How Automation Dictates the Success of Your Email Marketing Strategies? [INFOGRAPHIC]
When you say email marketing, what you really mean? It is nothing but a strategy to drive conversions. You will subtly use the right messages and context to push your customers forward in the sales funnel, with an ultimate aim to persuade them to complete the purchase.
For this, you need to devise an email strategy for every stage of buying that the subscriber would be in, as that will help them with just the content they want to read at the moment.
However, what makes life difficult for the email marketer is understanding the customer’s buying journey and manually sending appropriate emails at the right time with the right intent.
To make things easier, you need to use email automation, which is nothing but a marketing tool that lets you send automated emails based on certain triggers. It helps in gauging the current mood of the customer and send in emails that connect with them immediately.
How does automation work? Well, the first thing that triggers an automated email is the behavior of the subscriber. There is a goal that is written in the automation algorithm. Once this is ticked off, then the automated email is sent to the particular customer. It is as simple as that.
However, functional automation requires you to understand the customer’s journey, but, that’s not enough. You need to have a licensed and capable ESP, along with a defined workflow and a segmented list.
Of course, it does not end there. You also need to understand the expectations of the customer at every stage and monitor the email KPIs to know if you have a successful campaign or not.
Let’s take you through some of the automated email campaigns that you can invest in for your business’ success.
• Welcome Emails: They are the primary automated email type. Here, you are not only welcoming the subscriber, but you are also responsible for taking them around your business and setting the stage for expectations. The goal of the email is to settle the new subscriber down and help them adjust to your business. How does this help? The prospect will know your business in detail and might show real interest in your products/services. You can expect a certain level of engagement at this stage.
• Lead Nurturing Emails: The lead nurturing emails enforce what the welcome emails initiated- an understanding of the business and an awareness among the users about the services/products. These emails help the users take the decision regarding your product/service, as you will offer them some important advice at this stage.
• Sales Emails: This is the stage when your subscriber is most likely to convert. Promotional or sales-based emails will tempt them to make the purchase, as they have already floated from the nurturing to actual buying stage. If you have been building trust with the subscribers through your emails and have set the right step, you are likely to see conversions at this point.
Apart from this, you need to send emails at the post-purchase stage to get feedback from the customers. Amazon does this to understand how the product they received from the seller was, and whether the customer was satisfied or not.
Re-engagement emails work for those subscribers who have not opted-out of the email list yet, have not really been reading your emails or reacting to them for a while now.
Wrapping up
A good email marketing strategy combined with the powers of email automation should help you win over the subscribers and get good conversions. It is necessary to plan out the pace of the campaign and define the emails for each stage before sending them out.
For a detailed insight into email automation and its benefits look into the new infographic by EmailMonks: Email Automation in Different Buyer Stages.
Source: How to Plan Email Automation at Every Stage of the Buyers Journey
Kevin George
