In recent years, email marketing and marketing automation have taken the world of marketing by storm turning into the most popular form of digital marketing.
Their popularity has been affected by their widespread use combined with their ability to keep modern consumers connected with their favorite brands whenever and wherever they are.
With emails, brands have acquired a powerful tool to send personalized messages and content that will incentivize their subscribers to engage with their products and turn them into loyal customers that will support them unconditionally.
However, what has turned them into the most popular marketing channel for marketers to use is their cost-effective character.
Whether you have a profitable brick-and-mortar brand, a SaaS company, a blog or you are just about to start an online business, email marketing automation can give you solutions that will help you build a loyal audience with the best ROI.
What is Email Marketing and Marketing Automation?
While they may appear similar, email marketing and marketing automation have some primary differences.
Email marketing is a marketing channel that allows you to reach a large number of people through emails.
Marketing automation, though, gives you the ability to set up multi-step campaigns, set automated workflows and send action-triggered emails according to your customer’s behavior.
For example, welcome emails are a popular email marketing campaign used by brands to greet their new subscribers.
If you were to send this email to every new subscriber manually, it would turn out to be a very time-consuming process that would require your presence constantly.
With marketing automation, though, these emails can be distributed to your new subscribers the moment they take certain actions around your website.
Here’s an example of a marketing automation recipe and email marketing example that your new subscribers will see in their inbox when they subscribe to Burt’s Bees:
To get started with email marketing automation, the only thing you need is your creativity, planning skills, and a great email marketing automation platform (we recommend Zapier).
If you search the market, there are a lot of alternatives to Mailchimp like Moosend that can provide you with the tools to create, automate and send the best emails out there.
So now that you have the tools, check the following 4 email marketing and marketing automation strategies to help you keep your business thriving.
1. Set up Powerful Drip Campaigns to Engage Your Audience
One of the best strategies that companies must take advantage of when they employ email marketing automation is to plan powerful drip marketing campaigns.
Drip campaigns are automated processes that allow a brand to “drip” a series of emails to their subscribers to motivate them to take specific calls-to-action.
The success of such campaigns lies in their ability to keep your subscribers engaged through content and offers that will drive them further down your sales funnel effortlessly.
To take advantage of this powerful strategy, brands should keep in mind that while creating their campaigns might be easy to do, managing them correctly is the key to make them work.
Here are some drip campaign examples your brand should include in their email marketing strategy:
Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are an excellent way to start building relationships with your new subscribers since they are the equivalent of the brick-and-mortar staff greeting.
To be successful, your welcome emails don’t need to be lengthy or include extensive information that will tire your new subscribers.
What they need is to be straightforward and include a great welcome gift that will make your audience think that your brand values them.
Welcome emails are a great example of customer engagement messages you must send to help your new customers see the value of your brand.
Here’s a simple yet effective welcome email from Razer:
Onboarding Emails
Using onboarding emails will further assist your customer engagement, minimize the number of customers who make a single purchase and then disappear from your sales funnel and help you increase your inbound marketing efforts.
The simplest way to do it is to give them extra information about your products, inform them about upcoming sales, events and present them with cool tips that will keep them interested in your brand and your products.
So, by using attractive onboarding messages, you will give your customers more reasons to convert and stay with you.
Here’s a great example from Nikon:
Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned carts emails are an eCommerce store’s most powerful weapon when it comes to restoring valuable revenue.
These emails work as a series of reminders that will get your disengaged customers to come back to their carts and finish their purchases.
Combining your cart abandonment emails with FOMO marketing will add urgency to your CTAs resulting in a huge boost in sales.
And since a single email reminder is never enough, employing an abandoned cart drip campaign that will give more irresistible incentives will be a lot more effective and convert better in the long run.
Here’s an example of an abandoned cart campaign from Kenneth Cole:
2. Use Email Marketing Automation in Email List Segmentation
Email list segmentation is one of the best techniques marketers can use to deliver better, more targeted emails to their subscribers.
By dividing your list into groups according to different criteria like demographics and user preferences you can adapt your content according to each segment and deliver emails that will be tailored to your subscriber’s needs.
While segmentation alone can be a powerful tool to group your customers according to their needs, you can combine it with marketing automation to significantly increase customer retention and maintain list hygiene.
To take advantage of both, marketers can divide their subscribers according to their email actions: open and bounce rate, CTR and inactivity.
For instance, a segment that includes bounce email addresses will help a brand determine whether they are worth keeping in their list or not.
If the bounce rate remains the same, then brands can take certain actions to clean the list from these bounce addresses and improve their list hygiene.
Managing your segments through automation will help you avoid getting a bad sender reputation coming from the amount of bounced emails and significantly improve your email deliverability.
Also, if you need extra help to monitor your subscriptions, you can use a subscription analytics tool to check their performance and profitability.
3. Use Personalization and Dynamic Content
Personalization
At some point, we all received an email that was so impersonal that made us all feel like Tyrion Lannister during his stay at the Wall.
To avoid getting such cold reactions, you should first understand that personalization is a very important element that will enhance customer experience and give consumers more reasons to spend their time and money on your brand.
Things like the inclusion of a subscriber’s name in your subject line or email copy are enough to make your recipients feel more involved and appreciated by your brand.
Here’s an example of an email with a personalized subject line from Dell:
Dynamic Content in Emails
While the personalization of your subject lines and email copy can be extremely beneficial for the success of your email campaigns, using dynamic content can bring even better results.
To insert dynamic content in your emails you need to collect your subscribers’ data like age, gender or profession and then use them to divide them into specific segments.
For instance, if you implement dynamic content in your welcome or recommendation email series based on your subscribers’ gender you will deliver content that will suit their needs better.
Since consumers need to feel that the information they share with brands will provide them with better results, using dynamic content will be your ultimate weapon to engage, nurture or re-engage your customers.
4. Test Your Content
Finding the elements that convert best can be a difficult task that someone could say that content creation is, in fact, a process of trial and error.
While you might think that you have found a great content idea that will work miracle, experience has shown us that what you think and what your customers think can vary.
To avoid this scenario, you need to test your ideas and content to find the elements that your audience favors more.
The easiest thing to do is to create specific A/B Tests that will give you concrete results about the efficiency of your original control elements versus its variants.
While A/B Testing might be a tedious task that needs time, it is a necessary process that, when done successfully, will increase your open, conversion and click-through rates significantly.
For instance, Designhill tested their subject lines to see which one had higher open and click-through rates.
According to this case study, the company achieved a 2.57% increase in open rate and a 5.84% increase in CTR by including only the name of their blog post.
The bottom line
When it comes to growing a successful business in a competitive market, emails can be the greatest weapon that marketers can use to ensure the survival and success of their brand.
Implementing the right email marketing automation strategies will help your business save valuable time and expand the number of your loyal customers as effortlessly and cost-effectively as possible.
So next time you plan yours, don’t forget to consider the previous email marketing and marketing automation strategies that will help you get the most out of your emails and marketing automation tools.
