Email marketing is a powerful method of engaging your customers. There are still far more email addresses than there are Facebook accounts – that tells something about the size of audience you can tap into!

The secret behind successful email marketing is contacting the right people at the right time. It might seem hard, but email marketing automation is there to help you out!

Email marketing automation?
Does it mean it’s done by robots?

Not really (although that would be cool)! Automating your email marketing campaign means that certain processes are done automatically, thus saving you time.

Sounds vague? Let me give you an example!

Imagine you have a business that sells independent designer clothing online via an e-store. A customer willing to make a purchase needs to set up an account with their email address. Usually, when someone creates a new account somewhere, they expect a message popping up in their inbox saying something in vein of “Hello, thank you for joining us!”. Now, you don’t want to be sitting by a computer waiting for people to create accounts on your e-store to quickly send them a welcome message. Instead, you use automated processes, which act upon a certain trigger (in this case, signing up) and send out messages.

Similarly, you could set your email automation tool to send out messages to people who left your e-store with products in their basket and an unfinished purchase. Once they click the “close tab” button in their browser, your tool will interpret it as a trigger and will send out a message reminding them to finish their shopping.  

How can my email marketing campaign benefit from being automated?

Email marketing automation is so much more than just sending out newsletters to your leads. It allows you to effectively communicate with them at the same time avoiding labour-intensive processes.

Contacting your customers in a more effective way

Keeping track of who created an account, left the store without making the purchase, subscribed to your newsletter, bought something or did any other action on your website would be an almost impossible job if it was to be done manually. Each of the cases either expects a message or needs a reminder. You’d need to hire a person or a whole team dedicated specifically to sending out such emails (that would make the most boring job ever).

Get some revenge on that abandonment rate!

Do you remember all these times when you were this close to buying something and then something distracted you? Or when you saw the price and your bank account was like “NO!”? How about all these questionable impulse purchases that never become reality?

Such situations are every salesman’s worst nightmare. However, you can fight that with automated emails that are sent every time someone abandons their full cart. Such messages are a great way to remind them about that thing they wanted to buy. Maybe even offer a discount code if it was the price that scared them off?

Entice!

96% of people visiting your website are not ready to make a purchase. However, if you manage to get their email addresses, you can change that! Let’s say someone signs up for your newsletter/wants to download some sort of pdf guide/wants to participate in a contest or a giveaway. If they do, you will have more than enough to push your leads up your sales funnel.

How about an example? Let’s imagine you just signed up for a newsletter from an online news publication. They wanted the basics – your name and an email address. After that, you hear a notification pop up. You got a message from the publication you just signed up for. It says:

“Thank you for signing up, here’s the first month of our exclusive opinion pieces for free!”

Who wouldn’t want to benefit from that?

Then, after a month you get another email. This time it goes like this:

“Your free month is almost over! If you still want to receive our exclusive pieces, here’s 20% off for our annual subscription.”

This whole process is likely to lead to a sale. And it only uses two triggers for your email marketing automation. The first one is finishing the signup process, the second is the end of the free month. Simple as that.

Use data!

Email marketing automation would usually work along with your marketing automation campaigns. That means, you can utilize all the data about your leads that you got from your marketing automation tools. This will allow you to better recognize the stages of the sales funnel your leads are in and set better triggers for your email automation.

Summary:

Email marketing automation sounds cool, doesn’t it?

Let’s recap what you’ve learned from this article:

• Email marketing automation is all about sending out emails to leads based on triggering events like signing up or leaving the cart.
• Email marketing automation can drive up your sales by sending out right messages at the right time.
• Automation can be backed by data for achieving better results.
• Marketo, Eloqua, Userfox, Mailchimp and GetResponse are great tools for conducting your own email marketing automation campaign. These are certainly not the only ones, but they are worth checking out!

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