You have to send a newsletter to 1,000 subscribers in your company. What do you do? Open your email client (e.g., Microsoft Outlook) and put all these addresses in the BCC box and hit “send”? Or maybe you want to do “the right thing” and send every single email one by one? Both answers are wrong. What you should do instead is opt for email marketing automation.
33% of marketers send weekly emails, and 26% send emails multiple times per month. You probably send hundreds of them every month, too. The majority of them can be automated. In this blog post, we want to show you what email marketing automation is all about and how it can streamline your everyday work.
What is email marketing automation?
Shortly put, it’s a strategy aimed at designing, sending, and measuring the efficiency of the emails that you sent in an automated (partly or fully) manner. In order to benefit from email automation, you need a platform just like iPresso. There are three crucial components of such platforms.
EMAIL LIST
For starters, you need a list of email addresses. You can gather them in many different ways, e.g., through ads, landing pages, social media posts, and, of course, orders (if you run an e-commerce business). We will probably talk more about gathering emails (in a GDPR-compliant way!) for your email marketing base in one of our future blog posts.
EMAIL TEMPLATES AND AN EDITOR
Secondly, you need a tool that will streamline designing emails you want to send through the platform. Usually, it’s a drag-and-drop editor that comes with many ready-made templates you can adjust according to your needs. That’s what we do here at iPresso. Take a look at our editor:
As you can see, you don’t need any coding skills to create responsive (meaning they look good both on a desktop device and on a mobile device) and well-designed emails. Some of the elements that you can include in your emails comprise:
- Content boxes
- Pictures and videos
- Buttons, tables, and links
In many different configurations, colors, and sizes – almost everything is customizable.
ANALYTICS FEATURES
One of the advantages email marketing platforms have over Outlook or Thunderbird is that they come with analytics features that enable you to see and measure the effectiveness of your emails. Every email you send out is monitored (we provide data on open rates, CTRs, and conversion rates; read more about marketing metrics).
What emails can you automate?
Obviously, not all of them; sometimes you have to craft every word and send it yourself, e.g., when corresponding with an important client or your boss. However, every repetitive email that you send to at least several dozen people CAN be automated, and that applies, i.a., to:
- Newsletters
- Promotional emails
- Welcome messages
- Onboarding messages
- Thank-you notes
- Order summaries
- Reminders
The list is quite long, isn’t it? But what when you want to send many emails, but not identical, e.g., to different people or customer groups? That’s where two extremely effective marketing techniques step into the game – segmentation and personalization.
Segmentation and personalization: Two pillars of email marketing automation
Three of the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are:
- Subscriber segmentation
- Message personalization
- And email automation
If you can combine three of them into one email marketing strategy, that’s a huge step forward!
SEGMENTATION
Segmentation is a technique based on dividing your email subscribers into different groups based on their behaviors and interests. After all, sending emails about new shoes for small children to a teenager who’s been buying mostly t-shirts and hoodies is pointless. With segmentation, you can avoid that scenario and send specific emails to people who should be interested in them.
PERSONALIZATION
And personalization is the second way to make your emails more effective. Again, it’s all about reaching the right people with the right message. Personalization starts with addressing the recipient by their name (instead of impersonal “good morning” or – even worse – “dear sir/madam”), but it goes further. With good tracking and analytics platform, you can adjust emails to every single recipient, including their interests, past purchases, sent queries, etc. Here’s a good example of a truly personalized email:
Hey, Peter!
How’s your search for a new laptop going? Have you already found the right model? If not, you might want to check these two options:
Option 1
Option 2
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Our customer service team is ready to assist you!
Regards
Your favorite laptop store
Is that an email you would delete without reading? Probably not. Why? Because it’s personalized and to the point, it refers to what matters to you! Peter had clearly been looking for a laptop, but he probably left the store without buying anything. Such a short, friendly email can work miracles. That’s the secret behind personalization. That’s how our recommendation frames work.
How to make your email marketing effective
Even with segmentation, personalization, and automation, you still need to tick some boxes to make sure your emails are effective (meaning they produce many actions and conversions). Here’s what you ought to consider:
- Write about what matters to your customers/users. Sure, you want to promote your products and services, but do it in a way that works with what your customers need or want. Don’t do aggressive sales; concentrate on the product’s benefits and making your customers’ lives easier.
- Analyze, analyze, analyze. Use the analytics feature to draw conclusions about your email marketing strategy. The aforementioned source indicates that over 60% of businesses reduce the frequency of emails based on the levels of engagement. With some research and thorough analysis of data, you can find out when you should send emails and how often.
- Test different options. Sometimes one email “clicks” and the other doesn’t. There’s no knowing which is which in advance. You have to test different options to see which one works best. That’s what A/B testing is all about, and that’s also a part of our email marketing automation offer.
- Don’t flood your subscribers. Too many emails mean just one thing – a spammer label. Even if these emails are well-thought-out and personalized, you don’t want to be too pushy. People have a life outside your company, keep that in mind, and don’t flood them with marketing communication.
- Ask for feedback. People like to know they are heard. From time to time, e.g., in a newsletter, you can send a link to a short survey where your customers would have the opportunity to share what they like/dislike about your communication.
- Add incentives. Everyone likes to get something for free, right? A small discount, a free delivery, an additional free feature, a free ebook, or a report – all of that can get your subscribers more engaged. Of course, you have to find a balance; you don’t want to give away things endlessly, but keep that in mind.
And, of course, apply other suggestions you read about in this article. Personalization and segmentation are essential.
Give our email marketing platform a try!
At iPresso, we offer a free trial for everyone who wants to see how marketing automation can make your life easier. Apply today, and if you have additional questions – we’re happy to help!
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