Best Practices On Automating Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Reading Time: 5 minutesThis article was last updated on June 7, 2021
Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for your business today. As email marketing continues to become more and more popular, it continues to evolve.
Marketers are beginning to add to their email marketing strategy. In addition to newsletters and campaigns, companies are now beginning to set up automatic email campaigns that trigger based on a user’s actions.
What Is Email Automation?
Email automation is any marketing or transactional email that is sent, based on triggers or rules, that doesn’t require anyone to send the email. Rather than thinking of email automation as an addition to your email marketing strategy, consider it as a strategy that goes along with both your marketing and transactional emails.
These automatic emails are timely, personalized, and hyper-relevant to the reader. When automatic emails are implemented into your strategy, they are opened and clicked more frequently, and increase website traffic and revenue for your business.
To provide you with an example, imagine you’re Netflix and you want to send an email to a customer each time they sign up for an account. The email will come from Netflix, welcome the new customer, and show them how they can get started using their account.
Can you imagine if Netflix manually sent an email to each new customer? It would take an extraordinary amount of time. With email automation however, you can set up the email once and once people trigger the automation email (i.e., by signing up) the email will be sent to the customer without anyone taking the time to create and manually send the email.
Marketers are constantly searching for effective strategies that will allow them to work faster and smarter. By setting up an automated email program, your marketing team can free up a lot of its time while you continue to engage with your email list.
Needless to say, if you aren’t using email automation, you are missing out. If you are interested in using email automation, we are here to share the best practices on automation for your email marketing campaigns.
Segment Your Email List
Marketers must do everything they can to stay out of their subscribers’ spam folder. One of the best ways to do so is to remain relevant to your subscribers. To do this, you can segment your email list. By segmenting your list, you can send emails that are specific to their demographics, buying behaviors, and more. This means that every email you send is customized for each subscriber, so you remain relevant in their inbox.
Test Your Timing
The secret to being successful with email automation, or anything email marketing related, is to test, test again, and continue testing. Continuous testing with email marketing is important because there really is no single answer on when the best time to send an automated email is. Try sending emails early in the morning, and later in the day a few days later, and track the open rates. After collecting some data, you will notice that open rates are higher at different times. Whatever time you seem to have the highest open rates is the best time to send emails to your subscribers.
Use Text Emails
Email automation is all about being quick and delivering the information your subscribers need most. With that being said, many subscribers may be using an email program that does not let them see additional images. To remain quick and to the point, consider sticking to text emails rather than wasting time on adding in pictures your subscribers may not even see.
Allow Your Subscribers to Manage Their Preferences
Many people fear that allowing subscribers to manage their preferences will keep subscribers from seeing their emails, but this is not the case. Allowing subscribers to manage their preferences can actually work in your favor. By doing so, subscribers can segment themselves for you.
Select the Right Solution
Email automation can become tricky if you don’t have the right software in place from the start. Rather than being impressed and distracted by all of the features an email service provider provides, consider what you need before signing the deal. Make a list of the most important features and what is within your budget.
Filter Your List
If you believe having a large subscriber list is the key to success, you are not the only one. But the truth is, it’s not the total number of subscribers that counts, it’s the number of engaged subscribers that you have. As a result, you should be filtering out your email list as much as possible. It might not make sense to you to remove people from your list, but by doing so, you will have more accurate numbers for reporting so you can be even more successful with your email marketing automation.
Ask Your Subscribers What They Want
Are you wondering what the real trick to being successful with email automation is? Well here it is: to give your subscribers what they want. It might seem obvious, but several businesses don’t think to ask their subscribers what information they want to receive.
When you get a new subscriber, ask them in their confirmation email why they signed up for your brands email list? Most importantly, read each answer so you can accurately segment your new subscriber. By doing so, you will be able to personalize their experience and it will result in a long, strong, relationship with your audience.
Adding Your Personal Stamp – Bake Something Fresh
Each email service provider includes a selection of templates to choose from for your email creations, but your options do not have to end there. If you are searching for an original look that stands as a statement on its own and is perfectly in-sync with your specific branding, MailBakery is at your service. If you have a design that you are ready to bring to life, your first coding is free! Ready to see incredible results from your email marketing campaign? Let’s get baking!