Marketers today understand the importance of using email as a predominant marketing tool. After all, with 3.7 billion active email users across the globe, leveraging email marketing is one of the best ways of fulfilling their top priorities of driving conversions and generating leads.
In fact, email marketing when combined with email automation can work wonders for streamlining any marketing process and enabling one-to-one communication with customers. This is the reason 53% of marketers are innovating with their email campaign strategies by making extensive use of email automation.
So, what is email automation all about? Let’s find out.
Email automation works towards automating tasks and workflows related to marketing and sales. It also helps in tracking customer interactions related to an email campaign and increase subscriber engagement through auto-responder and follow up emails. In short, email automation analyzes the subscriber’s buying behavior, purchasing history etc. and automatically sends behavior or time-based emails when a subscriber meets any of the pre-defined criteria.
Hence, whether you have a large corporation or are dealing with a small business, leveraging email automation is a great way of boosting your ROI. Consequently, according to statistics, email automation improves ROI by 32.9%.
In fact, small businesses with limited resources and a consistent target market can benefit a lot through email automation. It is not only affordable and easy to implement but, also saves time and reduces labour cost.
Moreover, with automation market software expected to grow at a rate of 8.55% and reach the market capitalisation of a whopping $5.5 billion dollar by 2019, it is quite clear that email automation is the need of the hour. So, if you haven’t already started using email automation, it is high time you do it. Here’s how it can benefit your small business and help you boost your ROI.
Increases subscriber’s engagement
Email automation helps in sending highly personalized, relevant and timely emails based on the customer’s interests and preferences.
68.5% of the marketers believe automation improves message targeting considerably.
From personalizing your email subject line to segmenting customers on specific criteria, email automation does it all. This, in turn, increases customer engagement and helps you in nurturing leads. All you need to do is integrate the email automation software with your CRM and connect with your customers on a personal level while driving conversions and boosting your ROI.
GasBuddy does a great personalization job by sending its subscribers a scorecard of their driving history and skills.
Helps in lead reconnections
Email automation software allows you to monitor the volume and frequency of the emails you send. In addition, it even lets you analyze and measure the response rate of the emails sent. With features like email marketing analytics, email automation makes it easy for you to get an insight into the open and click-through rates, deliverability rates, unsubscribes rates etc. And with such deep insights, improving and personalizing your email campaign to suit the needs of your subscribers wouldn’t be a tough task. This is the reason 45.9% of marketers use email automation for improving customer experience.
Gets hold of active email list
Just creating and segmenting an email list isn’t enough. You need to keep a track if your emails are reaching the customer’s inbox and being clicked and opened. This is where email automation can come in handy. It lets you know about the soft and hard bounce rates of emails. A soft bounce means the subscriber’s inbox is full or the server is down, whereas hard bounces mean the email address doesn’t exist anymore or is invalid.
It is always advisable to use an email verification service to reduce soft and hard bounce rates and make sure you’re sending emails to the right people.
With such extensive information, you can easily clean up your email list and concentrate solely on your active users.
Schedules proper and timely emails
If you want to boost your ROI, it becomes imperative to retain existing customers and attract new ones. The best way of doing this is by going for an automated email drip campaign. It will help you send a series of consistent and relevant emails to a subscriber at regular intervals. These emails can either be welcome emails to let your new subscribers know about your product and services or promotional emails to promote your new line of products to the existing customers. See how Universe sends a personalized welcome email to grab the customer’s attention.
Promotes relevant content
For a business to be successful in the long run, it is important to create such email marketing campaigns that best resonate with your subscribers. And for that, you need to track the results of your campaign. This can be done through A/B testing backed by email automation. From the email content and design to fonts and layouts, A/B testing analyzes various versions of your email template by sending it to a smaller segment of your email list and measuring its response rates. This will help you determine the template that best clicks with your customers and send them relevant and resonating content accordingly.
Encourages metric-based actions
Since email automation gives you a detailed and deep insight into various performance metrics of your email campaign, it gets easier for you to take actions that give desired results. According to the metrics, you can create the right content, eye-catching design and perfect landing pages; all you need is an email automation software to extract the best out of your email marketing campaign.
Works towards optimum utilization of money
The funds are limited for small business owners. So, it is important to utilize them optimally. This is when email automation can help you do the needful. After all, the cost incurred in sending and designing an email campaign manually is a lot more than that incurred in incorporating email automation. Therefore, when you incorporate email automation in your small business, it saves your lot of money and efforts by making your email campaign effective and error-free. So, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that email automation is not an expense but cost-effective investment which can boost your ROI like never before.
Final thoughts
Email automation helps you extract your customer data and plan a consistent email marketing campaign of high relevancy. In fact, email automation if done right can be a great way of building a long, personal and enduring relationship with your customers. And that’s exactly what you need to nurture leads, drive conversions and generate revenue. In a nutshell, the potential of email automation is immense. So, tap on its potential and see how it works wonders for your small business and makes you ready to give your giant counterparts a tough competition.
Author Bio:
Kevin, the Head of Marketing at Email Uplers – one of the fastest growing Email design and coding companies, specializes in crafting MailChimp templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and provides free email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes ‘email marketing’. Get the latest updates on email marketing trends at his Email Marketing blog.
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