Email Automation Guide: How to Automate Your Email Marketing for More Leads and Sales

Do you want to automate your online business processes and achieve more leads and sales on autopilot?

This email automation guide has answers to the most pressing questions, such as;

What is email marketing automation?

How does it work?

Examples of email automation

The benefits of an automated email marketing campaign for a business owner

And more other useful information. Read every word.

What is email marketing automation?

It is the process of sending emails automatically to your subscribers based on triggers such as downloading an e-book, making a purchase, or booking a session.

Email automation is different from a broadcast because the latter is general and can often fail to get the expected results.

You don’t have to create a new email for every other person that opts into your list. Email automation can create a sequence that can serve you for a year or so.

How does email automation work?

It works by setting an event, which, when triggered by subscribers, sends out emails based on the trigger. For example, if a subscriber purchases a product from your website, they will receive an automatic thank your email.

Purchasing a product is the event here. And since it has been trigged, the thank your email goes out to the subscriber automatically without you having to create it.

5 examples of email automation

Let’s see where you can apply email marketing automation;

Abandoned cart email sequences

If you browse through an online store like Alibaba or eBay and decide to click on place order but fail to check out, eBay will mostly send you an abandoned cart automated email campaigns.

Screenshot

It will merely remind you about the products you have in the cart and how you can easily checkout. After some time, they can decide to gift you a coupon to complete your order.

All these emails are automated and will vary based on how you interact with the website information and email copy. 

Birthday emails

Upon opting in to your email list and purchasing your products, you can ask a subscriber to include their date of birth in the sign-up form.

Though most people merely ask for the name and email, some smart marketers now ask for additional personal information.

You can then decide to gift him a unique and exclusive coupon code to purchase your products. 

Welcome emails

This happens when you purchase a product in any online store. It can be a course from Udemy, as well. They mostly send welcome emails to new customers shortly after you buy from them.

Screenshot of a welcome email 

A welcome email usually introduces the company and what to expect from them. It is an essential email to create that first and lasting impression.

Customers often decide whether to open their next email based on the welcome email. So, it has to be as compelling and memorable. You can even induce a story to it; it works wonders.

Re-engagement emails

Have you ever got a re-engagement email after failing to open someone’s emails for some time? Well, most of them are automated.

A re-engagement email is meant to bring back existing customers who have changed interest over time – something that happens over time.

And since you can’t just let them slip through the cracks, you can decide to craft an email that’s not related to your main interest. You can even decide to ask them to book a call with you, reply to your emails, or take a survey to understand their changed interest.

Coaching follow-up emails

When you decide to book a call with someone, they will mostly have an automated email sequence reminding you of the same.

They come in intervals of days, hours, or even minutes. If you book a call for next week, there will mostly be a call confirmation email, an email a day before, and another one a few hours before the meeting.

All these are automated and personalized.

6 Benefits of email automation

There are a ton of benefits of email marketing automation.

Let’s check out some of them:

Email automation improves the customer experience. 90% of subscribers say that they enjoy reading personalized emails.

After downloading your lead magnet, they will receive an email targeted to them to take a certain action related to what they read in the e-book or the video.

They will later get bombarded by an offer to purchase a one-time offer related specifically to solving a unique problem.

Remember, these are all solutions to a unique challenge the subscriber has after opting into your email list. And since every email is personalized, most of them click to find out what you offer and purchase.  

Different from broadcast emails, email automation can help you increase sales significantly by boosting trust and customer relationship management. You can create more than one campaign here with a unique objective.

You can decide to create a campaign to create product awareness, generate leads for a webinar, or bring in sales. Between all these campaigns, you can create tags and retarget people based on their interactions with your content.

Think of an online e-commerce store like Amazon. After sending a roundup of their winning products to your inbox, they can decide to send an abandoned cart sequence to you if you fail to enter your billing information during checkout.

They can also choose to retarget you with a discount code after feeling you couldn’t afford the price of a product.

These processes increase your online business’s sales and boost your return on investment.

If subscribers get value from your emails, they can’t unsubscribe. They will need your information to grow their businesses and improve their lives.

And since email automation allows you to target every interest and customer event as they interact with your content, most of them will keep getting value from your emails and hence stay.

The result is that you are boosting their trust in you and your brand and improving the overall customer lifetime value.

For some reason, subscribers can fail to engage with your content after some time. One of the reasons is when priorities change, they have to focus on other things.

For example, if they were on your interior design tips list, they can decide to focus on coaching and hence ignore your content since it is no longer essential to them.

When that happens, you can decide to bring them back by understanding exactly why they haven’t been engaging with your content. Through automation, you can segment them and send them personalized automated emails to see them open and read the content.

You can create a rule whereby you assign a tag to subscribers who haven’t opened your emails for a while and send them closely related email sequences to ascertain their interest change.

Applying these simple tricks can re-engage and bring them back to your business domain.

The thing about an automated email sequence is you will take some time to craft and hence target the subscriber based on their interest.

When someone enters your email list, a welcome email will drop by and welcome them to your email list. They will receive more emails regarding what you do and how you can help them in the following days.

But the fact remains is that they are getting all these based on their interest since no one can decide to hop into an email list if he isn’t interested in what the person offers.

In addition, email automation allows you to tag and send emails to people based on their interactions with your content.

For example, if they didn’t purchase the main offer, it could be that they didn’t have the money, so you can decide to downsell them a lowly-priced offer.

That means every subscriber is getting useful information and offers personalized to them. And in doing that, you will see sales trickle in.   

The main benefit I found with email automation is that it saves you the time to create an email for every subscriber. Yes, you can create a broadcast and send it to thousands of subscribers, but they may not all be in the same position in the customer journey.

Some people create an email sequence using automated workflows, which can serve them for several years. They will keep feeding each new subscriber the same information as they move down the sales funnel and generate passive income.

You don’t have to create an email now and then. If you can map your customer journey and pinpoint the activities that will happen in the list, you can create an automated email sequence that serves any customer event.

Email Automation Guide: 5 Steps to Success

How can you succeed in email marketing even if you are a beginner? Follow these few but highly effective steps:

Step 1: Determine your overall campaign objective

The first step is determining your main objective based on your business goals. You can opt for brand awareness and building trust if you are a new business.

An already established business can decide to go for BOF (bottom of the funnel) campaign objectives such as sales. However, the objective has to be aligned with the overall marketing goals.

Most people start without a concrete plan. That can be challenging because you might not know what to do when things turn sideways. A plan and an objective help pinpoint what you need to do and when.

A campaign objective will also help you develop metrics to measure your marketing efforts, such as leads and sales.

Step 2: Choose the Best Email Automation Tools and Software

You now have an objective and metrics to measure your success at every marketing level. What next? Well, you need to find out the right tools for the job.

When I say the right tools, I mean the best email marketing tool with the features to automate your email campaigns.

This is what to consider when choosing such a tool;

Automation feature

Obviously, the essential feature is automation. Some tools might not have it. And if they do, they may not allow you to automate events such as clicks and retarget unengaged customers.

Find an email marketing tool with a customizable trigger; such that you can create several mini-campaigns within the main campaigns. You can downsell and cross-sell to a specific segment within your list based on their actions.

Real-time analytics

The email marketing tool you select should also give a detailed analytics report to help you make decisions quickly.

Analytics help when it comes to measuring your success and optimizing for better campaign performance. So, if you find a tool that gives detailed analytics, including devices used to open emails, clicks, and a lot of other metrics, consider it.

Templates

To save time and create compelling emails, you can opt to use a template instead of crafting it from scratch and somehow miss out on the important steps of creating an email copy.

Templates help you greatly since you may need to write an email in different formats and formulas. A welcome email ought to be concise. A product promotion should be visually compelling with a bold call to action.

With templates, it is a plug-and-play process. So, ensure your email marketing tool has a broad range of templates.

Mobile optimization

You will need to optimize your emails for subscribers using mobile phones. According to a Litmus report in 2021, mobile opens were about 41.6% of the overall email opens.

That means most subscribers will likely open your email via their mobile phones. And due to that, you should optimize your emails for mobile.

Most email marketing tools have mobile-optimized templates. So, you should ensure that the tool you select allows you to optimize for mobile.    

Email segmentation

The email tool you choose should allow you to segment your list based on your subscribers’ actions when interacting with your content.

Through segmentation, you can achieve the art of personalizing your emails to achieve a high ROI on your marketing efforts.

That means every action your subscriber takes, such as clicking, implies they aren’t interested in an offer. As a result, you can customize your emails to what your users like.

Best Email Automation Tools and Software

Now that you have mastered what to look for in a tool, which email marketing automation tools should you use?

Here are some of my favorite marketing automation software;

There are others, but these are among the best. I know you know some of these or have even used them. I would advise you to go with GetResponse. It’s what I have been using for a while now.

And guess what?

Step 3: Create events-based triggers

With the email marketing tool in place, it’s time to create campaigns and personalize based on events from the subscribers.

Here are some events you can choose to place as triggers;

Emails opens

The first event to track is the subscribers who open and read your emails. Most of them are hot buyers interested in the information you are giving. 

By tracking this, you can determine your open rate and work on improving it or merely optimize for better performance.

Link clicks

If you have several links on your emails promoting different products, you should track subscribers who click on a specific link and assign a tag to them.

If it was a product link, place the tagged subscriber into a mini-campaign with a discount code of the product at the end.

Your click-through rate matters if you are to succeed with email marketing. A higher click-through rate signifies a greater interest and hence more sales. A low click-through rate means the subscribers aren’t interested in your offering.

Purchase   

If a subscriber clicks on a link and ends up purchasing a product, you can assign them a sale tag and automatically place them on an upsell email sequence.

A purchase even is the end goal of most email marketing campaigns. But if you can tag a sales and upsell to them after a few days, then you can increase the lifetime value of that subscriber significantly.

Step 4: Segment your list

A segmented list almost always gives forth the best results. Your subscribers have varied interests and spending behaviors and come from different parts of the world with different cultures and languages.

Segmentation allows you to target all these with a personalized message more likely to make them perform an event such as booking a call or purchase.

Your subscribers want a personalized experience. That means if you can talk to them in a language they understand and offer them exactly what they are looking for, they will not fail to make a purchase.

Step 5: Analyze and optimize for better results

The last thing is to merely collect data based on subscriber interactions with your content, analyze, and interpret the results.

You should also keep on optimizing for better results. Just keep testing different subject lines, CTA buttons, offers, and email formats.

Following the five steps above, you can’t go wrong with email marketing automation. It is one of the best ways to grow an online business.

More automation ideas to explore

Here are some more email marketing automation ideas to explore and grow your online business.

Send emails on special days

Apart from birthdays, you can also send emails on special days such as special national events, holidays, father’s or mother’s day, valentine’s day, and such.

People tend to shop a lot on these days. That means if you automate your email sequence and choose to offer discounts during these days, you should get more sales than someone sending generalized emails.

Send events emails

Sometimes, someone can sign-up to attend an event you are hosting. In that case, you could automate the entire sign-up until after attending it.

After the event, send them a thank you email for attending it and ask them about what they have learned. This goes miles into improving the relationship you have with your subscribers. 

Send product usage metrics emails

If you have a productivity app such as a fitness app, you can opt to automate the auto-generated weekly or daily reports.

You can then personalize the reports based on the user productivity and overall experience. This can enhance the value they are getting while using your product.

Automate customer feedback

You can also choose to automate the feedback you seek from customers. If there is one thing customers like, it is a business that takes time to get their opinions and incorporate them into improving their experience.

To improve sales, you can automate the process of filling in surveys and writing product reviews after purchase.

Topics & Questions

What is automation in email?

It is the process of sending emails based on events triggered by the subscribers, such as a click or website purchase.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a powerful email automation tool that will help take your email marketing to the next level, I recommend Getresponse.

With its easy-to-use interface and wide range of features, you can create sequences that will serve you for months or even years.

Plus, it integrates with tons of other tools and services so you can get the most out of your automated emails. And if you want to try it before you buy it, they offer a free account so you can explore all that it has to offer.

So what are you waiting for?

Sign up for Getresponse today!