As a business owner, your primary focus is on growth and innovation, not on repetitive tasks like manually sending out emails. Email marketing, while essential, shouldn’t consume your valuable time.

Enter email automation—a powerful tool that not only saves you hours but also enhances your marketing efforts. Imagine sending targeted, personalised emails to your customers without lifting a finger. This technology streamlines your workflow, allowing you to nurture leads and drive sales effortlessly.

How does it work? In this blog, we’ll demystify email automation, showing you how it can transform your business. We’ll explore its benefits and share effective strategies to integrate into your campaigns.

What is Email Automation?

Email automation uses predefined rules to send personalised emails based on customer actions, such as welcome emails or abandoned cart reminders. This helps keep customers engaged and encourages repeat visits.

Why Utilise Email Automation?

The great thing about email automation is that it offers you a way to send the right message to the right people at the right time, making it a very powerful marketing tool. However, let’s take a look at some of the specific opportunities it grants you below. 

Personalise Customer Experiences

It’s no secret that customers love personalisation. Research by Statista simply reinforces what business owners already know: 90% of consumers find personalised content either very or somewhat appealing. However, it may come as a surprise that the leading type of personalisation experience that marketers use is actually email. This means that building relationships with customers via email should be a top priority in your marketing campaign, and email automation is a great way to do this. 

Take advantage of your mailing list sign-up form to collect relevant data. On top of asking for a new user’s email address and/or phone number, you could also include fields asking for:

• Their birthday
• The types of products they’re interested in
• Their reason for shopping
• What kinds of emails they want to receive
• How often they want to purchase your products

Plus, when you link your web analytics with your email marketing platform, you can even target people based on behaviour, location, preferences and previous sales. You can then personalise each customer’s experience and increase the relevance of your automated campaigns. 

Make the Most of Your Marketing Team

Automation is fundamentally changing the way that many different kinds of teams operate. For email marketing teams, this could look like less time spent manually compiling email lists and scheduling deliveries. This effectively frees up the time for them to focus on other pressing tasks, such as more in-depth customer relationship building.

Improve Customer Retention Rate

Automated emails are a fantastic way to boost your customer retention rates, especially when it comes to devising an exceptional post-purchase experience. After all, it’s much simpler and more cost-effective to market to existing customers than to convert new ones, and thanks to email automation, staying in touch has never been easier. Schedule messages so that customers hear from you regularly, and make sure that your copy is super relevant for maximum impact.

Win Back Lost Customers

Email automation can even help to draw back those customers you’ve had trouble retaining. Shoppers who have visited your site and purchased from you before, but haven’t returned in a while, are perfect targets for email communication. Personalise win-back emails based on: 

• Previous sales
• The length of time they’ve been away
• The average time between purchases for the types of products you sell

You could also include exclusive offers in your re-engagement emails to further entice customers, like a discount or access to a new product. 

Make Your Strategy Scalable

When you send out a series of emails manually, the size of your team limits the amount of customers you can reach. It’s worth considering whether you’d be able to stay on schedule if your client base suddenly doubled!

On the other hand, sending automated emails allows you to scale your marketing efforts. For example, programming your platform of choice to send a message every time someone signs up for your mailing list via a form means that you don’t have to wait for a staff member to be available to hit send. Customers are integrated into your system as soon as they perform any action that you track, without you having to put any more strain on already limited resources. 

How to Make Your Automated Emails Count

Now that you’re clued up on the ins and outs of email automation and what it can do for your business, here are a few tips on how to make your new automated email strategy run as smoothly as possible. 

Track Responses

Each time you send an automated email, you’re granted with a unique opportunity to collect key information from customers that shouldn’t be wasted. You should be tracking if a customer:

• Opens an email 
• Clicks through to your site
• Uses an offer
• Purchases a suggested product
• Continues to browse once on your site

Remember: everything you learn about your customers through targeted emails can inform your next step. For instance, if you notice that recipients aren’t opening your offer emails or aren’t clicking on recommendations, go for a different tactic. 

Be Strategic with Offers

Did you know that high shipping costs are one of the most common reasons that shoppers abandon what’s in their basket? Now, while you can’t skip out on delivery fees or bottom out your product prices, you could send out exclusive offers or promo codes to draw in customers who are on the fence. While this tip can be effective, make sure that you don’t use it too liberally – otherwise, customers might expect to receive a discount more often. 

Design a Drip Campaign

You’l sometimes find that certain users interact with your business several times before becoming a customer. In this scenario, drip campaigns can be handy, as they ‘drip’ useful content about your company, products or the industry you’re in. In order to pull these kinds of campaigns off, your content has got to be highly relevant. Fortunately, when using email automation, drip campaign messages only get sent out to prospects who have demonstrated interest in your company. 

Want to Stand Out in Every Inbox? 

Need more help getting your email marketing campaign off the ground? As experts in all things digital, Bigg makes it almost impossible to fail at growing your business. We take a results-driven approach to email marketing that leverages opens, clicks and conversion data to improve results and increase profitability month by month. We’ll work with you to understand your business objectives and to devise an email strategy that meets your goals the fastest.

To start creating well-designed, optimised emails that actually convert, get in touch with a member of our helpful team today.