What is Email Automation?
Email automation allows you to send the right emails at the right times, making communication with potential customers more effective. You have the ability to provide tailored experiences for customers based on the data about their purchases and behaviors. Automated emails may include order confirmations, shipping confirmations, abandoned cart notifications, welcome messages for new subscribers, upsell messages and more.
Dive in with us to learn more detailed reasons why you should start automating all your emails today.
1) They Are as The Title Says “Automated”
One of the absolute most important aspects of email automated workflows is quite simply that they are set on autopilot. Once your workflows are set up, whenever a view/user triggers the event, the sequence of actions in the email marketing workflow will begin.
You don’t need manual intervention, or a member of your team monitoring customer activity and manually sending emails 24/7 – it simply flows by itself.
Many email marketing systems even term their automated ‘flows’. As a business, no matter if you sell products or if you create content, you NEED to prioritize automated workflows.
- 33% of marketers who don’t utilize marketing automation plan to implement it in 2022. – HubSpot
- 75% of marketers state that they leverage at least one type of marketing automation tools. – Social Media Today
2) Nurture Your Leads with Value
Business is a relationship between the customer and vendor. Relationships are based on several factors – relevance and specificity being a massive aspect of building strong associations and connections.
Email workflows are designed to nurture your leads, specifically with content and offers that they want.
Many customers have an internal buying strategy, meaning that they do not necessarily want to be contacted by a salesperson almost immediately after they’ve downloaded your free PDF lead magnet. They want (and need) to be nurtured in the process.
Email automation allows you to do just that. By sending engaging, relevant and specific information that helps the contact learn more about your business and service, they become more receptive when they are approached by your team or offer.
3) Sales Team Benefits – Warmer Prospects
Reviewing statistics from email campaigns allows sales team members to see exactly what information a prospect has read, clicked, engaged with and so on. This means that the prospect is not ‘cold’ but ‘warm’ and the sales team has a greater understanding of the potential customers’ interests, aspirations, goals, and thought process. There’s a higher chance the lead will be interested in what your business has to offer.
Certain CRMs (customer relationship management) tools have integrated systems that trigger internal email notifications when a prospect takes particular actions (such as clicking on a link, filling in a form, or opening a certain email). This allows your sales team to take appropriate and relevant action.
- 75% of email revenue is generated from triggered personalized campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns. – DMA
- 76% of marketers that implement marketing automation see a positive ROI within a year, while 44% of them see a return within just six months. – Marketo
4) Relevance to The Email Recipient
When planning out your email workflow automations, you can start at the higher level and ensure everything is personalized and relevant to your prospect in each workflow campaign. Keep in mind, if your business has different categories, you WILL need to create multiple different workflows to the prospects.
We have all experienced the irritation of receiving multiple communications from a company that are clearly irrelevant, non-specific and an absolute turnoff trigger. Most of us just ignore the email or click SPAM at that stage – a very negative impact on your business marketing efforts, where future communications simply become lost.
Your email workflows will nurture more people if it’s relevant to what the recipient is interested in. This allows you to cut out the junk and unrelated content and instead focus on what attracts the prospect.
- Marketing automation users experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.
5) Increased Brand Awareness The Right Way with Email Automation
By sending out engaging content of value that is specific and relevant, the customer is already building a relationship with your brand and identity – all on auto pilot. Your pre-set campaigns have built your brand relevance and awareness without you having to lift a finger.
- The global marketing automation technology market is expected to grow to $25.1 billion by the end of 2023. – Statista
- By 2022, 80% of all advertising processes will be automated. – Adobe
6) Personalization is Key!
With most email automation workflow technology, you can get real personal. This means that the data gathered from your prospect’s digital footprint, you can target very specifically and personalize everything. Things such as name, location phone number and more can all be dynamically generated in your email responses to create the illusion that somebody on your team has hand crafted your email responses personally for the prospect.
This is vital.
Since humans like to buy off people, they’ll base that purchasing decision on their relationship with the people they interact with over a faceless entity any day. Getting personal in email automation adds a further strengthens that relationship.
Personalization has been shown to increase both open rates and click through rates as well as decrease in unsubscribes.
- Marketing automation tools improve productivity by approximately 20%. – Nucleus Research
- Triggered emails have higher open rates and click-through rates than routine newsletters
7) Carefully Planned Triggers and Responses drive Success!
If you plan your email automation workflows strategically, the content is dynamic and evergreen. Meaning a prospect could trigger a workflow today, tomorrow, next month or next year and the content is relevant and automated.
While some companies like to simply send the occasional email to their contact database, email workflows are carefully planned and have one key goal. It benefits your overall email marketing strategy because with each workflow you have the opportunity to plan out how they will work and ensure each email is relevant and has a purpose.
Most people and companies think that sending emails to a whole list is beneficial to them, but let us tell you, this is far from true. Did you know that most of your unsubscribes, non opens or even bounces come from at hawk email sends? Yes, because sending an email to your whole list that you have been building up over the lifespan of your company can be ruined very quickly with just a bunch of unnecessary and unrelated at hawk email sends!
- 63% of companies are outperforming competitors with help from marketing automation. – Lenskold Group
8) Minimize Human Error
Years ago, companies would use a person to email each prospect or attempt to manually create a process to contact customers. This introduces a lot of human error given the large volume of emails required to be sent.
With automated templates and workflows, you can revise, assess, update and improve your flows on the fly in one single location to ensure everything is optimized and always error free. Because at the end of the day, if you send out emails with errors, that will leave a bad taste on your prospect as well as just look bad for your business, and we don’t want that!
Email teams face a serious hurdle in achieving maximum productivity because of these reasons:
- Ad-hoc approval methods
- Last-minute changes
- Unclear requirements
- Inefficient testing methods
- Disorganized meetings about email
It is intriguing to know that around 48% of people had to halt their email during sending because of errors.
9) HUGE Time Savings
This is a big one! When everything is automated, it cuts out human involvement in the process which saves your company a ton of time. This includes time that your sales team can invest in more relevant and successful tasks such as contacting warmer prospects with more information about their prospects leading to a greater ROI.
- 53% of brands take 2 weeks or more to produce an email.
- 39% of teams review their automated messages every few months, while 37% review them once a year and 24% review only every two to three years.
10) Cost Saving
This almost goes without saying. With email marketing automation, you’re saving man hours which means your saving money. You don’t need a massive sales team making cold calls all day long with a low ROI. You don’t need additional admin teams ensuring emails are being regularly sent out. With automation, you can save your man hours for more relevant tasks and an opportunity to invest less in a greater return on time investment. Quite simply, email automated workflows are an investment to save you a lot of money and time that you can use for other tools and outlets.
- Abandoned cart emails have a 41% open rate (Barilliance, 2021)
- Abandoned cart emails have a 8.13% clickthrough rate (Barilliance, 2021)
- Abandoned cart emails convert at around 10% (Barilliance, 2021)
Ready to learn more about our email automation workflow strategy? Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and see what we can do to help your business thrive and succeed the way it was supposed to with the help of our content and email strategy team.
