4 Email Marketing Tips to Build Automated Campaigns

Email marketing automation is a golden child to elevate the user experience and generate revenue. It enables digital marketers to create systematic and efficient email campaigns, by reducing manual inputs and enhancing the relevancy of each email sent to subscribers.

Once understood and put in practice, automation can literally take the traditional email campaign past the stratosphere and introduce your online brand to new marketing horizons.

That's why we can't emphasize just enough, how getting started with email automation is key to email marketing longevity and success.

In case you're not sure how to get started or don't even know what email automation means, let us introduce you to this digital marketing haven.

What is email automation?

For newbies, email automation means simplifying the email marketing job for a whole digital marketing team. In other words, email automation enables digital marketers to create and send email campaigns based on specific triggers that, once set up, are able to send out emails each time a subscriber meets the predefined trigger.

So rather than viewing it as a new form of email marketing, think of email automation as an overseer to your marketing and transactional email campaigns. It creates a powerful channel to engage with customers by streamlining email campaigns that reach the right inbox at the most relevant time for them.

Equally important before automating email marketing campaigns, is to consider what data from subscribers carries value to the automation and how we plan to gather it. This is key because these data points are then linked to an email marketing automation software, and serve as triggers to the series of automated email campaigns.

You should also know that there are two main types of email marketing automation, namely trigger-based automation and drip campaigns. 

As the name indicates, trigger-based automation sends an email based on user actions, such as abandoning a cart or saving an out-of-stock product. On the other hand, drip automation sends a series of emails based on intentional user preferences, such as registering a new account or joining your newsletter.

In case you see it clearer now and feel ready to begin automating, we'll give you six pieces of advice to make your experience with email marketing automation as lucrative as possible.

Remember that email marketing automation requires some thought and planning, so these tips are meant to ignite your email marketing circuits and motivate you to implement proper automated campaigns.

4 Essential Email Marketing Automation Tips

1. Map out your marketing automation flow

One of the main advantages of email marketing automation is that it facilitates lead generation, by accompanying new subscribers along the marketing funnel, with a series of automated messages that nurture them into becoming customers.

That's why it is essential to create a visual representation that maps the different actions and stages new leads go through until they finally buy and advocate your products.

Taking the time to map the lead journey upfront, not only saves you an immense chunk of time in the long run but also enables you to spot opportunities that carry the potential of bringing in 5 times more revenue.

By laying your email marketing automation on a flowchart or a mind map, you'll be able to better assess how effective your automated email campaigns are at organically moving new leads from one stage to the next, as well as identify bottlenecks in the flow to make adjustments that ensure maximized conversion.

2. Create detailed buyer personas

If you're thinking of email marketing automation, it's only logical that you're clear on who the target audience for your brand is. So assuming this is done, you may take the next step and create detailed buyer personas to help guide your personalization of the automated campaigns.

By looking at your audience's background, you can gather information about their demographics, preferences, and occupations, to build an understanding of what their pain points are and how to align your email strategies to address them.

Similar to the map, developing a profile of who we expect to be engaging as subscribers and customers, is a critical step to ensure the efficiency of your email marketing automation.

The idea is to be able to identify who could belong to a prospective customer segment, so you're able to define relevant triggers and personalize the interactions with each persona.

3. Deliver targeted and engaging content

With email automation, you can deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. That's why it so important to first, build a detailed picture of who your target audience is and the sales cycle they follow, to deliver marketing content that matches their respective stage.

Knowing your audience, also makes it easier to let them dictate the type of content you produce. Remember that the possibilities to create content are endless and that whether you choose to use data to emphasize how your solution stands out or a case study to motivate someone to purchase an offer, it's all about delivering relevant content to the right person.

Using the data stored from subscribers and customers, you can segment based on similar attributes and then map the automated marketing messages, to deliver targeted and relevant content.

A key aspect at this stage is involving your sales team to help define what key messages help develop the conversation with new subscribers towards conversion.

4. Keep the lead scoring and qualification simple

When the communication with leads is automated, it's recommended to put a process in place to help determine which leads need more nurture and which are qualified to receive sales communications, this is called lead scoring.

Starting with the lead scoring process, make sure to keep it simple and objective. This enables a baseline for measuring performance and rapidly optimizing the scoring process based on feedback. The result of effective scoring is a happier marketing team, working to serve better-qualified leads.

You may decide to score leads based on both demographic attributes or behavioral actions, and by including sales communications in the process, it'll be possible to collect valuable insight and determine which actions or attributes deserve which score.

As one of the most significant practices in email marketing automation, the lead scoring and qualification must be reviewed at least quarterly. This ensures that the process is effectively qualifying leads and handing them off to sales at the right time.

In conclusion

During recent years, marketing automation has been the engine behind the accelerating growth and expansion of emerging businesses. So follow the tips above to take advantage of this trend, and start generating more leads, closing more sales, and making customers happier today.