Does your business utilize email marketing for brand promotion? If your answer is YES! You’re on the right path. Email marketing is one of the best marketing channels that continuously generate huge revenue.
It’s no surprise that email marketing is probably used by millions of companies of every size around the world. People who are unaware of email marketing might not understand why this channel is becoming popular in all industries. The key reasons for the email marketing popularity are low cost, delivering targeted content, generating high revenue, ease to use, reaching customers across the globe and more.
It doesn’t make any sense to write an individual email campaign for every individual customer. On the other hand, sending generic emails to all your subscribers can mark you as spam. Good news! You can stay away from these situations and generate huge revenue with “Automation”.
Yes, you’ve heard it right!
Email marketing automation is designed to send the targeted email campaigns at a given time period. Simply put, with automation, you can easily reach the target customer with the appropriate message at the perfect time. Sending relevant messages to the customers will have a bigger impact in generating better ROI.
Let’s discuss the best practices for email marketing automation.
Know your target audience
Don’t just create marketing campaigns without any proper plan. You need to always focus on your target audience while creating your email marketing campaign. In fact, the target audience is your utmost priority.
How can you create an effective email campaign? First, you need to have a clear understanding of your buyer persona. These can be a descriptive portion of your target audience. It includes information such as a customer’s pain point, motivation, interest and more.
Creating a buyer persona is easy when you have customer information with you. You can also get customer information using surveys, contact information, interviews, insights, analytics and more. Get a clear understanding of who your customers are then tailor the email campaign accordingly. This helps you to avoid sending generic emails.
Understand target customer’s journey
This is important! Customer’s expectation change from time to time. Make sure the automated email campaigns are reflected with the right message for the customers. Get started by creating an effective customer’s journey roadmap. How customers are interacting with your brand. Also, you can use automation tools to customize the upcoming steps according to how customers are being engaged.
Segmenting your mailing list
An effective email marketing automation highly relies on a well-segmented mailing list. Have a look at your customer data, according to the information, you can send personalized emails to the subscribers. If you’re unaware of segmentation, have a look below
- Demographics – Location, Gender, Age, Time, Company name, Designation
- Type of the subscriber – New customer, Existing customer, Free-trial user, Frequent customer and more
- Engagement – Active users, Inactive subscribers, interest levels, target openers, etc
- Recent activities – Where did the subscriber clicks on your website? What are the products on their wishlist?
Target with email automation
After a successful segmentation, it’s time to target the subscribers with email automation. Many marketers send one automated email to every subscriber. This is absolutely a wrong practice. Segment the customer based on the customer purchase behaviour. Later send the email according to the customer’s interest, demographics and other factors.
Let’s consider, there might be 1000 users on your mailing list. Among them, 300 female subscribers purchase beauty products regularly. 200 male subscribers purchase books only. The remaining 500 subscribers are interested in shoes. Now, you need to segment these customers according to their browsing history, recent activities, purchases and more. You need to effectively build an engaging automated email for every group of customers. Send email according to the customers’ preferences and choices for increasing sales.
Get the right data
Collecting the right information will actually help you in many ways. Automation is not all about running email campaigns on large base customers. Instead, you need to send the right message to the right people. For this, you should have the right information for the customers. Start collecting the customer’s information whenever possible (sign-up, contact form, survey, etc). You need to collect the audience’s insights whenever they reach you. This can be called behavioural information. What content customers are engaging with.
Send warm welcome email
Welcome emails are effective. As per analysis, 50% of customers open and read welcome emails. It means welcome emails are more effective when compared to generic newsletters.
The first impression does matter! Don’t forget to send warm welcome wishes to your subscribers. These emails will help for better engagement, save time, reduce spam issues, improve customer loyalty, etc. A welcome email can create hope in the customer’s mind that you do care about them. You can send a welcome email after registration or subscription. Also, inform your subscribers or new customers about the advantages of becoming a member.
At the initial stage, it might look like red tape over you. But, when you implement this correctly, the welcome email will support your business a lot. Customers will stick with you for a longer period.
Take care of existing customers
Who doesn’t want to be cared for or appreciated? Of Course everybody. Even the customers look for care and appreciation. you don’t need to do big things to win the customer’s heart.
Remember their name, it can be a tiny gesture that tells the customers your company is showing interest in them. Start inviting your regular customers to events. Also, you can provide exclusive discounts for existing customers. Request for feedback, this way you can get to know about your product quality and your service. Do these things and your loyal customers will definitely spread your brand products or services among their network.
Send mail to authorized recipients
The world is big! You might be collecting customer’s data from several resources. You cannot blindly trust every piece of information. There might be real or spam content. Therefore you need to have the proper information to email your customers. It includes email address, first name, last name, date-of-birth, qualification, working organization name and destination.
Whenever a user gets registered, you need to send a reCAPTCHA form to eliminate bots. Then, you can send a “Thanking Note” to the subscriber for choosing your brand. This process will help you to identify the verified subscribers,
Strengthen relationships
You can strengthen your relationship with customers using email marketing. Yes, you’ve heard it right. Popular e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Flipkart, Alibaba and other websites provide great offers to their customers. It includes bulk discounts, easy EMIs, easy returns, easy replacement and more. This helps their brands to build and strengthen relationships with their new and existing subscribers.
There are several ways to strengthen relationships using email marketing automation such as
- Build an accurate and automation segment to the latest content or message. This way, customers on your list will receive updated content immediately.
- Create the latest content whenever you launch a new product or service.
- Send an automated email seeking your customers to share their experience on their purchases.
Create mobile-friendly email
Did you know, more than 68% of people read email on mobile phones? Yes! Creating a mobile-friendly email is a must. When you’ve not created a mobile-friendly email for your customers, you’ll be missing something great. It’s important to make email campaigns mobile-friendly. While creating mobile-friendly emails,
- Watch the length of your subject line. It’s advised to write a subject line in-between 41 to 50 characters.
- Make your content short, scannable and concise. Customer’s don’t need to wait for a longer period to jump into action.
- Don’t display images. Always prefer text messages. Not every mobile phone can display visuals by default.
- Keep the call-to-action front or centre. This will ensure a high click rate.
- Test the email campaign around several devices.
A/B Testing
If you’re planning to stand unique in the crowd, you should always try new techniques for every email campaign. While introducing new changes for the campaigns, it’s important to perform A/B testing. You can test
- Call-to-action – Buy Now, Shop Now, Check Price
- Subject line – Product ABC on Discount, Offer on ABC Product
- Headline
- Visuals
- Layout
- Special offer (20% OFF, Enjoy Free Shipping)
- Closing text
Everything will have a great impact on your conversions. Let’s consider, call-to-action can affect the number of customers who are ready to buy the product or click and reach your website. The subject line will affect the open rate of your email. Test every small thing and analyze the results. There are testing tools available in the market, use them and get easy and quick results. Test often to get the best results.
Wrapping up
You’ve reached the end of the article. Automate welcome emails for your new customers. Take good care of your existing customers. Segment your customers into the form of groups based on the buyer’s persona. Now, create a personalized email for every individual group and set it in automation mode. Hope you got a clear picture of how to send an email marketing campaign. Implement it now! Use the above-mentioned best practices for your email marketing automation and improve your business.
