4 Tips for Building a Powerful Email Automation Series
Looking to build an effective email automation series? One that drives revenue growth by getting your prospects and customers the right email content at just the right time? Here are four keys to a successful automation series.
Although email is still one of the most effective channels for e-commerce retailers, it’s continually evolving. And today, automation marketing is having a huge impact on the way many marketers send emails. Unlike a single email that is sent to an entire email list, automated-email campaigns are set up to send a series of email messages to individual subscribers once they hit a trigger. For example, a trigger could be a customer reaching a post-purchase anniversary or a prospect downloading a white paper.
In a previous NewsLever feature, we talked about the many benefits of marketing automation and the types of automated emails you should be sending to your prospects and customers to increase leads and conversions. But what do you need to think about when actually building an automation series? The following are four important tips.
4 Tips for Automated-Email Series Success
- Relevancy rules. A major goal of an automated-email series is to create a one-to-one communication experience with your subscribers. And subscribers will open your emails mostly because they want and expect something of value, such as a discount or important product information. So, how do you ensure that you’re providing each subscriber with hyper-relevant email content at the right time in the sales cycle? Segmenting your list and personalizing your email content are two important ways to ensure that your automated-email series is relevant and will keep subscribers opening and engaging with your emails.
- Find the level of automation that works best for you. An automated-email series can get quite complicated, involving various segments, high levels of personalization, and numerous workflow streams. If your company has the time and skills to set up a sophisticated automated-email series, then do it! But as the saying goes, don’t try to boil the ocean. For example, you may find that sending a simple automated-email series to a segment of your email list that meets certain criteria might be all you need.
In addition, do the math to make sure you have the return on investment (ROI) that supports the level of marketing automation you’re planning to implement. Will the automated-email campaign increase the lifetime value of your customers? Does your list size support the investment? What is the average order value of your typical customers? Plug in your numbers to determine what makes sense in justifying the investment in marketing automation.Be sure to check out FulcrumTech’s ROI Goalsetter®—our free financial-modeling tool—that can help you uncover ROI opportunities and achieve your email-marketing goals. - Test and optimize to get the biggest bang for your buck. When it comes to building an automated-email series, half the battle is creating it and the other half involves testing and optimization to maximize your campaign ROI. Testing and optimization is the only way to ensure that your automated-email series is working effectively (and continues to work) for your specific target audience.
To get the most from your testing, be sure to go beyond subject lines, calls to action, and imagery. We’ve found that, in automation email series, testing cadence, offers, and incentives (e.g., white papers) has the biggest impact on improving the performance results and driving revenue.Also, keep in mind the importance of continual testing: Just because your automated-email series was relevant last year doesn’t necessarily mean it will continue to resonate with your target market this year. - Don’t just set it and forget it—document it. The first steps in building an automated-email series include creating your 1) customer journey map (all of the customer touchpoints on the way to conversion), and 2) campaign map (blueprint of the emails, timing, campaign goals, etc.). Unfortunately, companies often get into the habit of setting up an automated-email series and then forgetting it. Changes are made and new hires may get involved. Thus, we sometimes find a disconnect between the series of automated emails that some new clients think that they are sending and the emails that are actually being sent.
In addition to documenting and updating your automated-email campaign maps regularly, it’s also a good idea to sign up to receive your company’s automated campaigns to see exactly which emails your prospects and customers are receiving.
From nurturing new leads to inspiring your existing customers with information that encourages an additional product purchase, automated-email series help e-commerce companies get the most out of their email subscriber lists. Contact FulcrumTech today and we’ll help you develop and implement powerful automated-email campaigns that convert.
