Email automation is a simple yet powerful tool for marketers. You can nurture your audience with relevant content, generate sales, and meet your customers where they are on their customer journey — all with email automations that run while you sleep.
When compared to newer platforms, such as Facebook ads, text alerts, and retargeting campaigns, you may be saying to yourself, “Isn’t email…well, old?”
While email has been around for upwards of 40 years now, it’s still one of the best channels for lead generation, customer retention, and generating a high ROI.
So, why is email automation such an indispensable part of a successful marketing strategy?
Here’s a look at the benefits.
Using Personalization to Garner Interest & Boost Revenue
Imagine walking down a bustling city street and hearing, “Hey, you. Look at this!” Are they talking to you? Do you even care about what they want to show you? The same ideology applies to your email marketing campaigns. All too often, marketers blast every subscriber on their list with the same message.
However, the key to making an impact is using segmentation to personalize your emails based on certain characteristics your audience possesses – like interests, demographics, purchase behavior, and more. By divvying up your customer or prospect database into different groups, you can tailor your messaging to align with each segment’s interests.
Using personalization – like their first name, information relevant to their interests, or products they’ve bought – is instrumental in nurturing relationships, building rapport, and increasing conversions. According to Mailchimp, a popular marketing automation platform, marketers who used segmentation in their email campaigns saw 14.3% higher open rates, as well as 100.95% higher click-through rates.
Building Better Brand Awareness via Email Marketing
Email marketing is not only a cost-effective marketing medium, but it furnishes companies with the ability to boost brand visibility in a place consumers visit multiple times per day – their inbox.
Whether you’re speaking to a new subscriber or a long-standing customer, communicating your brand values, personality and expertise via email marketing is a valuable tool for increasing brand awareness and equity.
When setting up your automation sequences, always be sure to include your brand’s logo and other visual signifiers that define who you are as a brand. Being consistent with brand attributes (like your color palette and graphics) will help increase awareness, which in turn attracts customers to your products and services.
Think about it: if a consumer is making a choice between two brands with the same product – one they recognize and one they’ve never heard of – who do you think they’re going to choose? Hint: they’re going to choose the one they know.
Leveraging Transactional Emails to Generate More Sales
These messages are a vital piece of connecting with your audience based on where they are in the customer journey. They essentially allow you to continue the conversation, but in a streamlined and automated way.
Transactional emails are triggered whenever someone visits your website and takes a specific action. For example, may they download a piece of content, make a purchase, or subscribe to your newsletter. Recipients are shown to interact with transactional emails at a much greater rate than overly salesy or promotional emails.
This is where marketers tend to miss the boat.
Instead of crafting messages with basic “need-to-know” information, you can encourage recipients to take another step.
For example, when a new subscriber signs up, the corresponding email that deploys can include a discount code as a way to motivate the individual to make their first purchase.
Similarly, you can add a “Recommended Products” section to the bottom of a confirmation email to drive continuity and retain interest. Businesses that incorporate transactional emails into their marketing automation strategy have generated up to 6X more revenue. Now that’s a stat we simply can’t ignore.
Staying Aligned with the Customer Purchase Cycle
Timing is everything when it comes to being a savvy marketer. A huge benefit of marketing automation lies in the ability to craft and schedule emails that automatically deploy at just the right time.
For example, if your average customer orders a case of wine every three months, consider creating an email that reminds customers to stock up on their favorite palate-pleasing wines 2 weeks before the three-month mark arrives.
And just to clarify, there are other ways to leverage this tactic besides encouraging repeat-purchases. You could schedule messages that correspond with seasonal trends or promote products related to a customer’s previous purchases as well.
Ensuring Leads Stay Engaged With Your Business via Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns allow you to stay top-of-mind with leads by creating a series of automated emails sent regularly over a set period of time. This is the perfect way to keep in touch with people who are interested in your brand but may not be ready to take action or make a purchase at the current moment in time.
These types of emails should deliver value by addressing common customer pain points, answering FAQs, showcasing testimonials and demonstrating how your business helps solve the overarching challenges your target audience is looking to solve.
Persistence is proven to pay off, as drip campaigns have an 80% higher open rate, along with a 3X higher click-through rate compared to single-send campaigns.
One secret we often share with our clients is that interacting with potential customers and clients through email automation can be a game-changer.
That’s why we created our FREE 7-Week Wine Marketing Course.
In our 7-Week Course, you’ll learn branding, social media, marketing, SEO, and pay-per-click strategies to help you sell more wine!