Email Marketing Automation: How-To Guide + Best Practices

What is Email Marketing Automation? Should you choose Email Marketing system or Marketing Automation Platform? How to conduct a successful email campaign with modern software? How this software influences the effectiveness of campaigns?
We discuss the most frequent Email Marketing Automation questions and show how to do it.

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Email Marketing vs. Marketing Automation

In the beginning, let’s straighten this up: you don’t choose between Email Marketing and Marketing Automation. It’s a false opposition.

Email Marketing means all actions you undertake to communicate with your audience via email. It includes:
– regular newsletters sent to the whole contact base,
– emails sent to the segment of the base (for example, messages crafted for loyal customers with a special offer for them)
– dynamic 1-to-1 emails (sent to an individual customer in response to her action. A classic example of this practice are abandoned cart rescue emails. Sometimes dynamic messages are called “autoresponders”)
– Lead Nurturing or welcome cycle messages
– email courses (as a form of Lead Nurturing for advanced users or a form of Lead Generation – you offer your expert knowledge in a shape of an online course in exchange for email address).

Such campaigns can be executed with:
– Email Marketing systems,
– Marketing Automation platforms,
– one’s own email system.

Note: never use your email service program to send mass emails, eve if your base is small. In such case, choose a Email Marketing or Marketing Automation platform that offers free service for clients with a small number of contacts. For example, in SALESmanago you get a free Email Marketing account up to 10 000 contacts.

Dedicated Email Marketing System or Marketing Automation Platform?

Email Marketing Automation systems offer a narrower array of features. Mostly it consists of:
– creating a message (it templates are provided)
– sending a message (you can also tailor time of delivery to individual recipient’s preferences)
– campaign monitoring (Open Rate, Click-Through Rate, unsubscriptions)
– simple autoresponders.

Marketing Automation Platforms, on the other hand, are way more complex because they take into account also all the marketing actions you conduct, so it’s easier to personalize (for example, you can segment contact according to their behavior on the website, use scoring or implement advanced dynamic emails). Such technologies encompass more data on users and involve other marketing actions run by the company in other channels.

MAP helps you also control the context of your message:
– contact forms and other Lead Generation tactics,
– landing pages,
– it also integrates with CRM

If you have a branded mobile app and Mobile Marketing Automation tool, you can also use data from the app to customize your Emails (for example, you can segment your contact base according to other apps users installed on their mobile devices).

Shortly speaking, MAP shows two key benefits over Email Marketing systems:
1) You control the whole environment in which emails are sent,
2) You can send dynamic 1-to-1 emails based on rich customer profiles.

Email Marketing Automation: Definition

Email Marketing Automation means Email Marketing using the potential of automation. It gives you a broad spectrum of sending options and the vast amounts of data that you can utilize to personalize messages. Also, it helps you see all your marketing actions as a whole, not as independent practices.

Automation is the future of Email Marketing because it allows to tailor messages to the context very precisely and includes user’s interests, history of products viewed and bought, or content she consumed.

Email Marketing is the most often used Marketing Automation feature: 95% of marketers working with MAPs, use these tools to send emails (source: Smart Insights).

10 Best Email Marketing Practices

When we know what Email Marketing Automation is about, let’s see how to put it in practice.
1. Tailor time of delivery to individual user’s preferences: MAP automatically analyzes when each user is the most active and when she reads your emails. Basing on that insight, the system can automatically choose the time of email delivery for every user.
2. Emails to contact segments: divide your user into groups and send dedicated emails to each of them, according to their interests, purchase history, products they viewed, stage of the funnel, engagement (use scoring) or behavior in a mobile app.
3. Abandoned cart rescue emails: are the most critical solution for ecommerce. Send an automated message with products user added to cart but didn’t finalize the transaction.
4. Welcome messages (or cycles): another form of 1-to-1 communication. An average welcome message shows 50% OR (source: Emma). According to research, 74,4% of customers expects welcome message after subscribing to the newsletter. Thanks to that simple trick, your recipients won;t forget the brand after giving you their email addresses.
5. Win-back campaigns: campaigns of that type are directed to inactive contacts. It helps you re-activate users who haven’t visited your website in a long time and check whether these email addresses are correct (so you can remove outdated ones).
6. Lead Nurturing: cycles of educational messages that prepare your lead to buy, providing her with essential knowledge and introducing to the world of the brand. According to Annuitas, customers who were nurtured spend 47% more when compared to non-nurtured ones. (see more stats on Lead Nurturing)
7. Birthday emails: a great idea for establishing a personal bond with a customer. The MAP will automatically send a message with birthday wishes and a gift (a discount or bonus) in pre-defined time (for example, a day before the birthday).
8. Upsell and cross-sell: while acquiring new customers is vital, don’t underestimate the potential of existing ones. Upselling (offering premium version, extended warranty, etc.) and cross-selling (offering similar or complementary products) is a piece of cake with Marketing Automation. You can sort out the customers likely to upgrade to premium (thanks to contact scoring) and match complementary products with advanced recommendation engines, such as SALESmanago Copernicus – Machine Learning & AI.
9. Use customers name in the subject or/and in the body of the email: a small gesture that will break the ice and increase OR.
10. Landing pages: well-built landing pages can boost conversion by 300%, so use them! With MAP you can create them quickly.

Marketing Automation will transform your Email Marketing. You not only can send 1-to-1 dynamic emails, which are more often opened and clicked, but also get control over the whole process: from collecting data on your customers to personalization practices to creating landing pages to effect monitoring.