Email marketing campaigns have long been a highly personalized and effective tool for communication with your audience. It’s a medium that has defied the odds of the rapidly changing winds in digital marketing. It’s even evolved alongside other advances in marketing strategy to maintain its seat as a crucial element in any well-rounded communications plan. In fact, revenue from email marketing alone is set to reach 11 Billion dollars by the end of 2023.
Indeed, there are still a wide array of reasons why email marketing should not be overlooked as you develop an integrated marketing strategy. However, you may not be using the medium to its full potential unless you’ve employed the wonders of automation.
What is email marketing automation?
A large part of the appeal of email marketing comes with the wide variety of tools available to help both optimize your audience’s experience and serve your business goals. Automation tools take actions you’d normally have to process manually and string them together in an automatic chain of events. These tools come in a variety of flavors, from helping you categorize your CRM more effectively to provide a more engaging user experience.
Segment your audiences more effectively
One of the most useful tools of email marketing automation comes from providing your audience with opportunities to self-identify their intent. Through initial emails, providing certain questions or interactions can allow you to automatically segment recipients into buyer personas based on their answers.
More than 8 out of 10 people will open a welcome email, providing a ripe opportunity to engage the majority of your audience members with the initial send. Email automation software can then automatically segment your contacts based on rules and actions you set up in your journey.
These types of triggering actions can consist of:
- Clicking on a certain link
- Answering a dropdown question
- Content engagement
- And more!
Audience inaction can also provide an opportunity to filter re-engagement tactics to those who have not engaged with your content in some time. Many email clients allow you to view these segments, which then allows you to customize a re-engagement communication just to those email list members. This brings us to the next benefit of automation workflows: content tailoring.
Provide a personalized experience for your audience
With effective audience segmentation, you now can tailor more relevant content to your recipients based on how they interact with your brand. Automation tools can take segmentation to the next level, allowing you to craft highly relevant content for each segment and send automated emails triggered based on user actions. These personalized sends can utilize a variety of content marketing tactics such as:
- Re-education for inactive audiences
- Praise and reward for active audiences
- Segment-specific content on products or services
- Abandoned carts for e-commerce
- Content downloads on landing pages
- Tailored calls-to-action to improve conversion rates
Personalization ensures that the content current and potential customers see speaks to where they are in the customer journey. And makes sure they have useful information that gives them that next step to help move them further down the funnel.
Move your target audience down the funnel
Email marketing automation ultimately serves one central purpose, and that purpose is your audience journey. Each email you send, from introduction down to personalized content, should have clear calls-to-action that allow your audience to self-identify. By combining the usage of segmentation tools and personalized content at each stage of the journey, you can encourage your audience segments to move to that next step in their relationship with your brand. The combination of these tools can guide a consumer from merely considering your product to making that final purchase.
Work smarter, not harder
At the end of the day, email marketing automation can make your life a lot easier. Marketers have a lot on their plates. Executing complex customer journeys with manual sends and segmentation can be excruciatingly time-consuming. Not having robust journeys for your buyer personas is also a detriment to both you and your audience. Automation tools allow you to take your finger off the button for many of these actions, allowing your email campaigns to work for you, and not the other way around. When running a fully integrated strategy, the time savings with tools such as email automation can be crucial.
Ryan is the Director of Digital Services at RDW Group. Living his career on the digital frontier since ‘poking’ was social currency, he is ever on the pulse of the integrated mindset. Outside the office he can be found running silly distances to the beats of electronic music, capturing life through a camera lens, and soaking in the hop cologne at RI’s bountiful local breweries.