Many businesses rely on email marketing campaigns to gather leads and stay in touch with existing customers. To successfully run such campaigns, they must ensure that their emails are relevant and reach the correct audience at the right time. An efficient way to ensure this is to leverage email automation.
What is email automation?
Email automation is a tool that allows businesses to automatically send relevant and personalized messages to subscribers at a predetermined time based on specific triggers or predefined criteria. Such criteria include payment reminders, subscriber birthdays, promos, monthly feedback requests, order confirmations, and more.
What are the advantages of using email automation?
Here are the key benefits of email automation.
- Adds a personal touch
Email automation tools let you automatically insert a customer’s name and other details into an email. By using the customer’s name rather than using a generic salutation like “Dear valued customer,” you are able to make the email more personal, potentially increasing the chances that your customer will be more receptive to your marketing messages. According to Experian Marketing Services, personalized promotional emails have a 29% higher chance of being opened compared to non-personalized ones. In addition, consumers were also 25% more likely to engage with personalized triggered emails compared to those that are not. - Helps segment contacts
Email automation allows you to divide your customers and leads into groups based on their purchase behavior, demographics, and interests. For example, if your company sells mobile devices, you can use email automation to create unique messages for customers who’ve shown interest in either Apple or Android products. Segmenting contacts ensures recipients will only receive messages that align with their interests. This will help keep customers engaged and reduce the probability of them sending unwanted emails to the spam folder or unsubscribing from your mailing list. - Improves productivity
With email automation, your marketing team doesn’t have to spend too much time compiling email lists and creating and scheduling email campaigns. Email automation systems can automatically send out emails based on triggers, such as signing up for a monthly newsletter, or predefined events like birthdays. This will help free up your team to focus on more critical tasks instead of spending a huge chunk of time emailing clients and leads. - Helps retain existing customers
Selling to existing customers is easier and more cost-effective than converting a lead, so you need to keep your existing customers engaged. You can do this by sending them exclusive promos, feedback requests, and loyalty rewards via email. This will ensure that you reach more people, especially those that don't use social media.
When implemented properly, email automation can be a powerful marketing tool that frees up your team to do what they do best. If you want to learn more about email automation, give us a call today.