Landed upon a powerful guide to exploring and setting up email automations for your marketing email campaigns. Enjoy!
Introduction
Email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for marketing your business today, but it’s evolving.
While newsletters and one-off campaigns will always have their place in your email marketingstrategy, the smartest companies are starting to set up automatic email campaigns that trigger off of a user’s actions.
Why? Because these automatic emails are timely, personalized and hyper-relevant to the reader. As a result, they are opened and clicked more frequently and drive visits and revenue for your business.
Sound good? Then keep reading. In this guide, we’ll go deeper into exactly what automation is and show you 10 different types of automated email campaigns you can use in your own business to grow your revenue.
What is email automation?
As opposed to newsletters and one-off campaigns that you create and send to a whole list of people in one go, an automatic email campaign is set up once and then automatically sent to a particular individual when that person meets a certain trigger.
To give you an example, imagine you’re Facebook and you want to send an email to somebody when they signup for an account. This email will welcome them to Facebook and show them how to get started adding friends and uploading a profile picture in an attempt to get them to become a frequent user.
It would be a huge waste of your time to manually create and send an email campaign to every person when they sign up, so instead, you could set up an automated welcome email that gets sent whenever a new person joins your “Signups” list.
That’s the beauty of email automation, you can set up the email once and then as more people continue to meet the trigger you defined, the email will continue to be sent to them without you ever having to lift a finger. It essentially ‘automates’ your marketing for you.
Grow your business
Because email automation works on a basic trigger and action system (i.e., when a specific trigger happens, send this specific email or set of emails) you are really only limited in what you can do by your creativity and business needs.
To give you some ideas and help you get started, we’ve compiled this list of 10 automated emails you can start sending today that will help grow your business.
Welcome new subscribers
According to research, 96% of visitors to your website aren’t yet ready to buy. However, these people have clearly shown interest in what you have to offer and are perfect candidates to continue communicating with to try to get them to buy later on.
A great way to do this is to get them to subscribe to your email list. Subscribing to your list is a much smaller conversion action than handing over money to make a purchase, and therefore people are much more likely to do it.
Once they’ve subscribed, you can then use an automated email campaign to welcome them to your list and offer a special subscriber-only offer that compels them to buy.
This kind of automated welcome email can be set up in just a few minutes. You simply need to add an email subscribe box to your website that adds people to a list in your chosen email marketing tool and then set up an automated email to go out whenever someone joins that list.
If your eCommerce platform supports it, you can even generate a discount code and include it in the email. Not only does this provide a great incentive for people to purchase, but it allows you to track the effectiveness of the campaign and see the impact it has on sales.
Nurture your leads
According to research, 50% of leads generated by organizations are qualified but not yet ready to purchase.
The challenge with this is, how do you help move those leads along to purchase without spending too much time on them? And how do you make sure your business is top of mind when they are ready to purchase?
Using automation to set up a series of lead nurturing emails can be a great way to do this.
If you are using a CRM system like Salesforce or Highrise to manage your leads and sales, you can tag certain leads that need nurturing and then use a tool like Zapier to integrate those leads with your email marketing system.
From there, you can send a series of automated email messages over time that educates your audience on the benefits of your product and why they should use it.
Popular marketing blogger Patrick McKenzie recommends you start with a simple series of 6 emails that goes out over 30 days, and increases in “‘salesness”’ as time goes on.
The email flow he recommends is as follows:
- The problem email – possibilities of replacing their existing process with your product. This email should focus on educating readers on the problems associated with their current method and should barely mention your product.
- The benefit email – A look at the benefits of using a product like yours to achieve their goals. This email should focus on the benefits of using your category of product (I.e. using email marketing tools over mass-mailing from Gmail) and outline how doing so can help improve their lives.
- The transition email – Remember, every potential customer is currently using something else to do what your product could do for them, and the act of switching from that process to using your product is a barrier you need to overcome. This email should focus on outlining a simple and easy process for making the switch from their existing solution to using your product to solve their problem.
- The tools email – An overview of the tools available to achieve what your product achieves, almost like a quick buyer’s guide. This is the first time you introduce your product and outline why it’s superior to your competition. Include a call to action to purchase or sign up for your product for the first time in this email.
- The case study email – A case study on how one of your customers uses your product. Make sure to outline what problems it solves for them (tied to the problems outlined in the first email) and what benefits it brings them (tied to the benefits outlined in the second email). Include a testimonial from a customer and a call to action to signup for your free trial/free plan in this email.
- The resources email – The final email. Suggest some other eBooks, blogs, templates, kits, etc. for learning more about whatever it is your product does. You can also try including a discount code or special offer in this email as if you haven’t converted them from the previous emails a special offer could help tip them over the edge.
While this is just an example, you can see that the focus is on educating prospects rather than making the hard sale.
Only once they have been sufficiently educated on the problems of their existing approach and the benefits of replacing it with a product like yours do you introduce your product and make an offer, at which point they are much more likely to sign up or purchase.
This kind of automated email series, when sent to the leads your business generates through your website and other marketing channels, can be a very effective way to nurture potential customers through to purchase, and help grow your business.
Create an email course
Offering an email course (a number of lessons on a particular topic delivered via a series of emails) can be a highly effective way to capture subscribers and educate them on a chosen subject matter.
When executed correctly, it helps to build your email list while showcasing authority and expertise that encourages people to eventually purchase from you.
Campaign Monitor customer CoSchedule do this effectively with their 6 quick tips email course.
As you can see, the emails are well designed (making the content easily digestible) and each email contains a prominent call to action to get started using CoSchedule, helping to convert course subscribers into customers.
The result? CoSchedule has been able to add an extra 3,000 subscribers to their email list and convert countless readers into customers.
Setting up an automated email course like this is simple. All you need to do is add a form to your existing website or create a landing page to capture subscribers, then set up a basic sequence of emails to be sent out at different intervals whenever a new person subscribes to the list.
These emails can help to grow your business by showcasing your expertise and authority within your industry and building people’s desire to work with your company.
Tips for Effective Automated Email
Just like the regular campaigns and newsletters you send, automated emails need to be optimized for conversion in order to be effective.
Here are a few tips & resources to help you create remarkably high-converting automated email campaigns:
- Write great subject lines – Even though automated email campaigns are triggered off the recipients actions, they still need to have great subject lines to grab recipients attention and ensure they get opened. To help you write a great subject line, check out these 8 subject lines formulas or the 15 power words to use in subject lines.
- Structure your email for scanners – Research shows people don’t read email campaigns word for word like they do a book, instead, they scan the email looking for elements that pique their interest. So in order to get your message across you need to make sure your automated email campaign is structured for scanners. This post on the subject outlines exactly how to do it.
- Use compelling copy – It’s important in your automated emails to create desire towards the conversion action, and there is no better way to do this than by using compelling, benefit-focused copy. We regularly use copywriting formulas such as the PAS formula or the BAB formula to achieve this in our own email campaigns, and they are two resources worth checking out. Alternatively, if those formulas don’t quite fit the message of your email then use these 5 persuasion techniques to help you write email copy that converts.
- Use a call to action button – We ran some tests recently and found that including a call to action button (as opposed to just text links) increased our conversions by 28%. So when creating your automated email campaign, make sure to include a call to action button to increase your chances of people clicking through and taking your desired conversion action. It’s also important to optimize your call to action buttons, and this post provides a 3 part framework for creating the perfect CTA button.
- Measure your results – Most email marketing tools will give you comprehensive data on email-related metrics like opens, clicks, etc. Some will even show you a real-time world map of people engaging with your email. However, to truly measure and optimize the results of your automated email you need to go beyond these metrics and look at the fundamental numbers that matter to your business, things like visits, customers and revenue. Google Analytics is a powerful and free tool to use to do this, and we’ve made a free Google Analytics dashboard that you can use to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing at a glance. If you’re more of an advanced user, check out our 4 favorite Google Analytics reports for measuring email marketing.
Wrap up
As a marketer, you likely have more and more things competing for your limited time and resources.
However, of all the opportunities available to you to grow your business, email marketing still remains one of the most impactful, and setting up automated emails can help you drive results without having to spend time working on them over and over again.
So take some of the ideas for automated emails presented in this guide and apply them to your business. Tools like Campaign Monitor make it incredibly simple to set up automated email campaigns and you can have them driving revenue for your business for years to come.
Coming up…
We will be reviewing the next steps to creating a high powered email campaign while focusing on conversation. To get a head start, visit the link below!
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