Email marketing stands at the pinnacle of all marketing strategies and it gets even more interesting when you embrace its automated workflow to fully optimize your marketing campaigns. It’s swift, highly effective, and exceptionally scalable!
While marketing automation outperforms manual processes by increasing sales productivity by 14.5%, automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails.
As a result, there’s been a growing popularity for marketing automation and 58% of marketers now leverage its potential to streamline their email marketing activities and upsell their goods and services.
But it’s worthy of note that this strategy could become a nightmare without the required skill set and expertise to understand which automated email campaigns to prioritize and test.
In this article, you’ll understand what email marketing automation is and learn 7 automated email ideas to generate more sales for your business.
What is Email Automation?
Technically, email automation is the process of streamlining your email marketing campaigns with the use of marketing automation software.
This hi-tech system uses preset algorithms which trigger email messages and personalize communications with leads and customers without you having to lift a finger. By automating the process, you can send
- Welcome emails for new sign-ups
- Notifications for discounts and promos
- Updates about product availability, price changes, and other workflows.
7 automation ideas to streamline your email marketing workflow
1. Lead nurturing automation workflow
It triggers multiple top-of-the-funnel conversion events
A lead nurturing campaign is a perfect prerequisite for a successful e-commerce business. It’s the fastest way to educate and engage your target audience and already existing customers alike to get them familiarized with your brand’s intent.
- The email nurture series serves as a guide for customers and prospects alike. When staging webinars, for instance, you can schedule welcome emails that carry CTAs directed at providing detailed information about the upcoming event.
Lead nurturing examples are multifaceted and may include podcasts and other virtual events, and also ebooks and free trials that prompt visitors to engage with your site in return for sign-ups and most importantly build a sales pipeline.
- Overall, lead nurturing is a great tool for enhancing customer experience and retention. Not only does it provide insights about your products, but it also gives other relevant information about your email list.
2. Onboarding email automation workflow
It triggers new subscriptions and free trial attempts
We’re just getting started! Your work doesn’t stop when you have successfully attracted a new user or buyer and your free trials are more or less a means to achieve an end.
It’s pertinent that you onboard new subscribers immediately after a signup activity is initiated and the perfect way to fast-track the process and guarantee accuracy is to exploit the viability of email automation in the onboarding process. It’s your best shot at
- Highlighting the features as well as the many benefits that come with using your products
- Guiding new clients through the know-how of using your products and
- Reassuring new subscribers that signing up for your product and services is the best decision they can make.
When sending out onboarding emails, refrain from boring and lengthy content. Instead, exploit the potential of email automation workflows to present all the details in a series of short onboarding emails to enhance customer experience.
3. Abandoned shopping cart email automation workflow
It triggers an uncompleted purchase or account setup
For eCommerce businesses, abandoned carts are parts of the process and are seemingly unavoidable no matter how skilled you are. 81.4% of online shopping carts get abandoned in the process of making a purchase.
However, you can set up an automated series of email campaigns that gently reminds the shopper to complete the purchase. To bolster the effectiveness of your emails, you can incentivize the process or introduce irresistible limited-time discounts.
While these cart abandonments may be intentional, it’s a good idea to increase your brand awareness to stay at the top of the minds of customers. Oftentimes, all your clients need is a little convincing to get them to hit the purchase button.
No matter how much you fine-tune your emails and brand identity, never forget to include a bold and actionable CTA button.
4. Happy birthday email automation workflow
It triggers birthday reminders
If there’s something that puts a smile on the faces of your customers asides from discounts and incentives, it’s a sincere and timely birthday message. It’s a praiseworthy tactic of sending positive chills down the spines of your customers and cementing your relationship with them.
While birthday emails may be perceived as trivial, the fun fact remains that they generate 342% more profits than promotional emails. Imagine what you stand to benefit from!
To draft the perfect surprise birthday emails,
- You’ll need the information you garnered during the subscriber’s registration.
- Then, you can initiate a birthday series before, on the actual date, and a couple of days after to remind them to claim their gifts.
- The gifts don’t necessarily have to be worth a fortune, it could be a coupon or even a one-day free trial or bonus package.
5. Upsell and cross-sell email automation workflow
It triggers post-purchase conversions
Heads up now! This is a pretty risky attempt but when you weigh in what you stand to gain, you become extra cautious about playing your cards right.
You’re pushing your customers to make more purchases while they just completed a transaction or are still in the process of completing one. While it wouldn’t be termed as being profit-margined, you’re conveying the value of your services to sell more expensive bundles.
Here, automating a sequence of personalized emails can make it feel less like an upsell. All you need to do is throw in an element of personalization by tailoring your services to a particular recipient else, you risk losing the deal and the client alike.
To be successful at this,
- Your CRM system must be accompanied by a well-organized segmentation process
- Afterward, make sure each record is properly labeled to showcase their need and wants
- Finally, once a window of opportunity opens, finesse the way with a hyper-targeted upsell.
6. Re-engagement email automation workflow
It triggers customer’s re-engagement
As a marketer, it’s not uncommon to occasionally experience a decline in overall customer activities, and a good way to revitalize disengaged subscribers is by leveraging email automation.
Automation software allows you to keep a tab on customer engagement and also provides you with detailed information on user activity. With that, you get to identify the inactive clients and follow it up with a “get them back” campaign.
- Schedule a series of automated emails to make your clients understand that their absence was felt and you want them back in earnest.
- Additionally, grab their attention by showing them those things that they missed out on while they were away
- Finally, stay on top of their minds by reminding them about why they chose your brand in the first place.
Note: You must be extra careful with the benchmarks you use in segmenting active clients from inactive ones to avoid provoking customers who are enjoying their vacations or sick leave.
7. Customer survey email automation workflow
It triggers quality feedback from surveys
Customer surveys or feedback emails are a great prerequisite when gauging customer satisfaction. While they may not be inextricably linked with the revenue generated, feedback allows you to weigh the performance of your products with respect to customer initial expectations.
More importantly, surveys allow you to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities as well as other areas that are begging for improvement. Just so you know, 60% of customers will consider dropping a review in exchange for a positive experience.
To gather quality feedback,
- Harness the potential of marketing automation software to segment long-term customers not less than one month in patronage.
- Afterward, create and schedule feedback emails and lace them with incentives to prompt customers to complete the surveys.
- Once the responses have been garnered, you can identify individual and general customer pain points and exploit the insights you gained to increase the quality of your products and services.
Streamline your email marketing campaigns now
Don’t snooze on it! Now that we’ve gone in-depth and you’ve gotten some great insights on the viability of email automation to streamline your email marketing, it’s about time your email list sees drastic growth as you have the potential to unlatch more profitable campaigns with triggered emails.
From nurturing leads to customer engagement and other email marketing tactics aimed at enhancing customer experience. Marketing automation is the new gold mine for any marketer or e-commerce business looking to take that giant stride and become invisible in the business world.
Thanks for reading and I hope you make your way through these automation ideas to set up your sequence.
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