Automating Your Email Marketing: What You Need

Automating your email marketing campaigns is a vital part of your marketing process that you, as a business owner, cannot ignore.

This has become a common practice among many businesses that today, nearly 49% of businesses use some form of automation in their campaigns, including email marketing.

Why is this important?

With email marketing automation, you are able to make use of your time preparing your email campaigns more efficiently - this is done by eliminating time-consuming tasks like:

• Having to set up email lists and segments every time you send an email;

• Sending generic messages to your audiences that perform the same actions every time; and

• Manually scheduling your email campaigns whenever you need to send them.

By automating your email marketing, you can take care of these repetitive tasks, and you or your marketing team can focus on the more important aspects of your email campaigns.

Now that we understand the value of automating your email marketing, let's take a look at some of the things we need to prepare to make the automation work.

Automation isn't magic; you need to set the right circumstances and triggers for the right things to happen.

Let's begin by taking asking these questions whenever you are planning on automating your email marketing.

1. Who Are You Sending The Emails To?

To target your email recipients effectively, consider segmenting them based on specific criteria.

For instance, you could group your email list by lifecycle stages, such as targeting existing customers who haven't purchased a specific product for an upsell campaign.

Utilizing an email marketing tool, you can efficiently segment your customers based on the criteria you've established before launching your campaign.

This approach can help you tailor your messages to your audience and increase the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

2. What Do You Want To Achieve With Your Email Campaign?

Are you wanting them to buy a specific product? Or how about getting them to schedule a consultation call with you or one of your salespeople?

To create effective email marketing campaigns, it's crucial to have a clear strategy in mind.

Determine the primary objective of your email, such as driving sales, providing valuable information, or encouraging a specific action. This will guide the content and messaging of your email.

Once you establish your objective, you can create a plan to guide your contacts from their current stage to where you want them to be. This might involve a series of emails designed to nurture your leads or encourage a specific action.

3. What Triggers Need To Be Established For Your Target Audience To Start Getting The Emails?

Commonly known as trigger or enrollment criteria, these sets of events allow you to determine when your target lead, prospect, customer or client enters the campaign so they start receiving your emails.

In a scheduled email broadcast, this can be selected manually, but for a pre-designed email campaign, you need to create triggers so when a contact meets the criteria, they get entered into the automation.

4. Are There Things You Want To Track, Or Changes You Need To Account For Along The Way?

Think of what you, as a business owner, would want to collect from your email campaigns. Some of the most common things you'd want to track are open rates, click-through rates, delivery rates, click-to-open ratios, and unsubscribe rates.

These can be fully automated, allowing you to get insights on how well that specific campaign is performing.

In the same vein, you need to also consider what happens when a contact reaches that goal that you want them to achieve in the campaign. This is important when planning for multi-email campaigns.

After all, it's essential to plan for success as well.

For instance, if you create a 10-email series to persuade prospects to request a consultation, and a prospect converts after the first email, continuing to send them the same messages could be frustrating.

Make sure you have a plan to adjust your messaging and provide a positive experience for those who convert quickly.

5. Are Your Email Assets Ready?

While AI platforms have made it easier for you to write your campaigns, it is still important that you edit the output so that your voice is heard in those emails. After all, AI and automation are meant to be supplements to your business process, not replacements.

Get all the emails ready - not just the primary emails that will be sent out, but also the ones that will go out after your target audience reaches a particular stage in the campaign.

These will include the text, images, links and attachments in the email.

Once the email assets are prepared, you can then start loading them into your email marketing platforms and adding these emails to the automations or workflows that you have set up.

6. Did You Test Your Campaigns Before Making Them Live?

Last but not the least, is the testing phase. It's not a stretch to say how essential testing your email campaigns are, considering that these emails represent you and the message you are sending out to your audience.

When you are performing tests, consider the following things and make sure they are set up properly:

• The email content (text, images, links, attachments)

• The sending settings (from and reply-to email addresses)

• The automation/workflow triggers

• The subject line and pre-header text of the emails

• The tags, segments or lists that you applied to your contacts (this way you can make sure that the number of people entering the campaign is the number you expected)

• The IF/ELSE criteria that you have set up.

Getting the items above correctly can save you the trouble of having to redact certain statements, or sending emails to the wrong people.

In Conclusion

Automating your email marketing campaigns can enhance efficiency and free up your team's valuable time, which can then be devoted to customer engagement and other crucial tasks that demand their attention.

This process also aids in refining your email marketing strategy and tailoring email content to maximize its impact on your intended audience and customers.

Want to start automating your email marketing campaigns?

Contact ACRR Solutions today and we'll build your email marketing automations for you so you don't have to worry about the repetitive, time-consuming email tasks.