Email Marketing Automation: Identifying Growth Opportunities

In recent years, automation has become the norm in various fields of marketing. The most popular form remains email marketing automation. Before we delve into ways to use automation to grow your business, let’s unpack the benefits of email marketing automation to give you a better understanding of how it can help in reaching your goals.

Benefits of email marketing automation

Email marketing automation allows you to set up a process that automatically triggers (i.e. sends emails) to your customers at different moments of their customer journey, saving you time and energy. But there is more to it.

The main benefit of email marketing automation is that it allows you to create segmented mailing lists and offer your customers a highly personalised experience, helps convert prospects into customers, increases your opening rates and thus, makes engagement with customers much easier.

All this helps you build a level of trust that will lead to a higher average order value (AOV) and higher customer lifetime value - topics our friends at Bitfiner preach and teach about. Ultimately, email marketing automation brings in more business and helps you reach higher profitability rates. Studies show that using marketing automation software leads to an 80% increase in the number of leads and a 77% boost in conversions.

Email marketing automation is not only an often-untapped source of revenue. It also has one of the highest returns on investment of all marketing channels. Overall, the costs of automation remain relatively low, with tools’ subscription prices in triple, if not double digits.

If you consider the time you save on planning email campaigns alone, they are worth it. Not only is automation a more efficient way to implement an email marketing strategy but also a better, more creative, and personal way to get your message across to your customers.

You can segment your audiences, mark different occasions in a customer’s lifetime, send them the messages they really care about to turn them into brand loyalists. Done right, email automation can help you step out of the spam territory right into customers’ inboxes and only a click away from delivering that message to their screens.

Let’s do a little mathematics and assume you pay $200/month for your email service provider. That will come up to $2,400/year. Now let’s add to that the costs of paying a marketer to work on email campaigns for 2 hours/day, 5 days a week, at a rate of $40/hour. This amounts to $7,680 a year, bringing your total email marketing spend to $21,600 a year. Again, making realistic assumptions, if the cost of your lead is $100 and your email campaign brings 3,000 leads/year, your total revenue from email is $300,000.

With this data we can now calculate your ROI as follows: ($300,000 – $21,600)/$21,600 = 1,288.88%

Pretty impressive, right?

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Let’s delve further into the details of automating your email campaigns. If you’ve done email marketing, by now you know that it requires a strong strategy in place from the start. But sequencing, that is sending the right emails, to the right people, at the right time is just as important.

Automated email campaigns do just that. A campaign usually consists of 2-3 emails. The tool will use data about your customers to trigger those emails when the time is right. Max Mustermann just purchased products worth 500 EUR? The automation tool will activate the "VIP email series" for Max.

There are many points in the customer journey that can trigger a series of emails and they are not always easy to identify. This is why we put together a list that you can quickly go through to see which of these you can use to grow and elevate your business (Thumbs up if you already have some of them up and running):

The VIP Email Automation Flow

This series rewards your most loyal customers, those who purchase a lot or often, or engage with your brand in some other ways, whether on social media or in the brand community, etc. Make them feel special, they deserve it.

The Referral Email Automation Flow

This is a great way to grow organically by encouraging your existing customers to spread the word and obtain benefits for themselves or their friends and family. Combine word of mouth with automation and you’ll be reaching for the stars.

The Upselling and Cross-selling Email Automation Flow

This series is all about anticipating the needs of your customers. They bought a coffee machine but didn’t add the coffee or the maintenance part? Send them an email to remind them that they can add products to their order or order more of something.

The ECO and Donation Email Automation Flow

In today’s age, you cannot afford not to be an eco-friendly, green brand and if you are, you might as well tell your customers about it. Let them know that you are doing your part to support and donate to organisations that stand for a green cause. Who is not going to love that?

The Timely Reminders Email Automation Flow

For those who sell products with predictable run-out times, this series is a goldmine. From the car maintenance industry to beauty and food, a multitude of businesses can benefit from using the data to predict when customers will need their product next. If you know your bottle of shampoo typically runs out in 4 weeks, you can send reminders 3 weeks after the last purchase.

Welcome Email Automation Flow

It’s not just about buying a product these days, it’s about trusting the brand enough to make a purchase and then even become part of the brand community. In an age of constant backlash against unethical brands, welcome emails are a great opportunity to introduce your customers to your brand identity and ethos, tell them who you are, what benefits you offer, what your value proposition and unique selling points are. Take this chance to make your brand feel “real” and inspire trust so that people keep coming back.

Nurture Email Automation Flow

These campaigns are for those who have not yet been converted but have toyed with the idea of purchasing from your website and prowled through some landing pages. This allows you to collect data and analyse their behaviour so that you can create funnels to activate them.

New Customer Email Automation Flow

The first purchase is a great moment to start building a relationship with your newly acquired customers, tell them more about your brand, thank them and talk about the future.

Repeat Customer Email Automation Flow

Returning customers deserve special attention because they have the highest potential of becoming brand loyalists. Your emails to them should be personalised - you should know them well by now - and relevant, without pushing products too much.

E-commerce Receipt Email Automation Flow

A sale does not end after purchase and receipt emails are a great way to show your customers that you care about them and not just about cashing in. Sending post-purchase receipts is a great opportunity to get in touch, and can set the ground for further sales.

Re-engagement and Reactivation Email Automation Flow

One or two purchases do not mean you have customers for life. Nor does inactivity mean you lost them for good. Max might have been busy in the past 3 months and hasn’t purchased anything. Now is a good time to give him some good reason to come back, whether it’s a new offer, a discount code, or simply announcing a new product launch.

Personalised Email Automation Flow

A brand that knows its customers is a brand that cares. Show your customers you care by sending them personalised emails with product recommendations based on their purchasing or browsing history. There are numerous engines and AI tools that do a really good job of predicting and making recommendations.

Birthday & Seasonal Email Automation Flow

Use special occasions like birthdays, Christmas and other holidays to engage with your customers. If you can throw a little birthday or Christmas gift in there, even better.

Educational Email Automation Flow

Make your brand more than just about the products by educating your customers. Educational emails that share knowledge can appeal to many customers who are passionate about your product. This is especially true in the case of luxury products. Whether it’s wines and the regions they come from, food pairings, the history of a product, sharing interesting facts and educational information can engage your customers more.

To sum up

shutterstock.com/Pixels Hunter

Pick the most relevant types of campaigns for your business and start small. Don’t get too excited and schedule extensive campaigns from the get-go. Test and try out a few things, and then use your learnings to plan more complex campaigns. Remember that simply using automation won’t do; you need to learn how to do it right or else it might backfire and you will end up with a long list of unsubscribers.

If you follow the steps above but also ask the right questions for your business you will be heading for success. Tools like MailChimp, Klaviyo, or Active Campaign provide you with a wealth of data that you can learn from to improve your campaigns.

This is only just the beginning of your automation journey. The steps to come require just as much attention and planning. If you’re curious, we summed up the key steps you need to take before launching a successful automation campaign on this page.

Happy automation!