Email marketing has consistently proven its value, but automation can take your efforts to another level.
In general, email marketing is a type of marketing that shares details about your business, products, services, discounts and other information with your customers and potential customers through emails.
See these 48 statistics that show every dollar spent on email marketing is well spent.
Let’s dive into what email automation actually is, why it matters and 14 examples that provide inspiration as you get started.
What is email automation?
Email automation is a series of emails you automatically send to your prospects or customers. Using a tool, such as DailyStory, you can schedule emails to send based on your audience’s interactions with your business.
Unlike email newsletters and one-off campaigns, email automation allows you to create a campaign one time and then automatically reach individuals when certain triggers are hit. That means emails will continue to send long after you set up that automated campaign without you lifting another finger.
An example would be signing up for an account (whether it’s Twitter, Netflix or anything else) and then immediately receiving a confirmation welcome email. Of course, when done right, that automated email is encouraging you to act or engage in some additional way. In this case, it could be a request to complete your profile.
Why does it matter?
Email automation enables you to both save time and be more effective in the timing and point of your messages.
Just set up a campaign initially with automated triggers included. That’s it. Then, your brand is meeting your customers and potential customers wherever they are in their purchasing journey with your business. It’s about scalability within your own business as you continue to grow.
This leads to a greater return on investment (ROI) for you efforts.
With about 64 percent of businesses using email automation, it truly is the most popular form of marketing automation currently.
And while businesses are often focusing their marketing efforts on getting new customers, email automation can do the work on nurturing and engaging with your existing ones.
This is important because it costs five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep your existing ones.
Dive deeper into why email automation matters to your marketing.
Examples of email automation
There are almost limitless ways to engage with your customers and potential customers through automated emails, depending on your goals and the nature of your business. These 14 examples can help inspire you to get started:
- Welcome new customers (or subscribers)
- New customer onboarding
- Abandoned shopping cart reminder
- Gather feedback on your products or services
- Inform customers of upcoming expirations (or renewals)
- Birthday messages
- Anniversary messages
- Appointment reminders
- Milestone messages, such as the 100th visit for example
- Nurture your leads (see more about email drip campaigns)
- Promote new content, such as blogs or videos
- Offer an email course
- Event or webinar reminders
- Replies to customer complaints that explain your complaint process and ensure you’re working on fixing the issue
In conclusion
The key to a successful email automation strategy is not only the marketing platform you’re using but also the depth and quality of your data.
The triggers that can send off the right email at the right time to the right person are all based on the integration of your systems and the type of data you have on each consumer.
In other words, the better you know a customer or lead, the more uniquely you can design an email automation campaign around that individual to better engage with him or her.
DailyStory can help with email marketing automation (as well as in other types of digital marketing). And our platform offers even more than automation capabilities. Schedule your free demo with us today.
Also, check out these seven opportunities for social media automation that you might not have thought of yet.