You added email to your app, but how can you optimize user engagement? The answer is email marketing and automation. This allows you to send triggered emails based on user behaviors or schedules, elevating your email program with minimal extra work. Let’s explore email automation – what it is, why it is important, and how to implement it effectively.
What’s Email Marketing Automation?
Email marketing and automation is basically setting up emails to be sent automatically without you having to send them manually each time. However, it’s important to understand the difference between automated emails and transactional (triggered) emails.
Transactional emails are sent automatically in response to a specific action taken by the user, like making a purchase. These are triggered by the user’s behavior.
Automated emails, on the other hand, are not triggered by the user. Instead, they are set up to go out automatically based on predefined criteria, such as being sent at a certain time or date. These automated messages can be part of a marketing strategy to engage with customers. Examples include welcome emails for new subscribers, email newsletters, monthly surveys, birthday emails, and payment reminders.
Why Is Email Marketing and Automation Important?
Email automation makes your workload lighter, lets you message customers in positive ways, saves money, and helps promote your business – all by having emails go out automatically when you want them to.
Streamline Your Workflow
Email marketing and automation help make your email processes more efficient and consistent. Instead of manually creating and sending individual emails to each customer, you can set up automated emails to go out to everyone. This saves you substantial time that can be reinvested into other aspects of your email marketing efforts and customer communications.
Give Customers a Better Experience
The time you save by automating emails allows you to create emails that are more helpful and enjoyable for your customers. While some automated emails are just reminders for payments, others can be welcoming messages, special offers, or friendly check-ins that make customers feel good.
Promote Product Awareness
Automating emails lets you control when and how often you email customers so they don’t forget about you, but you also don’t bother them too much. You can schedule emails to go out at just the right times to keep your products/services on customers’ minds without overdoing them.
Optimize Costs
Creating emails from design to writing to coding takes time and money. Email automation helps you save costs by reusing existing email templates. Instead of building new emails each time, you can populate the templates and automatically send various emails whenever you need without monitoring every step.
Better Target Your Audience
Email marketing and automation allow you to segment your email list based on customer behaviors, traits, and engagement levels. This lets you then automatically send tailored emails to each specific segment based on their unique characteristics.
Reduce Errors
Manually sending individual emails or copy-pasting templates risks errors. Automation takes the guesswork out of sending. It maps each customer’s information into the right template sections and sends emails out correctly.
Enable Detailed Reporting
Email automation services provide in-depth data and analytics on your email performance. You can see which emails work best, track delivery rates, and stay on top of all your important email marketing metrics.
How to Make Email Automation more Effective
Pay Attention to How People Respond
Each automated email gives you insights into your customers’ behaviors and interests. When you send automated emails, closely monitor who opens them, clicks on links, etc. The data you collect about how customers engage (or don’t engage) with your emails can guide your next steps. If people are ignoring your discount offers or product recommendations, that signals you may need to adjust your approach and content to better resonate with them.
The key is to treat every automated email as a way to gather valuable feedback through customer actions. Then, use those insights to continuously improve and refine how you communicate with different segments of your audience through future automated emails.
Offer Discounts Strategically
High shipping costs are a major reason shoppers abandon their online carts before purchasing. While you may not be able to remove shipping fees entirely or drastically cut prices, you can strategically send automated discount codes or coupons to give those hesitant shoppers an extra incentive to complete their orders.
However, be judicious about offering too many discounts. If customers get used to receiving frequent discounts, they’ll start to expect them and may be less likely to make a purchase without a promo code. The discounts can work to boost sales, but overusing them diminishes their motivational impact.
Nurture Prospects with Automated Email Sequences
Many potential customers need multiple touchpoints before they’re ready to make a purchase. Drip email campaigns provide a steady flow of relevant information over time to educate prospects and build trust in your brand.
The content dripped out through these campaigns, like product details, use cases, or industry insights, must be valuable and engaging. Email marketing and automation allow you to set up these drip sequences to only go to leads and prospects who have already shown interest in their behaviors.
Use Atom8 App
The Atom8 BigCommerce automation makes email automation super easy. It can automatically email customers who haven’t ordered in a while to re-engage them. You can schedule your blog posts and product updates to publish automatically. During sales, Atom8 can apply discounts to products and switch back to regular pricing after the sale ends.
The app even updates banner ads across your channels for a seamless promotional campaign. Atom8 also connects to popular email marketing tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp. With this powerful tool from Grit Global, powerful automation runs behind-the-scenes so you can effortlessly email customers, share content, run promotions, and sync your marketing – all without manual work.
To Sum Up,
Email marketing automation is a powerful tool that can significantly boost your business’s efficiency, customer experience, and brand awareness. By strategically automating targeted email campaigns triggered by user behaviors or schedules, you can streamline workflows and deliver more personalized messaging to potential customers.
Finally, leverage the right email automation platform like Atom8 to seamlessly integrate this capability into your marketing stack. Contact us today to learn how our intuitive app can help your business with email marketing and automation.
