How Automating Your Email Marketing Can Lead to Success

How Automating Your Email Marketing Can Lead to Success

Marketing a product or service can be time-consuming work, and marketing managers no doubt benefit from automating some of their messaging. This allows them to shift their focus to tasks that require heavier lifting, like producing content and engaging with customers face to face. These major facets of marketing will never be replaced by automation, but they can certainly be enhanced by it.

Email marketing is one specific area that can be easily automated, especially when it comes to generic follow-ups, as well as pre-sales messages. Some ways marketers can leverage automated messaging when emailing clients include:

• Following up on a sale with a new discount.
• Following up on a sale with education about a product.
• Introducing existing customers to new product releases.
• Wishing customers well on their birthday or other holidays

Now that we’ve established how automating email marketing can help your company prolong and improve the customer experience let’s dive into how you can optimize such automation.

Target a Specific Audience

Data indicates that segmenting email contacts results in 50 percent more click-throughs than using email blasts. What this means is that marketers select a target audience and create a list that ensures each automated email is sent to recipients who will actually be interested in what’s inside. Marketers can use factors like profession, interests, and location to determine which clients should be included on an email list — though they can also leverage more complex metrics to create groupings, like where leads originated from.

Get Personal

Making clients feel like you’re speaking to them directly has been proven more effective than sending emails that are obviously going to thousands of other accounts. One simple way of making the client feel like your message is personalized for them is by using an email marketing tool to automatically input their name in the subject line or at the beginning of the message. Mailchimp, Wishpond, and Salesforce are some of the most well-known tools for doing this.

Similarly, you’ll want to add to the personalized feel of the message by having the email come from a manager or company executive instead of from a generic company account. Signing off with that person’s name at the end makes it feel like a direct correspondence rather than one-sided automation.

Ask for What You Want

The surface-level goal of an automated email might be to enhance the customer experience, but converting that engagement to sales is what marketers hope to achieve from their efforts. And although addressing customers might be enough to get them to purchase your product or service, flat-out asking them to do so does actually work.

In business lingo, this is called a “call to action,” and it leverages action terms to get email recipients to follow up on the message. Some words or phrases you can use include:

• Buy
• Try
• Sign up
• Shop
• Discover
• Start

These are just a few ways to make automated email marketing work for your business — and if done successfully, they’ll help you land sales without repeating the same work over and over. Additionally, tracking the results of these email campaigns will help you determine if what you’re doing is working, or if you’ll need to strategize further to get results.