1973 Ltd

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Your complete guide to email marketing - Automation (5 of 6)

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Session 5 - See what benefits automation can offer you
Automation
Lesson 5
Welcome to session 5. In this part of our email marketing series we look at the benefits automation brings, offering advice to help you identify where you are now and where you would like to be in terms of adopting an automated approach.

Topics covered include:

Marketing automation
Marketing automation is a process that lets technology take over the time and resource intensive marketing tasks from internal teams, freeing up people to look closer at elements like strategy. Email service providers can now automate scheduled email sends, as well as social media posting. Moving towards marketing automation enables you to determine better ways to deploy content, and to optimise content (as well as timing), for the best results.

Most marketers are time poor, and lack the ability to create each email campaign and monitor and manually press send — especially as business grows. Marketing automation allows you to grow your relationships, customers, and brand engagement with little day-to-day effort.

Implement complex strategies
We all know that email marketing can create meaningful conversations and interactions with potential and current customers, with most companies sending a series of pre-built and written content at regular intervals — such as newsletters. Automation enables you to add elements of complexity to these messages, that you otherwise wouldn't have time to do. Personalisation drives customer loyalty, and sales, and treating your recipients as unique people with unique needs is always a smart marketing move. Automation allows you to send custom messages to different segments, timing these sends based on the recipient's past actions. But how does it work?
How does marketing automation work?
Automation is only possible with the correct data on your audience and send lists. Each digital interaction with your business creates and provides you with valuable information. These can range from subscribes, purchases, clicks on online adverts and engagement with social media posts.

Use your ESP or website analytics to gather a complete picture of your contact data lists, see where your audience is located geographically, their gender, their engagement levels, and turn these insights into actionable automation.

Consider what messages you want to send, and to which segment. Then you simply need to analyse your data to see what circumstances are best for a triggered event or send.

Ask yourself the following questions to get started:

• Can you identify, track and engage individual buyers online?
• Can you look at a list of customers and prioritize them based on fit and likelihood to buy?
• Are you filtering leads based on level of engagement and interest?
• Can you measure the revenue contribution of every single one of your marketing campaigns?
• Can you do all of these things without wanting to tear your hair out?

Marketing automation will enable you to do all this.
Detailed look at marketing automation in action
When Hansel and Gretel Sweet Co. approached us, their business had exploded. They had gone from a small sole-proprietorship business, to a multi-national organisation in just a few short years.

They had too few staff to perform all the elements necessary for highly effective email marketing. They knew they needed to automate and optimise their sends to free up the team, and knew their customer journey was not streamlined, and didn't know how best to react to this to improve sales and digital experience.

We recognised that whilst revenue and sales was good, Hansel and Gretel Sweet Co. had not fully focused on building relationships with their customers, and as such, their retention was poor. We suggested that Hansel and Gretel Sweet Co. use automation to build long lasting relationships with current and potential clients by building out the user journey.

Stage 1: The user journey
Using their existing metrics, we identified that Hansel and Gretel Sweet Co. was losing potential converts on their website through a low dwell time, and high bounce rate. We incorporated a subscriber pop-up form on their site on key pages, and built an email welcome track from this first action. The email series was automated, scheduled to send at regular intervals to keep Hansel and Gretel Sweet Co. at the forefront of these users' minds when it came time for them to make their candy-house purchases.
Stage 2: Checking out
We knew that Hansel and Gretel Sweet Co. had high value actions occurring regularly on their website, including many users putting products in their online shopping cart. We created a series of automated emails triggered by this action, sending a reminder email to the user, adding urgency to drive conversions into sales. As a final step in this triggered series, we sent engaging bread-crumb themed vouchers and promotional codes to the recipients that met certain criteria for loyalty or high value past spend.
Stage 3: Re-warming contacts
H&C Co. had a large email list, and many unengaged past purchasers. Some of these contacts had not engaged with the brand for a long time, but we felt they were still valuable to Hansel and Gretel Sweet Co. Using automation, we sent occasional reminder emails to these targets, reminding them about what great value H&C Co. offer, and sending them engaging and informative content to refresh their brand perception.
How do I implement email marketing automation?
Marketing automation software can vary from simple online tools, to large applications built to manage workflows and integrated campaigns. Whilst you can adopt some of the strategies involved with automation, you will require a platform of some description to best utilise these in order to free up your resources.

Consider what you need from your software, what features, integration or customisation you require — and at what price point.

Quick wins
How to improve your email automation
These examples of best practices should inform your marketing strategy, and enable you to make informed decisions about how to best utilise email automation.
1. Be specific — Although the world of automated marketing can seem daunting, it's essential that you start with clear objectives and goals. Set achievable goals based on your existing data.
2. Look at examples of automation done well
— It's likely you have already engaged with an automated email send, look at your inbox and see what you could easily replicate with automated and triggered emails.
3. Segment your audience — Automation works well when it's used against highly targeted data. But how you segment and target will depend entirely on your goals, and your audience.
4. Create steps — Identify your triggers for how you want to move your recipients forward and towards your overall goal. Create if/then statements — if someone interactions, then they receive?
5. Test, test, test! — Nothing is more off-putting than receiving an incorrect or irrelevant email from a company, before you hit go on your automated campaign, make sure your lists and information are completely robust.