Scaling your business is hard. It takes considerable effort. In the beginning, it means wearing different hats.
Why automate email marketing?
Automation improves time-consuming and repetitive business processes or tasks. Businesses are able to save more time and resources with process automation. This enables retail owners to work on other aspects of their business, such as improving email marketing strategy and reading up on special info on how to build and maintain a website.
How To Grow Your Small Business - Email Marketing Automation Tips Share on X
Email Marketing Automation
Automatic email marketing processes automate the task of sending out and marketing email to customers and potential consumers, according to the user-defined triggers or schedules. Email marketing automation applies a simple concept but has the capability to be impactful and advantageous to marketers and entrepreneurs.
There are 2 major approaches to email marketing automation:
- Trigger-based emails, and
- Drip feed content
Trigger-based emails are, as the name suggests, prompted by an event or customer or user behavior. Actions such as welcome or onboarding, abandoned carts, milestones or special occasion, rewards, bonuses, and other related events are some of the triggers for this type of automation. While drip feed content emails are messages that are regularly delivered to consumers and potential customers according to a defined timeframe. One of the best examples of this method is the regular reports sent to subscribers by online businesses or websites.
Highly Recommended Email Marketing Automation Tips
Expand and Curate an Email List
Grow your list
There is no email marketing without a customer base. The customer database, or email list, is the pool of individuals that you advertise and promote the products and services of your business. There are numerous ways to grow your list, most notable are:
- Subscription incentives upon initial visits.
- Bonuses or rewards for referrals made.
- Provide discounts or bonuses for subscription checkouts.
- Linkages and subscription options through social media platforms.
Curate and organize
To make the best use of email marketing automation and related tools, like free email services and email marketing software, maintaining a well-curated and organized email list is a great help. It is best to organize your customer base into sections that you can easily identify and use as the basis for personalizing email marketing content.
Provide Quality Information At-a-Glance
Knowing how to write emails is no longer enough. Developing and delivering quality and impactful content drives the success of any email marketing endeavor. Great content enhances the consumer experience of your business and products. Personalization is a trend that many online businesses are employing to encourage and improve their customer relations. Ensuring that content addresses customer needs and contains information that is tailored and relevant to their preferences and behavior goes a long way in strengthening consumer loyalty and enhancing their experience.
Recommended read: 3 Creative Digital Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Business
Make content short but sweet. Ensure that all important information is included and presented in a concise, readable, and digestible manner. It becomes easier for consumers to understand what the message of the marketing email and interested enough to go visit your website. Emails writing is no longer limited to just texts or professional emails. Enhance content with simple multimedia, like images, infographics, or short videos. Incorporate call-to-action messages into your content. Adding action-oriented themes to your email marketing content encourages recipients to jump to action.
Test and Analyze Performance
With all the planning and strategizing, it is most helpful if you were to start implementing as soon as possible. This enables you to see how well your strategy works early and provides you with ample time to make adjustments. Start small and expand as you improve your implementation. Even when you are fully implementing your strategy, continue testing. Testing enables you to see areas where you can improve.
Continuous testing of your email marketing strategy provides you an avenue to get feedback from your consumers, testers, and stakeholders. Use this feedback to adjust and modify your email marketing strategy. Take note of your performance against your pre-identified email marketing KPIs. Bounce Rate, Open Rate, Click-to-Open Rate, Click Rate, and Unsubscribe rate are some of the indicators to monitor when analyzing the performance of your strategy. Aside from standalone performance, measuring against set historical benchmarks and industry-specific numbers also provides a wider perspective on how well your marketing campaign performs.
Link with Social Media Activities
Having a social media presence adds to the online presence of your small business. Linking and leveraging the various social media platforms to encourage subscription and traffic to your business is highly encouraged. Providing updates on events and subscription reminders to followers reinforces communication with consumers and potential clients. Linkages also work both ways. Providing links or entry points to your social media platforms on your online outlet also encourages site visitors to view your profiles and enhance your social media presence.
Interacting with followers and consumers also encourages communication and improves the relationship. Highlighting interactions, reviews, and user-generated content in emails and social media posts show customers and followers that you value them and their input. This encourages further interaction and encourages more subscription to your business.
Enhance Consumer Experience
User-centric or personalized email marketing shows consumers that they are prioritized and that their needs are considered and addressed. A personalized call-to-action message is a good subject line for an introductory email. Email marketing content specific to the shopping behavior of the customer as follow up messages presents the marketing experience as something personalized just for the consumers.
Recommended read: How Social Media Support Email Marketing Campaigns?
Aside from personalized experiences, ensuring that the subscription process is easy and accessible to the visitor or customer also adds to the consumer experience. This applies to all possible outlets for your business – physical stores, online portals, or social media platforms. Subscription or any act should not be a burden of a task for consumers, but instead should be an act of fulfillment; when they click that checkout, subscribe, or “Visit Now!” button, they are fulfilling that interest or curiosity about the product, service, or business. Incentivizing subscription – giving rewards, bonuses, or discounts – upon customer visit or cart checkout adds positive reinforcement to the act of subscribing to your business.
Expand and Collaborate
You are not alone in this endeavor. There are numerous free email services that can help manage your email marketing automation. There are also companies providing email automation services in the market. There are advantages and disadvantages to employing any of these companies, but there is definitely a company for your needs. Some of the best email service companies providing email automation services are:
In the age of technology and interconnectivity, email marketing is one of the largest and widely used strategies in strengthening online consumer relationship and communication. The potential for higher gains going forward, and its capacity to adapt to changing technology is why marketing automation is the future of email marketing. Email marketing automation need not be a burden for your business. With the right strategy, execution mindset, and collaborative and adaptive team, email marketing automation is a great advantage to your business.
