The email marketing campaigns are one of the most cost-effective method to reach out and connect with your targeted audience and customers. The email marketing is still the most cost-effective tool with highest ROI, according to studies a business can yield $40 against each $1 spent on email marketing. However, it is a common misconception that the making and executing email marketing campaign is difficult, and that too is true at some extent. Businesses often spend hours on their email marketing campaigns. However, things are changing rapidly, same like any other business process where the modern technology, digital systems and software have introduced automation and digitalization, the email marketing automation have completely revolutionized the email marketing. With the specialized email marketing systems and software tools one can send thousands of email within a few clicks. You can personalized your emails for better interaction and you can manage responses as well in a fully or semi-automated way. Businesses can schedule campaigns, they can automate communication and they can use it for brand awareness and much more. In this blog we will discuss how email marketing automation can simplify email campaign management and help improving the results.
What is Email Marketing Automation?
In simple words the email marketing automation is to create right email message, send it to right audience and at the right time without ever repeating all the process. In fact you just have to create a message once, the system will take care of everything, it knows what to send, when to send and to whom. You can also schedule your email marketing campaigns so your audience can hear regularly, which is a great way to nurture relationships. The email marketing automation tools will also help you to compose multiple copies and it will take instructions from your to understand which copy has to be sent to whom and when. Relevant copy and right timing can greatly improve your email marketing campaign’s results. The automation is achieved by a dedicated email marketing system or email management system which is a software tool with specialized features to manage and automate email marketing campaigns. A standard email marketing system or email management system have in-built email composer which allow both plain and HTML based templates along with other designing tools. It also have contacts management tool and allow businesses to segregate audience in different groups to send them most relevant information and communication. Modern email marketing systems can also be integrated with other systems, such as CRM, ERP, customer databases and central information center.
How Email Marketing Automation can Simplify Campaign Management and Results?
The email is one of the most automated marketing channel, more than 60% of marketers all around the world prefer email marketing automation and even more, around 70% of B2B email marketing is managed using automation tools. Here are some key advantages of email marketing campaign automation which help businesses maximize the impact of their campaigns and also drive efficiency by reducing human labor and manual work.
Email Marketing Automation: Audience Management
The audience management is one of the most crucial part of any email marketing campaign. You should always have to be proactive in collecting more email addresses and increasing your subscriber bank in order to make your email marketing more impactful. One of the major source of email contacts is your existing customers, you should collect emails from all your customers, and you can also utilize digital channels to collect email addresses. Businesses can also collect contacts from their corporate websites, social media or other sources. Businesses can also create subscription forms to collect email contacts. For that lead magnets are used, a lead magnet is some kind of incentive which is used to encourage users to share their email address. Furthermore the email marketing campaign automation tool or email marketing system also help businesses to segment their audience, which is extremely important. In order to execute a successful email marketing campaign you should be able to segment audience based on various criterions to personalize communication and share most relevant information which will strengthen your relationship, help you nurture leads and raise loyalty among existing customers.
Email Marketing Automation: Email Campaigns Management
The very important step in any email marketing campaign is to create an eye-catchy and engaging email template. Whether it is a regular communication or a promotional newsletter, the template design and the email copy are the most important aspect of any email campaign. The email marketing automation tools or any email marketing system comes with in-built email composer tools. These tools allow you to include various visual elements, fonts, styles, images, links and even forms. The email template have strong initial impact on the viewer, it can attract them and intrigue them to interact with the email or read it through. That is why it is important that you have a great email composing tool. Furthermore businesses tend to use various email copies for different sets of audience and at different stages of customer journey. The email marketing automation enables you to create and manage various different email copies and templates which can be automatically sent to the targeted audience groups as per pre-defined strategy. Furthermore the personalized content is tend to be more persuasive, the email marketing automation tools help you personalized each email to improve customer engagements.
Email Marketing Automation: Workflows and Automation Rules
Ability to setup workflows, rules and triggers is a key to email marketing automation. It might sound difficult but it is very simple, think of all the events or times when you have to send an email, for example, as soon as a new customer signups or a customer made an in-store purchase, you are sending them a welcome email. The email marketing automation tool allow you to completely automate this workflow. You can compose and store a welcome email template which is automatically sent to new entry in the customer database. This is possible with the help of third-party system integration or API integration. The API integration is a technique to enable a communication between two independent systems. For example, as soon as a new customer signs-up in the relevant system (ERP, CRM, POS, Sales Tool, Website, etc.) sends a trigger to email marketing system and it sends a pre-composed welcome email to the customer. Similarly businesses can incorporate various workflows, such as after a customer had a service center visit or after an online interaction with support staff, or if a customer abandoned the cart halfway through customer journey. That is not all, instead of setting up one email, you can also setup a series of emails and workflows based on user behavior, actions and various other important factors.
Email Marketing Automation: Insights and Analytics
Tracking and analyzing key metrics such as open-rate, click through rate, conversions, form submissions, bounce backs, and unsubscribe rate are vital to understand the performance of your email marketing campaign. With traditional and manual email marketing methods, it is either extremely difficult to collect that kind of insight or it is completely beyond reach. Which is why the email marketing automation tool is used, it can collect various insights and help businesses identifying the areas of improvements to make good changes. A modern email marketing automation tool or email marketing system will help you collect valuable insight which can be very helpful in understanding the user behavior, trends and patterns and customer data which will help you take informed decisions to further improve your email marketing campaign. Furthermore you can also easily conduct A/B testing to analyze two or multiple copies of your email, its design templates, subject line and call-to-action (CTA) button and various other aspects, which coupled with analytical data and insight can greatly improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Why Email Marketing Automation is Essential for Modern Businesses?
The email marketing automation has become absolutely essential for modern businesses, the email communication has become increasingly popular and modern businesses heavily rely on it. It is not just communication, in fact the email marketing has become center point of brand awareness and promotional efforts. Here are some key benefits of email marketing automation:
- Save Time and Resource: Managing email campaigns, follow ups and communication can take countless hours and a lot of human resource with traditional manual practices. However, email marketing automation can greatly reduce your efforts and make it super-efficient.
- Increase Productivity: The email marketing automation can automate several aspects of your email campaign. The ability to setup workflows, triggers and automated emails can greatly improve the productivity.
- Boost Sales and Conversions: When you have an email marketing automation framework in place, your sales team can automate a complete sequence of multiple emails. It helps them to take customers through customer journey without spending hours on crafting personalized messages.
- Raise Brand Awareness: Brand awareness campaigns are vital for any business’s growth, it is extremely easier to send bulk emails with email marketing automation tool. Businesses can conduct A/B testing, they can send different copies to different audience groups and much more.
- Increase Customer Engagements: Customer engagements can be increased by connecting with them at the right time and sharing the right information they need at that time. This whole processes can be automatically managed by email marketing automation software.
- Improve Customer Retention: The email marketing automation enables businesses to schedule email campaigns and communication for months and in upfront, this means your customers will receive continuous news, updates, promotional content and much more which will keep them interested and it will also give them a sense of community and connection which increase customer retention and also help reducing customer churn rate.
An effective email campaign can greatly improve customer retention and help businesses achieve their goals. The email marketing and various email campaigns can generate greater results and at a very cost-effective rate. This is the reason the email marketing is always considered to be the most cost-effective digital marketing channel.
Conclusion
This is the era where digitalization and technology is dominating each and every aspect of our lives whether it is personal or work life, we are heavily relying on technology. The digitalization and technology bring automation and help businesses and individuals to achieve great with very little efforts. This not only improve productivity but also save time and cost. When it comes to the digital marketing the email marketing is one of the oldest, yet most successful medium. Businesses are heavily relying on emails for their communication and marketing needs. However, sending thousands of emails, managing responses and ensuring your email communication and marketing is achieving its goal is not as that easy. Even if you are a small business you should invest a lot of time and human resources to manage your day-to-day email communication and marketing needs. However, the email marketing automation is a key to all those problems, it not only greatly minimize the efforts and expenses of sending emails but it also greatly improve the results and help businesses achieve their goals. In this blog we have discussed what email marketing automation is and how businesses can leverage an email marketing system to gain great many benefits. If you want to learn more or if you want our help to design a customized email marketing automation tool for your business’s unique needs, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.