workflow works as intended. You may even want to run a test as long as the email automation platform you use offers this capability. When everything is how you want it to be, there’s nothing left than turning your automation on and waiting for the desired outcome.
Monitor performance and optimize
Many marketers fall into the trap of letting their automation workflows run without giving it a second thought. But while email automation frees up time from doing things manually, it doesn’t end with setting a workflow in motion. Email automation enables you to collect a vast array of customer data. Key metrics like open or click-through rates provide you with accurate feedback regarding what works and where there’s room for improvement.
Also, you can gather insights from A/B testing to determine the winner between two email variants differing in one element, like your email subject line or CTA. The findings will help you determine which component performs better based on the key performance indicators you’ve set. The information you collect from monitoring your workflow performance will highlight your customers’ interests and preferences and the email content they prefer to engage with. Based on that information, not only can you optimize future email communication but also build more accurate customer personas.
