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However, in all the excitement of new tech, your planned email campaign may have fallen by the wayside, laying sad and forgotten.
Before you rush off to explore greener pastures, we’d like to not-so-gently remind you of the incredible value that email marketing brings to the table, specifically the magic within email automation.
We’re deep-diving into this topic, highlighting five fast ways to grow your business with email automation so you can take full advantage of your lead magnets, email lists, and other resources to give you an edge over the competition.
Defining Email Marketing
First things first. Email marketing serves to keep the people on your email list updated on new products, special offers and other services. It is also a great tool to engage with your customers between purchases, allowing you to personalise your brand. Email marketing can include upselling or cross-selling products (in a gentle, non-salesy way) or simply telling stories to entertain and stay front of mind.
Does email marketing still work?
Very much so!
Over 80% of B2B marketers use email newsletters as their most popular form of content marketing, with new product and feature announcements receiving the highest click-through rate and excellent email open rates. Interestingly, a single email address is worth £84.50 across all industries, given its excellent ROI and lifetime value.
It makes sense, then, to leverage email marketing to its maximum potential and not leave money on the table. With this in mind, we need to ask the question, what is email automation?
What Is Email Automation?
Email automation within an email marketing campaign is a process whereby messages are automatically generated and sent to customers based on predetermined criteria. This can include welcome emails, order confirmation emails, shipping notifications, and more.
Automating these messages can help you save time on a number of tasks, including email list management, content creation, and follow-up. You can free up time to work on other aspects of your business by automatically sending out relevant emails to your subscribers.
Of course, linking these processes to your existing systems to close the loop and keep all your valuable customer information in one place is, in a word, smart! But more on that later.
1. Let’s Talk About A/B Testing in Email Marketing
A/B testing is a process of split-testing email marketing content to determine which version is more effective at achieving the desired goal, such as higher open rates or click-through rates. By automating the processes of A/B testing, businesses can increase the ROI of their email marketing campaigns.
Having the data on what works best - whether a headline, a featured image, or even sending emails at a particular time - gives you the ammo you need to reach your sales goals. This way, you can be sure that you’re sending the right message to the right people at the right time.
2. Make Use of Conditional Content
Conditional content is an ideal way to improve customer retention, using tailored messaging to appeal to a specific target at a precise time.
For example, if a customer registers for a loyalty program but doesn't complete the purchase before they leave your site, you can send them an offer for free shipping with your next purchase by tweaking your copy with - you guessed it - conditional content.
So, if conditional content is a customised experience based on someone's behaviour or preferences, it makes sense to track, test and measure all your user touchpoints. A dedicated Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a mind-blowing tool for this (and many other) purposes and is well worth exploring when planning an email marketing campaign.
3. Email Automation Success Through Audience Segmentation
Email marketing can be a great way to reach new customers and grow your business, but only if you do it right. That means segmenting your audience so you can send them targeted, relevant content that they’ll actually want to read. Outside of this, your message will likely be marked as spam and followed by an unsubscribe notification.
If your business has a single product or service, for example, you only sell kids’ school bags, then segmenting your audience may not be necessary. Organisations of a larger size, however, should take care in determining what communication to send to whom.
Let’s say you sell women’s clothing, and you’re having a promotion on maternity wear. You’d logically want to find expecting mothers, even segmenting your list further into the different trimesters, and ensure your message reaches them. Sports women, business women, or college students will not be interested in maternity clothing, right?
Audience segmentation can be defined by age, location, income, or past purchases, among a host of other things. Finding what matters to your target audience is a critical component of successful marketing and needs the data to back it up.
4. Set Up Automated Workflows in Your Email Campaigns
You'll need to set up automated workflows if you want to grab your audience's attention wherever they are in their journey.
Using your omnichannel marketing plan (that we know you have in place by now), you can set up campaigns to cater to each part of the customer journey and lead them down a logical path.
Workflows allow you to schedule an email based on a certain behaviour or criteria, and then, depending on the actions taken, the flow branches off to offer different messages.
When this amazingly useful information is plugged into your CRM, you can enjoy the advantages of dynamic audience segmentation and further hone your messages with dynamic email subject lines and more.
5. Nurture Leads to Grow Email Marketing ROI
Who has the time to reach out to potential customers to upsell, cross-sell - or sell at all? Email automation and the clever workflows we’ve just discussed allow you to carefully nurture potential customers until they are ready to join your tribe.
This part of your email marketing strategy requires excellent email marketing tools with advanced options that allow you to create deeply personalised and strategic messages. Again, can you do this without automation? We’ll leave you to answer that.
In Summary
It’s stunningly clear that today’s businesses need effective email marketing as much as ever. But more than that, they need email automation to leverage the amazing benefits that are within reach.
So, make sure that you’re ready to automate and reap the rewards.
Gather and grow your email lists with omnichannel communication
Segment your lists into logical groups based on empirical data
Use A/B testing and conditional content to send the right message to the right people
Set up automated workflows
Nurture your leads
Email marketing is made simpler and far more effective with email automation tools, and we know that your sales team will thank you for it. We invite you to explore the innovative email marketing tools available from CM.com to level up your marketing campaigns.
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