You’ve worked hard to generate leads. Your social media lead generation efforts have paid off and your customer is on your landing page. How can you successfully convert your leads to a sale? Email marketing automation is the answer!
Here are five tips to make sure that your email automation strategy is as effective as possible:
- Use Triggers
- Timeliness
- Personalization
- Segmentation
- A/B Testing
The words email marketing automation may feel very impersonal, almost detached and robotic. Yet optimizing email automation is an incredibly effective way to build relationships with your customer.
Many novices think email automation is simply sending an automatic response to the buyer after a quick online purchase. In reality, email automation, when implemented well, can play a crucial role in your marketing campaign.
It helps in developing relationships with your customers, provides an opportunity to build and tell your brand’s story and creates added value to the customer experience in a way that will increase your sales.
A report released by Klaviyo, a leading ecommerce marketing platform, showed that the open rate of automated email flows is about 40%, with click rates of about 6%. This is double the numbers for an average email campaign. Why so much of a difference?
It’s simply because email automations are more targeted and are triggered by specific behaviors that the user takes on the website or platform.
Automations are triggered to ‘catch’ the customer and target them at the right place at the right time – when they are most likely to make a purchase.
So, what type of customer behavior should you target? What exactly warrants an automated email series?
The most common automated emails are order confirmations and shipping notifications. However, there are other important uses of automation that you can incorporate into your email marketing strategy in order to get the customer through the sales funnel.
1. Use triggers
Triggers are the actions or behaviours that your customer takes when they are on your website or at some point in the sales funnel. This might include filling out forms, putting a product in their cart/wish list, or even making a purchase. Use these actions to trigger a relevant follow up email with specific messaging. This is doubly powerful because the messaging you send has a high degree of relevance to email subscribers.
2. Timeliness
Your email automation needs to be timely. When a customer signs up or subscribes to your newsletter, they are expecting to receive an email from your business. You should set up a trigger to welcome them immediately – you might disappoint your customers if you don’t respond in a timely manner. Similarly, an email to sell similar products will not be welcomed right after a purchase has been made. You should set up the automation so that the timeliness of the email builds the customers’ confidence and shows them that your brand is reliable. Timing plays a major role in automations.
3. Personalization
Personalize your automation. Refer to the customer/subscriber by first name, remind them if they have products in their cart or show them similar products they might be interested in. You may also choose to send them a reminder when a product in their wish list becomes available again. Your customers want to be seen, they are not just an email address. Getting into their inbox is a privilege and you should treat it that way. In fact, Campaign Monitor found that subject lines that were personalized are 26% more likely to be opened.
4. Segmentation
Segmentation refers to the separation of contacts according to engagement, behavior, interests, purchase behavior, geographical location, interests, etc. Segmenting your contacts can help you make more targeted lists so that you can send them more specific and tailored messages according to their needs/interests. If your subscriber shows interest in a specific product category, then you can send them an email based on those interests. If your brand is using a lead magnet like a free webinar, segmenting will allow your brand to send content based on the fact that they signed up and showed interest in the subject of the webinar.
5. A/B Testing
A/B testing is crucial to help you make improvements and gather key learning to see what resonates with your customers. With A/B testing, you make changes to the subject line, email content, call to action and see what interests and connects with your target audience. In this way, you can understand your customers’ copy preferences.
A/B testing must be on-going in order to produce statistically significant conclusions. It might be tempting to turn off the test after a few days if it seems to be a failure. Persevere. Every failure gives us insights into what is working with a particular group and what isn’t. When A/B testing is ongoing, you will constantly have a stream of data that will reveal a story and give you insights into what actions need to be taken.
Conclusion
Email automation is becoming an increasingly important part of every marketing campaign. When nurtured well, automated email marketing will help you keep in touch with your leads, build a more personal relationship with your target audience, keep your business top of mind and get your customer through the sales funnel – ultimately increasing your sales!
