A beginner's guide to understanding email automation

Time is money and using automation can help you save time while enhancing your customer experience, as well as email performance. Planning out your email campaigns is great, but using the data you have available to you to send out valuable communication that will increase your bottom line (with minimal intervention) is even better.

Email marketing automation allows you to create seamless experiences that deliver targeted messages to your audience via emails, with the right messages at the right time. We’ll tell you more about how email automation can help you.

What is email automation?

Email automation is a useful marketing tool that allows you to send targeted emails to your customers based on certain triggers, criteria and actions that they take. A common example that is used in the ecommerce space is abandoned cart journeys.

An abandoned cart automation workflow allows you to send an email to your customers who’ve added something to their cart without checking the items out as a reminder to purchase. This is especially useful as people can easily get distracted when they are busy making an online purchase. The possibilities with email automation are endless, the main considerations are what your goals are and how you can improve your overall experience for your end user and provide value that they will appreciate.

Why is email automation useful?

Automation is useful because it allows you to communicate more effectively and efficiently. Automation also allows you to take control in a more strategic way and use your subscriber’s actions to customise their interactions with you and your business.

How is automation and transactional email different?

Automation and transactional email differ. Where transactional emails are usually triggered based on a user or customer action, an automated email is more likely to be a more pushed form of communication from a marketing perspective to encourage a response or action to reach a desired goal.

Terms you need to know when looking at email automation

Email marketing comes with quite a few terms that you may already be familiar with and email automation is no different. When we look at automation across different email sending services the terms used can be different but mean the same thing.

Here is a brief overview of terms you need to know:

Triggers: Triggers tell the system where to start with the automation and differ depending on your goals for the workflow.

Workflow: A workflow is the email journey that you are setting up based on set triggers and actions.

Steps: Steps allow you to add actions to your workflow to let it run the way you want. Steps are usually categorised under the following 4 things:

• Email: This is where you ask the system to send a specific email.
• Delay: This is a step you use if you want to add a time based delay i.e. wait three days once someone has subscribed.
• Condition: A condition allows you to split a workflow journey essentially based on the action that the subscriber within the list takes.
• Action: An action step within automation gives you a chance to add an extra action and apply that action to your subscribers as they move through your workflow sequence. An example would be to update a subscribers details or move them to a different list automatically.

Benefits of email automation

With budgets and time pressure affecting all businesses; automation has come out as one of the most talked about marketing buzzwords over the last few years. There are so many benefits to email automation but we’ve handpicked a view to give you a taste of how email automation can help you.

Personalised experiences without manual intervention

Email automation gives you an opportunity to personalise the experience you give your customers without having to manually intervene. Increased personalisation is definitely set to increase your bottom line as your customers feel more connected and understood. Personalised experiences help you give your customers what they want in a way that is useful to you, which sets you apart from your competitors.

Improve employee productivity

Using email automation can drastically improve your employee productivity. How? Automating some of your email campaigns gives your team more freedom and time to focus on other marketing activities while still driving exceptional results.

Helps with retention

Creating email automation is a great way to help you retain more clients in an efficient way. The reason why email automation can help you do that is because your workflows can be set up to check in with your customers or clients at crucial time periods within their customer lifecycle with you. No more having to manually configure emails to check in on their progress or satisfaction with your brand. You can craft automated surveys that can help you connect with your audience.

Save money

Did you know that automation helps you save money? Having automated workflows allows you to save money as less manual activities are required. Invest time in setting up your workflows and all you need to do is keep an eye on your performance and optimise and update your campaigns as needed.

Did you know we are busy building our very own email automation functionality? Would you like to be part of our beta group for testing? Email mailto:[email protected] to let us know if you’re interested in testing this feature when it launches.