Email automation is a great way to get some of your marketing tasks running on autopilot, freeing you up to focus of building customer relationships. However, automating anything can feel a little impersonal and robotic which could lead to less engagement from your audience. So how do we balance convenience and time-saving with a personal and effective strategy when is comes to automating emails? Here’s 5 email automation tips to get you started…
#1: Segment your list
No one wants to receive emails that aren’t relevant to them, so use groups or tags to organise your subscribers into separate segments and customise the content you send them. Segments could be based around subscriber’s characteristics, demographics or buying behaviour. for example, if you’re a selling a B2B service, you could have segments based on industry or company size. If you have a B2C ecommerce website, you could have segments based around products people have purchased in the past.
A great example from Feetus here where the customer receives an email with links to products in their size, making it personal, relevant and really easy for the customer to buy:
#2: Test your emails on mobile
Email is being read more and more on mobile devices, yet we often create and test our emails on a much larger, desktop screen. Most email marketing tools allow you preview your email in a mobile format, so make use of this when creating new automations. But, there’s no substitute for sending yourself a test email too and checking you can receive and view the email on your mobile.
Do you have email automations you created months or years ago? If so, when was the last time you checked what they looked like on a small screen? Go back and check!
#3: Helpful CTAs
Every email you send out should make it really simple for the recipient to reach out to you, so don’t leave your call-to-action (CTA) to the last email is a long series of automated emails. Instead, ensure that your contact details are clear on each email and there’s an easy way for recipients to find out more information if they’re ready to buy.
Using an email template is the easiest way to do this, so your contact details are present on each email without you having to manually add them each time.
#4: Keep branding consistent
Email templates are also a great way to keep your branding consistent across all emails. Consistent branding (i.e. logo, colours, fonts) has a number of benefits aside from making your email communications look professional, it also helps recipients become familiar with your brand, improving the chance of recognition in the future. Changing your branding in every email because you fancy using a different colour or font can create confusion and looks less professional. Imagine going to the supermarket and seeing all your favourite brands with different logos and different coloured packaging every week – to the brand owner, it might seem fun, but to the consumer it would make the weekly shop even more frustrating!
#5: Personalise your automated emails
To combat some of that robotic feel of automated emails, be sure to personalise your emails as much as possible. Personalising the subject line can help improve the open rate of your emails, whilst personalising the content can make your emails much more tailored to your audience. Use merge fields to greet the recipient with their name, mention the product they purchased from you in the past, or say where they met you. You’ll need to make sure this data is in your list for each recipient and if there’s any gaps in your data, make sure you have default values to fall back on so your email still makes sense. (Using MailChimp? See their handy guide on merge fields and defaults.)
It can be tempting to “set and forget” email workflows, so take this opportunity to review any email series you have set up and use the above email automation tips to refine your content, improve your open rates and increase your engagement and enquiries.
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