Why Email Automation is a goldmine for your Marketing

While the traditional sales heavy newsletter might be a fleeting concept for most businesses with decreasing open rates and increasing unsubscribes, email automation is an untapped goldmine for many businesses, blind to the benefits of structure, prepared and designed flows.

So while the Email Marketing that existed in the 90’s may belong in a museum, Email Automation does not, so let’s look at the reasons why.

What automation does for your Marketing

Email Automation has a range of benefits to your business. We’re going to look at some of my personal favourites today and the ones we see delivering the most value for growing businesses.

• Automating the process of sending, enrolling and developing email campaigns frees up a ton of time
• It allows you to set enrollment criteria that automatically enrols prospects into your sequences when they reach a certain threshold
• It allows you to split, differentiate and segment your audiences based on how they engage with your emails and other content
• It qualifies your audience, without you having to even touch it. When designed properly, it feeds out qualified leads at the bottom with little manual input

Email Automation not only gives you time to going back to what you do, but it is brilliant for segmenting your audiences and sending them relevant information. A lot of the time, the reason for failing email campaigns is you’re sending generic and unengaging content to audiences who aren’t interested.

Having unique criteria for enrollment and unique criteria for branching means your audience will relate to your emails and content because it’s designed for them. With the branching included, your audiences can even follow different paths based on actions, making the content even more hyper-relevant. This is such a simple and effective way to qualify your audience, and also make them feel like you truly are speaking to them.

Where can I run an automation?

Automation software has developed in recent years and many are offered now, but we’ve decided to look at the easiest to use and most comprehensive, so you don’t end up locked into an awful contract for a software that only holds you back.

Our personal favourite (and for good reason) has to be Hubspot.

Hubspot offers one of the most effective and well-designed automation tools in the world. Not only can you set up beautiful email automation, because of it’s comprehensive digital marketing and sales tools, you can set automation based off engagements with any of these tools, meaning if someone signs up for a demo or downloads a guide you’ve written, you can have this as an enrollment into an automation. This comprehensive approach means your email marketing gets seamlessly integrated with all your other marketing.

Another popular option and well-known platform is Mailchimp.

Mailchimp has grown from what started as a place to write and send emails, to a tool that offers automation and even recently, landing pages. Its popularity stems from it’s beautiful UX and templates, making any email easy to send. Mailchimp doesn’t offer the comprehensive approach of Hubspot, but it is cheaper, making it an appealing option for smaller businesses.

And finally, an up and coming option on the market is Drip.

Drip is designed as it says, to help develop drip feeding, streamlined email automation, that are super simple to set up. It is very effective for its size and easy to use with drag and drop features. While it doesn’t have the reputation of Mailchimp or the comprehensiveness of Hubspot, it’s a safe option with a lot of upsides and is likely to keep developing.

The results of email automation

To show you just how effective Email Automation can be, let’s look at a couple of automation we’ve set up for clients.

Firstly, one of our clients was offering a 2 week trial period for new customers, but they needed their new prospects to stick around and feel like they were getting value for money. So we set up a ‘Welcome Series’ automation for them with timed delays so emails would be spread across the trial period:

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And here’s another one we just set up for a client, following the download of a piece of content they’d designed, qualifying leads for a sales consultation. While this has just started, it’s a great example of what branching can look like:

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If you haven’t realised by now, we’re big fans of email automation. The possibilities really are endless, and it brings email marketing back to relevance. If you want some insight into your automation or some ideas of where to begin, feel free to reach out!

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