Email has been around a long time and is one of the tried and true pillars of marketing that still holds strong today. With over 6 billion email accounts, it’s the preferred form of communication in the professional world and it’s a medium that you cannot afford to pass over in your marketing.
Related Article: 7 Reasons People Ignore Your Emails
The Benefits of Email Automation
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: automating your email marketing is a great way to save you time overall. Whether it’s scheduling out emails or setting up automatic emails, it will free up time in your day to focus on tasks that impact your business while also giving you time to analyze your email marketing activities and optimize those efforts.
When sending automated email campaigns through HubSpot, you can measure the success of email automation by setting up workflow goals. While analyzing open and click-through rates is important, by setting a desired goal for a sequence of emails (form submission, lifecycle stage update, etc…), you’ll better understand how your emails are performing against your overall business goals.
Another benefit of email automation is all the lead nurturing opportunities available through consistently pinging contacts with customized and personalized content. 77% of buyers want unique, targeted content. So, address them in a personalized way to make the most of your messaging.
The Many Ways to Automate
Email automation can mean a lot of different things to different people. There are many forms of automation when it comes to email and there’s something to fill most needs.
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Scheduling Emails
The most basic automation is something you’ve probably experienced before in social media or blog posting and that is scheduling out emails in advance. This is a simple time saver and allows you to knock out all your email related tasks at once rather than having to carve out a space every day or every week to work on it.
How far in advance should you schedule? The answer to that depends on you, your business, or your clients. Schedule out months in advance as long as the information you put in your emails isn’t out-of-date or no longer relevant.
You can use Seventh Sense integrated with your HubSpot CRM to learn how your leads engage with your emails and then schedule sales emails in advance at the most probable time the contact will engage with them.
(Right) With the help of Seventh Sense we can optimize send times for email campaigns
Follow-up / Action Based Emails
Another way to automate is to set up automatic follow-up emails that are triggered by certain actions a user takes.
Some of these triggers will include:
- Subscribing to an email list
- Responses to somebody completing a survey or form
- Persona self-selection on a form
This is a great way to nurture leads continuously or check on them if they continue to interact with your site. If a contact interacts with your site, and they meet your set criteria, they can be enrolled into specialized drip campaigns that deliver emails to their inbox at the optimized time, thanks to Seventh Sense.
RSS Emails
An RSS feed for your site is a great way to keep people up to date on the newest content that you have to offer. The feed will pull the newest blog updates, bring them together, and ship them off to subscribers as an easy-to-read email.
It’s a great way to drive traffic to new content and keep interested people in the loop of what’s going on in your blog or in your company.
Email Automation Tools
A carpenter is only as good as their tools, as they say. If you want to be an elite email marketer and utilize automation to its full extent, you’ll need to enlist the help of some of these top tools:
With a big reputation and the cutest logo on the internet, Mailchimp is probably the biggest name in email marketing.
Mailchimp provides many tools for managing all things email from mailing lists, newsletters, campaigns, segmenting contacts and sending them customized mail. All of this is done in one place. They even have a great episodic series that covers many marketing topics.
Inside HubSpot’s marketing and sales platform is a solid email marketing tool that provides everything you need from forms and surveys to automated email marketing that you’d expect.
This software integrates directly into HubSpot for your convenience and is your specialty tool for analyzing and predicting the optimal send time for your emails and the appropriate frequency that you send them.
Using a tool like Seventh Sense helps you improve your open and deliverability rates which can lead to increased conversions and engagement for your team. Don’t let you email get ignored!
How You Can Help Your Automated Emails
In order to get the most out of your automated emails, there are a few things you can do to ensure that each email that is sent is as appropriate for its audience as possible and as effective as it can be.
Simple things like Personalization Tokens to add a first name or something else pulled from the database to personalize each individual email. Also, simply maintaining a clean and organized database by removing un-engaged contacts from email lists and keeping consistent records will help you segment faster and easier.
Segmentation
Segmenting your database creates smaller, broken-down lists of contacts that fit certain molds or have things in common. You can segment your contacts in many ways such as demographic, location, history on the site, where they are on the buyer’s journey or on the flywheel, and if they frequently engage with emails already sent. This helps you to focus your emails on a portion of your ideal audience which improves the effectiveness of the email by a long way as recipients of an email are 75% more likely to click on segmented campaigns over non-segmented.
According to Mailchimp, segmented email campaigns are opened 14% more, are clicked on 100% more, have a bounce rate 4.65% lower, and are unsubscribed from 9% less than non-segmented campaigns.
Email Deliverability
One of the biggest keys to a successful email marketing campaign is improving your deliverability, which is a measurement of how well your email is at arriving to its intended destination. Is your email getting into the inbox of your recipient?
Here are a few key things to look for to get your emails delivered:
1. Avoid being marked as spam: When your emails get marked as spam, ISPs may start to think that you’re spamming more people and that could lead to having more and more of your emails marked down as spam. The best practice to avoid somebody marking you as spam is to develop a solid opt-in process where people recognize they’re signing up for an email and are accepting that you will send them future email campaigns. Avoiding the element of surprise goes hand and hand with avoiding spam. You should not be sending email marketing campaigns to people who are not familiar with your company or not expecting to hear from you.
2. Don’t sound spammy: Not exactly an exact science, but when writing subject lines you need to avoid sounding like spam or click-bait.
3. Keep the content relevant: A lot of things go into creating quality emails like making sure you’re sending to an interested audience with proper segmentation and writing quality copy that is relevant and engaging. Emails that people actually enjoy will increase many other email metrics (like click-rate, conversion rate, etc.) and lower the chance that someone marks you as spam.
With the right content and the right tools, you can avoid the dreaded spam filter and build a successful email marketing campaign.
