What is Email Automation and how can it benefit my business?

This piece has been provided by Red Circle Digital.

Many of you have heard of email marketing automation and have some idea what its benefits are, however I would like to give you a brief outline on how simple email automation/triggered email sequences can significantly impact your business in a positive way.
Email automation is the most effective way to engage in email marketing because it enables you to send out multiple messages to your customers at designated times without the need for human intervention. It can however be a bit hit and miss if you don’t know your audience. With a bit of simple research you can find out when your audience is most likely to open an email, what day of the week, what time of day etc.. What email automation allows you to do is to adjust your email marketing approach to get the best results.
Business owners don’t necessarily have the time to send individual messages to their customers. Using marketing automation, you can save time by setting up triggered based campaigns or simple welcome emails when customers take specific actions on your website, like signing up to your newsletter. Let them know they’ve been added to the list and give them an idea of what to expect from future messages. You can take this one step further and add in a preference centre. Ask a simple question such as “How often would you like to hear from us”?
A welcome email is one of the most powerful messages, yet some business still seem to not be engaging it. Using a flexible API into your email platform, this process takes a matter of minutes.
While automation may sound complex, it actually allows business owners to develop closer relationships with their customers by maintaining effective communication and creates great brand awareness.
You may have different workflows you wish to automate, these email campaigns can be complex or simple. Most platforms provide ways to set up workflows that will deliver messages based on more intricate steps taken by recipients, the concept of marketing automation is pretty universal though on all email platforms.
Other triggers that are easily set up and prove great for customer engagement and keep your brand front of mind are birthday messages, or annual messages or some type of other anniversary which are a good way of keeping customer engaged.
Another one to consider is based on actual website activity, for instance if a customer makes a purchase or clicks on a link, follow them up with an automated email, such as “thanks for purchasing” or cross/upsell suggestions. These simple messages tend to be very effective, makes them feel appreciated.
On the other hand if they don’t go onto purchase or book, follow them up with a trigger known as an abandoned cart email. This is one of the most effective ways to drive customers back to your site. They have one of the greatest returns in the email automation arena.
You can even take this one step further once the action is completed on the website, set up a simple trigger, like would you like to participate in an online survey? Surveys allow you to gain important feedback about the shopping experience and helps customers feel valued.

A few things to consider:

  • Sending automated emails helps marketers repurpose over 60% more content than marketers who don’t use automation.
  • Triggered email messages average over 70% higher open rates than your usual marketing messages.
  • Automated emails get over 100% higher click rates than normal email messages.Relevancy and timing are 2 key ingredients for successful for email marketing campaigns. Automation is an important factor in getting to understand your audience on a more strategic level. Using triggers you can gather this information to target your audience in a much more dynamic way.This will undoubtedly provide key information that will in turn provide much better ROI on your email campaigns whilst running seamlessly in the background.
    In our humble opinion every business should be utilising some form of automation, even on a very basic level, simple and very effective and quite frankly a no brainer.