With email being a tool dated as old as the 1970s, some people may view email marketing as a thing of the past. This is so far from the truth!
Email marketing is still a strong way to build relationships with the people that are keeping your business alive! If you make sure that your emails are all about your customer, you’ll get the most value out of your email marketing campaign.
BUT realistically, manually sending emails to each of your subscribers isn’t sustainable long-term, especially if your business is growing. This is why email automation is often used to create an email marketing flow that does all the manual sending for you.
What is email automation?
Email automation is essentially what it sounds like! You’re able to set up an email campaign that you want to send to your subscribers and even adjust the parameters that trigger your email to be sent out.
For example, you would be able to set up a welcome email that would be triggered by a new subscriber or a new customer inputting their email address since manually sending a welcome email to every single new subscriber would be extremely time-consuming. Email automation can even be personalized based on data that you’ve collected about your different customers and the way they shop.
What are the benefits of email automation?
1. Increase in Revenue
Automated emails have the potential to lead to a high conversion rate. If you think about how much revenue is actually lost through abandoned carts, just recovering a fraction of that can significantly boost your sales.
2. Customer Engagement
If you’re setting up emails to be personalized to your different audiences, your customers will feel that your emails are relevant to them rather than just spam. These emails can also complement the usual newsletters that you send out to your subscribers already to help create consistent brand communication.
3. Time Efficiency
Setting up email automation may take some initial time investment, but after you initially set it up, it continually runs and sends emails to your customers.
What automated email flows should I use?
1. Welcome Flows
This has become the norm among many businesses and is widely implemented in e-commerce email automation. Whether or not they open the email, people typically expect an introductory email when signing up for something online.
Your welcome email could also be used as part of your strategy to build up your email list. For example, to incentivize a visitor on your website to subscribe to your email service, you could offer some kind of promotion or discount that can be accessed through the welcome email. Every email should have a purpose so we recommend having a call-to-action (CTA) implemented in each one that you send.
A welcome email is also useful since it can give your customer an idea of what to expect from you as it helps to set the overall tone of your company.
2. Product Recommendations
With all the data you’re able to collect on your different customers, it’s easy to create personalized emails with recommendations for products that they are more likely to be interested in.
Behavioral triggers can be set up to recommend products based on the different products a certain customer has already looked at or bought. An example of this would be recommending products that other users have frequently bought alongside the product that they’ve been browsing. The same idea works if there’s a group of customers who have been browsing items on sale on your website. When you have new products on sale, sending an email to let this group know could lead to more sales.
The goal is to stay relevant to your different audiences and email automation is a great way to instantly do exactly that.
3. Discount and Promotional Emails
Sometimes customers are stuck between really wanting to purchase a product and deciding they don’t need it. This is where discounts and promotions play a role in conversions.
Another behavioral trigger can be set up to send a discount email when a customer views a product on several occasions without making a purchase. The hope is that a limited-time discount would encourage the customer to finalize the sale and convert browse abandonment.
Having well-timed discount emails or even just a promotional birthday email can foster customer loyalty so they feel more inclined to open your emails in the future as well.
4. Abandoned Cart Emails
Sometimes, customers add a product to their cart and leave the site without completing the check-out process. The average rate of abandoned shopping carts is about 70% so this is quickly becoming a big issue many e-commerce businesses are trying to address.
Abandoned cart email automation flows remind your customer that they were interested in a certain product. The key here is to have a supportive tone and show them pictures of what they were so close to purchasing.
5. Order Confirmations
Everybody likes confirmation, especially when it involves your money. By sending a confirmation email to your customers, you’re developing that sense of trust with them because they know that their purchase went through without any transactional issues. Even giving them details about their product’s shipping status can garner their trust because it shows them how much communication and transparency mean to your business.
6. Customer Feedback
Genuine customer reviews influence how other future customers will see your company or your product. After your customer has received what they have purchased, sending a follow-up email asking them to provide feedback or a review can help convert potential customers who are just browsing through your website.
Any business that is expecting to grow should be looking into email automation. It might seem like a lot of information if this is your first time hearing of this, but it’s definitely worth the investment.