Email marketing is one of the most commonly-used and effective marketing channels these days. For every $1 spend, you can expect a return on investment of up to $51. This would be an ideal ROI for small businesses knowing that every dollar spent on marketing effort is worth it.
At a time when there are 293 billion emails sent daily, email marketing automation is needed your optimize your performance. With automation tools, you can reach out to the right people at the right moment without doing the work every time.
Interestingly, even though 58% of marketers regard increasing the customer engagement rate as the top goal when running email campaigns, 46% see it as the #1 challenge.
In this case, a proper email strategy would help achieve the extraordinary results of this channel. In this post, we’ll guide you through 4 ways that automated email campaigns can enhance your results.
1. Personalise your email
By personalizing your email, we mean using customer data to personalize your message. This will prevent the impression that you’re sending out an automatic campaign without considering its relevance to the receivers.
For example, you can start the email with “Dear Laura” instead of “Dear customer”.
Or “You might like these (based on customer on-site behavior)” instead of “You might like these (randomly generated)”.
This way it can help your business generate a $20 return on every $1 spend.
What is more intriguing is that email whose subject lines are personalized with customers’ name often increases the open rate by 16%. Given that 47% of the open rate depends on the subject line alone, it is a sure way to get in touch with your customers.
Ask for the right information upfront
Great personalization starts when the customer fills out the form. Without information such as name, gender, email address, you would be very limited in your personalized communication. Remember to only ask for the information you need. Otherwise, your customers might feel intrusive and hold a negative impression of your brand.
Use a real reply-to email address with a real signature
A real reply email increases your credibility and keeps your readers engaged with your message. Likewise, a real signature offers a way in which your customer can keep in touch with you if needed. This is highly important to be personal and build a strong relationship with them.
Set up a workflow to save time
You can always use email marketing automation to sync your online retail store with external tools. Then you can tell the system to automatically assign customers to a group based on their behaviour and send the message accordingly. This integration, which works in multiple cases, would save you a lot of time and resources.
2. Segment your audience before sending
When you segment your database, you are more likely to hit the audience who are really interested in your brand.
Say you want to hold a discount event for female customers on Women Day. The best way to do this is to separate your female from male customers, segment them based on their location and language and send them an invitation letter. This can be perfectly done by setting up email marketing automation.
Automated segmentation helps increase your performance. Specifically, the open rate is witnessed to have accelerated by 39%, whereas for revenue, sales leads, and deliverability, the number is 24%.
That’s amazing, isn’t it? But so far only 9 out of 10 markets don’t segment their database. Therefore, mastering this tactic would bring you a competitive advantage in the competition.
There are several ways to segment your audience:
Location
Where is your customer based? Where do they want to have their package delivered? Knowing where your customer locates is powerful data as of finding tune to your targeting effort. Instead of sending an email for all, sending emails to people in the right region would prevent unsubscription and enhance attention.
Age
Would you send the latest cat meme to a middle-aged lady in the countryside? Likewise, would you send a nineteen-year-old buddy a 60-page long industry report? Some might be interested in it, but segmenting by age would help identify your most suitable audience. Customers who spend more money on your brand are more loyal than others. Use the data about their transaction to keep them engaged by sending them personalized messages and exclusive promotions.
Behaviour
Do customers visit your website on a daily visit? Do they leave their shopping cart abandoned? If you can get notice of the page they visit and the action they take on your website, you can send targeted emails based on these behaviours.
3. Try out multiple versions of your email
Testing your homepage, landing page, and email templates helps you sort out the most practical decision to improve your performance.
Email marketing is no different.
Most of the marketers have A/B testing in their campaigns, especially with the subject line, message, call to action, and design. Having multiple versions means a lot of work to be done. That’s why you should have an email marketing automation tool ready to assist.
Remember, before distributing your A/B testing, you should beware of which metrics you want to examine. For example, if you want to increase the click-through rate, you should consider the image vs no image version or the color of the CTA button. Meanwhile, for the open rate, the subject line and the capitalized words are more important.
Apart from these factors, you can also test:
Sender address
In fact, the sender’s name is one of the reasons making the audience open an email. One way to test your From address is by sending your campaigns from a person’s name, person, and the company or from your CEO.
Long vs short emails
It depends on you to keep short and sweet or long detailed. While the former includes more detailed copy, shorter emails will send the reader directly to a targeted landing page. Try it out to see which is more suitable for your audience.
Plain text vs HTML campaigns
Plain text would be good enough for some cases. Yet in others, adding an element of personalization would transform the email in a way that it appears to be written for the reader alone. Want to know which works best in which case? Test it.
4. Automate your email campaign when possible
Automating manual tasks is a must-have procedure if you want to win more time for meaningful investment. Among the simplest, your SME can transform into an automatic store by performing trigger-based email. Trigger-based emails are emails that are sent out immediately following the user behaviour. The most common forms of trigger-based emails today are welcome letters, thank-you letters, and transactional emails such as receipt emails or order confirmation.
But you would never have time to keep an eye on your website 24/7 to send an email whenever needed. That’s why email marketing automation is important for your business.
The challenge is to find a tool that will automatically deliver the emails for your customers without you taking over every step on the way. If your store operates on BigCommerce, this shouldn’t be a matter with Atom8. Atom8 allows for integrating your online stores with email marketing tools such as Mailchimp or Klaviyo so as to streamline the process of taking care of your customers.
After installation, you can set up a workflow to send an email whenever an action takes place.
A step-by-step example would be:
Trigger: WHEN a customer visits your website
Condition: IF they sign up for an account
Action: THEN tag the customer on Mailchimp and send them a welcome letter
Only with a few clicks, you will have Atom8 integrated into your website and having your campaign sent whenever needed!
Email marketing helps you find potential customers and constantly engage with them. Unlike manual campaigns, automated emails run in the background while you’re doing other valuable tasks.
With email marketing automation, you can segment your customer based on their information, personalize the message and keep in touch with them on a regular basis. With Atom8, we make sure that this process is run seamlessly on your website, especially when it is integrated with powerful email marketing tools. Check the app out and let your business scale!
