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Email Automation – A Complete Guide for Newbies

Posted by Sajitha Banu on  September 30, 2021  in Email Marketing, Marketing


Managing email marketing campaigns is not as easy as it looks. Businesses need to put in a lot of effort to make it successful. And the power of email automation is extraordinary as it helps to send personalized emails to users. For creating relevant emails, this amazing strategy uses pre-set triggers based on customer’s actions.

Nowadays customers also prefer personalized content excluding loads of spam emails. Also, you must know that “automated emails are clicked 119% more than broadcast emails”.

Are you wondering how to get started with email automation and how it can drive sales? If yes, let’s take a closer look at our Complete Guide for Email Automation to strategize your emails. And how to choose an email automation software for growth.

What is email automation?

Automated emails can help businesses to send personalized emails to customers and subscribers based on predefined “triggers.” These types of emails are usually welcome messages or other information that might include order status, shipping details, or product review requests.

How Does Email Automation Work?

Email marketing automation is simple enough. It just requires you to set it up based on certain criteria. Once you have achieved the workflow, businesses can send automated emails seamlessly.

You don’t require additional efforts to make your marketing strategies successful. Here are a few examples of email automation for beginners:

  • Welcome or confirmation email once the email list is set up
  • Specific emails based on survey answers
  • Emails for subscribers when they revisit your website
  • Abandoned cart recovery emails to make shoppers complete a purchase

Benefits of Email Automation

This amazing strategy isn’t limited to high sales numbers and advertisements. Actually, there are more benefits of Email Automation for businesses which we will discuss here.

The advantages of email automation are so vast if you know the right strategies. Now you know the importance of email automation and how it helps businesses to get profits. Before this, you must understand how email automation is helpful for your customers.

1. Personalization Strikes Again

Personalization is one of the best advantages of email automation. The main thing is, your customers are more attracted to personalized emails than others.

You can easily personalize your emails by segmenting the customers based on individual traits. They cherish and come forward to interact with businesses that consider personalization first.

2. Time-Saving

Email automation can save the quality time of your marketing team. Yes, it also saves your customers time when used correctly. We know customers receive tons of emails all the time.

And most customers ignore emails that don’t offer any value or are relevant to them. In such cases, you can send relevant emails and target your customers to a great extent.

Your customers will appreciate the efforts and take action to associate with the business immediately.

3. Marketing for the Long-Term

By using email automation, you can earn customer relationships for the long term. Email automation can take your business beyond its current level. This strategy will help businesses to grow their profits and bring in more customers.

Are you still on the fence about how automated emails will help your customers? No matter how big your business gets, email marketing can earn customer’s trust. The fact is, it will improve your buying experience and prevent customers from having to find a new brand.

4. Improve Customer Retention Rate

Email automation will improve the customer retention rates for both the business and the customer. However, the business can get more profits by retaining existing customers. As a result, customers also get opportunities to build a relationship with credible businesses.

By providing a great shopping experience for customers, you can have real-time interactions with them. If you’re able to build trust with your customers then no one can stop you from success.

Email Automation Step-by-Step Guide For New Age business

Effective email automation starts with planning and selecting the best email marketing software. You also need to understand the key metrics to focus on. By setting up your email automation clearly, you can get actionable results and save time.

Step 1: Choose your email automation service provider

Once you start looking for service providers, you’ll come across dozens of companies. Everyone claims to be the”best” email marketing service provider. Also, most companies offer the same type of features and services.

Hence, you need careful research to discover the best company for you. To help you find the right fit, we have some suggested options below.

If you’re an emerging business owner or a newbie, you don’t need an enterprise software solution. This type of solution will cost hundreds of dollars as it offers multiple features and often you may not require all of them, at least in the beginning.

Instead, you can choose a company that helps to get started with a minimum budget and scale up your business.

Step 2: Plan your email strategy

You can begin your marketing with a simple email strategy. You don’t need to use a single email template to send out to customers at a time. Instead, you can try one or two types of emails and focus on more options gradually.

To formulate an email strategy is not possible in the early stages, you have to keep testing. Once you get familiar with triggers, focus on more suitable options.

The standard message that businesses can send is a welcome email. Once your customer sets up his/her account, you can include a coupon/discount in the email. This strategy will boost your sales and generate more follow-ups.

Step 3: Look out for your workflow

Quality and consistency are essential for any type of marketing strategy. With this, you can establish and maintain the customer’s trust. Follow up your marketing strategies right from creating an email, to its design and layouts.

Also, you need to follow up on every element in your strategy. You’re the one responsible for managing all your tasks.

Make use of Gantt charts, which you can create with project management software. You can build a visual representation of your workflow using it. This helps to manage your production timeline by analyzing the type of email, and the person responsible for each task.

Step 4: Build your email segmentation lists

By segmenting customers and markets, you maximize the return from email lists massively. You don’t have to give much attention to direct emails as they’re hardly relevant.

List segmentation enables businesses to personalize emails based on customers’ behaviors, interests, and demographics.

Segmented emails are the opposite of welcome emails. They are sent to customers who have purchased more. According to research, customers are more likely to make successive purchases from brands.

Step 5: Analyze the metrics clearly

Email marketing automation helps beginners to collect a variety of information from recipients. For this, you need to identify how they interact first. Analyze important metrics including open rates, bounce rates, CTA, and forward/share rates.

A/B testing allows businesses to test two samples having content with a common theme to find the better performer. For example, create two different subject lines for the same email content and see which has a higher open rate. By doing this, you can determine the best subject lines for future emails.

Different types of automated emails

As we discussed earlier, choosing your email marketing service is essential. Once you are done with this step, start using the automation features. Here are the top 7 types of automated emails that help businesses to increase revenue.

  1. Welcome emails

The Welcome Email is one of the most common types of automated email. You can thank and greet your new subscriber using this strategy. You can create single emails or a series of welcome emails to interact with them.

Here’s how Airbnb uses welcome emails to greet new subscribers:

welcome emails Airbnb
  1. Thank you emails

Every time a customer completes his/her purchase, you can send an automated thank you email. A simple ‘thank you’ email can help businesses to establish long-term relationships with customers.

Here’s a simple payment ‘Thank You’ email by Wistia:

Thank You Email
  1. Online course emails

One of the best strategies to entice users into enrolling in your courses is by sending emails. Email automation breaks the process simply as it reaches multiple users. Also, you can send it to only relevant users which is an added advantage.

Here’s how Mailchimp promotes its Email marketing Course:

Online course emails
  1. Re-engagement emails

Re-engagement emails allow businesses to interact with the target audience or inactive contacts. Analyze your workflow to find the time period since the customer last visited your site. And you can offer coupons or discounts to re-engage customers again in your brand.

Here’s an example from Grammarly that sends emails to inactive users with ‘The Wrinkle in Time Badge’.

Re-engagement emails
  1. Upsell emails

If you have a membership scheme in your business or customers who make regular purchases, then use automated upsell emails. You can include special offers or promotions in your email list.

Pro Tip: If you’re running an online store, these email marketing strategies can help you to upscale your business!

Here’s an example from Carbonite that offers free renewal coupons of two months for existing members:

Upsell emails
  1. Abandoned shopping cart emails

If you own an eCommerce store, automated emails can trigger your customers to complete purchases. Send an abandoned shopping cart email when a customer adds an item and disappears without buying.

Tips for an eCommerce owner: You can use the abandoned cart recovery plugin to automate your emails and recover the shopping cart.

As per reports, “69% of customers abandon their carts without checking out”. You can also remind customers to complete purchases with attractive incentives.

Here’s how to design a successful abandon cart email:

Abandoned shopping cart emails

Don’t limit yourself to just one email subject. For example, you can schedule a series of emails and send them to customers like this:

Email 1: send 24 hours later.
Email 2: send 48 hours later.
Email 3: send 72 hours later.

  1. Subscription renewal emails

No business wants to lose its potential customers, then why are you losing it? Email automation is one of the best strategies to engage your loyal customers. You can remind customers by sending renewal emails of accounts or subscriptions.

Here’s an example from GoDaddy that reminds customers about expiry:

Subscription renewal emails

Top-Notch Email Management Software

Now that you know all the importance of automated email marketing. It’s time to get your email automation software to take your business further. But you need to understand your business goals to get started.

Optinly is a great solution to manage your business hassle-free. You can integrate this software to maintain all your user data.

Another important factor in response handling depends on the size of your business. As every brand needs a solution to scale up its campaigns effortlessly. Moreover, you can send automated emails like birthday and anniversary messages to engage users.

Optinly is equipped with extraordinary automated messaging solutions. You can send emails via other channels like popular social media networks or even text messages. This helps businesses to manage digital marketing campaigns and fuel their growth.

Schedule a free demo to know more about its email automation features in detail.

Summing up

Smart businesses should entice customers with the best email marketing automation strategies. Take advantage of automation emails, save your time, and increase customer engagement. Remember, your marketing automation statistics are equally important for businesses.

Make sure your email marketing strategy includes the options discussed in our Email Automation Guide. You can test out all the personalized messages to engage your prospective customers.

Still unsure how to strategize your automated emails? Reach out to us, we’ll help your brand grow by actualizing its full potential!


Author Bio
Sajitha Banu 
Sajitha Banu
Sajitha is a creative writer and blogger who loves to express a myriad of topics with a never say-no-attitude. She is ready for professional challenges and gives the best to any project entrusted to her. She hopes to make an impact through her writing and build a career out of passion.

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