Let’s talk email for a minute. Email is one of the highest impact marketing tools with a potential return on investment (ROI) of $42 per every $1 spent. And 79% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement in the last 12 months. So even though social media gets a lot of airtime and is as trendy as Wordle, email is marketing bread and butter. But when it comes to optimizing your gains from email marketing, don’t just stop at email newsletter creation; reap these 11 benefits of launching an email automation campaign.
Set It and Forget It
What’s an email automation campaign? There are many ways to slice and dice it, but as Mailchimp says, it “is a way to create emails that reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. It’s a way to implement a robust email strategy through intentional and structured actions. Also, it’s automated, meaning it does its job without you lifting a finger.
Save Your Team Time
Automation means your team saves a ton of time. Email automation campaign creation involves:
- Choosing email software and understanding how it works.
- Establishing goals for your email automation campaign.
- Designing a strategy to meet those goals.
- Mapping out a workflow for the emails, i.e., what’s the order of the content, how frequently should they go out to your audience, etc.
- Segmenting your email list so that the right people receive the right messaging.
- Launching your email automation campaign.
- Tracking your metrics and tweaking your campaign when necessary.
Once you’ve done steps 1-7, kick back, bust open a kombucha, and watch those emails send, send, send.
Build Brand Awareness
Have you ever subscribed to an email list, received one email, and never heard from the company again? It happens, and it’s not great. With an email automation campaign, you’re sending consistent, regular, branded communication to your audience. It’s kind of like sending an email to a friend:
- Hey
- Thinking of you
- Here’s what’s new with me
- Let’s talk sometime soon
When you’re building your brand, you’re cultivating relationships with your ideal customers, and email automation campaigns are a great way to start and continue conversations. Conversations spur awareness. Awareness leads to motivation. Motivation leads to action.
Gain Access to Data
You can track data with any email you send, but the benefit of email automation campaigns is you have control—the campaign itself—and you gain access to data over time. You can track how your email automation campaign performs during specific sales cycles, seasons, or in reaction to current events. Because your data is more robust, your insights can be more meaningful. Additionally, you can draw direct throughlines from your email automation campaigns to your sales data through click-through rates. You can see how many emails it takes before your audience feels compelled to act. Finally, you can compare copy and design elements across emails to discern which ones get the highest engagement from your audience, which tells you what they’re resonating with. You can learn a lot through email automation campaigns.
Prevent Errors
Since email automation campaigns are built, scheduled, and repeatedly sent over time, there’s a higher level of control over quality. In addition, quality assurance is built into the email automation campaign process, with multiple hands usually involved, practice runs, and various moments during the development process to catch errors. As a result, you can send one-off emails quickly, pass them through fewer hands, and ultimately, send error-filled emails to your recipients.
When you send emails with errors—misspelled names, incorrect information, formatting snafus—it can erode your audience’s perception of your business and put their interest in engaging with you at risk.
Increase Engagement Through Personalization
Email automation campaign workflows can include many options for personalization, such as autofill recipient first and last names. These are the facts: Personalized emails have higher click-through rates. Additionally, email automation campaigns often include segmentation. Check this out:
You want to engage your audience further after signing up for a membership on your website.
You can segment your audience into those who signed up for the membership and have utilized some or all of the benefits and who signed up and are not yet active users.
You create two email automation campaigns to engage your audience further; one catered to those already invested and the other to those who need a little encouragement to engage.
Your messaging matches the segment and thus carries a higher likelihood of further engagement when done right.
Reduce Cost
Let your email marketing do the work for you. Once you’ve set up your email automation campaign, you have a digital sales representative contacting your audience regularly. That means if you can pare down sales activities, streamline your sales teams’ time, and save money on tasks that can be eliminated or reduced by email automation campaigns.
Link Strategy to Execution
When strategy and execution are seamlessly aligned, that’s where the magic happens. One of the ways your marketing can fall flat on its face is by having faulty connections between strategy and execution. You need to be strategic to set up an email automation campaign, and the process itself links strategy to execution without extra effort.
You have to consider your audience’s characteristics and behaviors to define segments.
You have to consider how much communication they want and how frequently they want it.
You have to consider your messaging and how you want to vary it across emails to be effective.
Automating your email campaigns is a great way to see what strategy and execution can look like when they dance the tango together. Let’s just say it’s top-notch stuff.
Take Your Audience On A Journey
People engage with brands that make them feel something positive about themselves.
Beautiful.
Successful.
Interesting.
Desirable.
Connected.
Initiating, maintaining, and growing relationships with your audience is a process. Over time, you have to nurture your audience, woo them a little bit (or a lot, depending on your brand), and build trust. Investing in your audience is ultimately investing in your business, and one of the best ways to go about that process is to take your audience on a journey. Center them in your brand story. Show them what value you provide. And guide them along the pathway to self-actualization.
Email automation campaigns are an opportunity to do just that. First, adjust your tone, cadence, and formatting as they experience the progression of your campaign. Next, create rising action through your creative execution. Finally, lead them to the only conclusion that makes sense: engage.
You can create a story in a single email, but with automated campaigns, you’re laying the groundwork for an epic where your audience is the hero. And if they feel like a hero, they’ll be more likely to come back for more.
Increase Conversions
Have you ever had somebody tell you they want to marry you on the first date? Soul mates aside, throwing out all the stops over your first glass of wine is a bit offputting. Leading your audience to conversions requires nurturing, just like dating does. The structure of email automation campaigns lends itself to the nurturing process. It gives your business the opportunity and the time to create a solid base with your audience. You get to know them. They get to know you. And eventually, when all the ducks line up, your audience converts.
The sales tactics of the 20th century fall short with today’s audiences. With enough exposure, people have developed built-in radars for snake oil. Many people find pushy tactics repulsive. Especially younger audiences will unsubscribe if you’re too aggressive, too frequent, or too obtuse in your efforts. The elevator pitch needed to evolve.
Use email automation campaigns as a tool, a structure to support your communication efforts with your audience, and create an intentional strategy that meets their needs, preferences, and values. As a result, you’ll be more likely to yield conversions.
Know your audience, and let your audience appreciate your emails.
Raise Revenue
Strategy, time savings, money savings, data, quality assurance, and more—email automation campaigns are beneficial. And all of these benefits can culminate in a massive benefit for your business: increased revenue.
When you build your email automation campaigns on smart strategy, you let it do the heavy lifting for you, and you cater it to your audience, the result can 100% be increased revenue for you.
Augment Your Email Marketing
Automated email campaigns are a must-have part of your marketing strategy. Your sales team will see the benefits of your marketing. Your marketing team gains time savings, efficiency, and a tried-and-true solution for nurturing your audience. And your audience? They get to learn more about you in an intentional, engaging way. If taking on email automation solo sounds like a bit much for your business right now, consider outsourcing it to a marketing agency that is well-versed in the art. We’re on standby. Email us at [email protected] to start planning your next email automation!
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