5 Ways Email Marketing Automation Benefits Your Business

It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to spend hours painstakingly writing individual emails for every one of your customers. At the same time, you don’t want to send general email blast after email blast to your entire subscriber list. When subscribers get messages that are irrelevant to them, they’re more likely to unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam. Fortunately, it’s possible to avoid these problems and improve your ROI with marketing automation.

Email marketing automation is the use of software, such as MailChimp or Hubspot, to send targeted emails at specified times or in response to certain actions your customers take. It’s all about reaching customers with the right message at the right time. Below, we look at five reasons why your business should use marketing automation.

Increase Transactions by Getting Personal

Imagine that you’re walking down a busy street. Are you more likely to turn around if you hear someone say, “Hey, you!” or if they use your name? You’re more likely to pay attention if someone addresses you personally, and the same principle holds true with email marketing.

When you use an email marketing automation platform, you can include personalized fields (like first name and company name) that will be populated with information you have in your email list. Tailoring emails to the recipient can have a big impact: marketing emails with personalized subject line have a 26% higher open rate than those that don’t, and emails that include personalized content can have a transaction rate that’s six times higher than those with generic messages.

Make a Bigger Impact with Segmented Emails

In a survey asking companies why they use email marketing automation, 83% said the biggest benefit they see is being able to send more relevant messages. With marketing automation, you can segment your customer or lead database into different groups and tailor different messages to those groups based on their interests, demographics, or purchase behavior. For example, if your business sells surfing and scuba diving gear, you could create different messages for customers who have expressed an interest in either surfing or scuba diving. This ensures that email recipients only receive content that aligns with their interests.

As with personalized fields, segmenting your email list through your marketing automation platform can result in greater engagement. Popular email platform MailChimp found that marketers who segmented their campaigns saw 14.3% higher open rates and 100.95% higher click-through rates.

Boost Your Revenue with Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are messages that automatically go to website visitors after they take a specific action. These actions might include subscribing to your newsletter, downloading an eBook, or making a purchase. Transactional emails usually include some basic information the recipient was expecting to get (such as an estimated shipping date or a link for a free download), but they don’t have to stop there.

Since recipients interact with transactional emails at a much higher rate than they do with promotional emails, savvy marketers often use these messages to encourage customers to take another step. For example, an order confirmation email could include a “Recommended Products” section at the bottom, while an email that thanks someone for subscribing to a newsletter could include a coupon for the shopper to use on their first purchase.  This marketing automation strategy has proved highly successful: businesses can generate up to six times more revenue from transactional emails than other email types.

Example of a possible upsell offer in a transactional email

Sync Up with the Customer Purchase Cycle

Another one of the benefits of marketing automation is being able to schedule emails that reach shoppers at exactly the right time. Let’s say, for instance, that you own a company that sells eco-friendly cleaning products. Knowing that your average customer goes through a bottle of your Squeak-E Clean Dish Soap in a month, you could schedule an email that goes to customers three weeks after they’ve purchased the dish soap, reminding them to restock.

You don’t just have to sell repeat-purchase products to use this email automation strategy, though. You could send messages promoting products related to something a shopper has already purchased or plan messages that correspond to seasonal shopping trends. For example, a knitting pattern company might schedule a “Sweater Weather” campaign offering a discount on all sweater patterns when the weather starts getting colder.

Keep Leads Engaged with Drip Campaigns

A drip campaign consists of a series of automated emails that are sent to leads on a regular schedule for a set period. Why use this type of marketing automation? For one thing, drip campaigns can be a great way to keep your business top-of-mind with people who are interested in your product or service but aren’t ready to make a purchase. You can use these emails to answer FAQs, address customer pain points, and demonstrate how your products solve problems, keeping your leads warm until they’re ready to buy. Persistence pays off: drip campaigns have an 80% higher open rate and 300% greater click-through rate than single send campaigns.

If you know that your business could benefit from email marketing automation but aren’t sure how to get started, contact Leverage Marketing. Our email marketing team would be happy to talk to you about automation tools and strategies we can use to increase your conversions.