Email automation is a way to create emails that reach the right people with the right message at the right moment—without doing the work every time.
When you link your website analytics with your email marketing platform, you can target people based on behavior, preferences, and previous sales. Then you can personalize each customer’s experience and increase the relevance of your messaging.
The benefits of email automation
Research backs up what most marketers already know: Customers love personalization.
- 90% of consumers find personalized content very or somewhat appealing.
- 91% of consumers are more likely to patronize businesses that provide individualized recommendations and offers.
- A recent experiment revealed that when shoppers knew an ad was based on their activity on the site, their click-through rates increased by 11% and revenue from the product grew by 38%.
- In 2019, 72% of customers only respond to marketing messages that target their interests.
- The leading type of personalization experience that marketers use is email.
You can even create a series of automated emails to help grow your relationships with your customers—and your business.
Automation is changing the way that all kinds of teams do business. According to a 2017 survey of information workers, respondents said they believe it can improve employee productivity:
- 69% said automation could help reduce wasted time.
- 59% said that they could save at least 6 hours a week if the repetitive aspects of their job were automated.
- 72% said that they would use the time they saved to focus on higher-value work.
For email marketing teams, for example, this could mean less time spent on manually compiling email lists and scheduling messages. Instead, team members could use that time to focus on other important tasks, such as in-depth customer relationship building.
The bottom line: With automation, more gets done—and the added productivity is of higher value.
Improve your customer retention rate.
It’s much easier and more cost-effective to sell to an existing customer than to convert a new one, and with automation, you can stay in touch better than ever before. Schedule your messages so that your customers don’t go too long without hearing from you—and be sure the copy is relevant to maximize its impact.
An email that reads “Hey, we haven’t heard from you in a while. Pay us a visit!” is likely to end up in the trash. Compare that to this one:
“Dear Joe, we haven’t heard from you in a while, and we wanted to make sure that you heard about our latest offer. The printer you’ve been buying parts for came out with a new model, and it’s 20% off! Come check it out.”
That’s an example of a message that fills a need, which is more likely to bring back a customer.
Email: “Welcome!”
Even if your website is an e-commerce store, many of your first-time visitors won’t be ready to make a purchase. If you capture their interest with a “subscribe now” button, what should you do with an email once you have it?
Welcome emails have become like thank you notes after a job interview. There’s no rule that you have to send them, but people notice when you don’t:
- 74% of people expect to receive a welcome email when they subscribe to a mailing list.
- Welcome messages get 4 times more reads and 5 times more clicks than standard marketing emails.
- They generate as much as 320% more income per email than other promotional messages.
When you get a new subscriber, following up with a warm welcome can help turn new leads into customers without any extra effort.
Trigger: Cart abandonment
Email: “Forget something?”
It only takes 1 click to add an item to your cart, but following through takes more steps. About 70% of e-commerce shoppers abandon their carts for many reasons, including high shipping costs, having to register for an account, or concerns about the site’s security.
Abandoned cart emails can help you recover lost sales. Once you get to know your audience and write a clear, timely email, you can start recapturing the interest of your shoppers.
Trigger: New products or promotions
Email: “Something special for you!”
If you announce every new product release, upgrade, or promotion to every customer, your messages can start to lose their effectiveness.
Email automation helps you avoid this trap because it lets you announce products to particular customers based on their interests. In fact, if you include personalized recommendations in your email campaign, you can increase sales per email opening by an average of 150%.
Here at Create Build Optimize, we specialize in creating personalized email marketing automation to help build a better experience for your customer base and help retain customers.
