What Is Email Automation? How Does Automated Email Sending Work?

Have you ever subscribed to a newsletter or new website and immediately got a welcome message on your email? That’s an automated message. No person is sitting behind a desk typing emails for the hundreds to thousands of people subscribing to a website every day.

Not only would that be time-consuming and difficult to manage, but it would also be costly.

Business owners, online retailers, and influencers are all serious about keeping in touch with their customers. This builds a good relationship with your customer base and is important to keep them coming back.

That’s why email automation is so important.

But what is email automation?

Email Automation

What is email automation?

Email automation is done through software that will automatically send an email to a user at the correct prompt.

This could be a button that they press on the website, a timed email for advertising, or even just a simple welcome message.

Some more complicated software can use your website analytics, like geographical preference, age preference, previous sales, or gender to send automated messages to only certain customers that would be interested in certain products.

This sort of targeted marketing is being used more often than not. If you’ve ever searched something online and found an ad on Facebook that is advertising the same stuff you were looking for, look no further.

Email Automation Diagram

How can email automation be used to grow your business

The software used to do email automation is quite simple to use. Not just that, but there are plenty of email marketing automation tools available online.

There’s what we call a trigger. This trigger is what tells the software to send an email to all the emails listed. These triggers can be simple things like a date, time, a certain button on your website, or an activity done by a certain customer. 

This trigger tells the software to then send a related message to the user. Each trigger message can be customized to say whatever you want it to.

For example:

When a new person enters their email and clicks subscribe, you can have the automation software send a welcome email to the new subscriber.

According to campaignmonitor.com, welcome emails have a 91.43% read rate and 5 times the click-through rate of standard marketing emails.

A lot of businesses that set up online shops, won’t see sales immediately, which is why it’s important to get them to subscribe so they canr receive emails frequently.

If you’re looking to get the most out of your automated emails, whether it be a welcome email or promotional email, a great way to get more out of your email is the use of  power words. They can be difficult to get right, but if you follow this guide to the best power words, then you’ll quickly start seeing more emails converted.

What are the benefits of email automation?

1. Use your marketing team to its full potential

Automated emails don’t just have to be used for customer relations.

Instead, a productive workforce might see the unlimited power of using automated emails. 

Weekly events and reminders can easily be set up to be sent automatically to your co-workers, instead of wasting time writing them over and over again, or even worse, setting up a meeting that could have been an email.

This could help the people at work not only save time for more important things, but should also keep morale up, whilst keeping everyone informed. Workers don’t have to waste as much time writing and compiling emails, which is soul-draining.

The bottom line: With automation, more gets done—and the added productivity is of higher value.

Use your marketing team to its full potential

2. Provide a customized experience.

All research points to what most digital marketing agencies already know, that users like to have a customized experience.

An interesting article on Salesforce shows that 66% of customers expect businesses to be able to meet their needs and expectations. 

Thus, more than half of the people you will find on your website will be expecting some sort of personal touch.

Automated emails will do just that. Using specific parameters set on automation software, you can send emails to only certain people. This targeted marketing makes customers feel heard and like their expectations are taken into account.

Not only that, but you can create weekly, or monthly email campaigns that keep your subscribers and customers up to date about your latest products and services that might be of interest to them.

This allows you to create an efficient sales funnel, as your relationship grows with your customers.

In addition to that, you can also leverage email automation to get your customers’ feedback after their purchase, which is definitely a great way to help provide a better experience based on their evaluation. This is especially for products in constant development (e.g. Saas products).

3. Keeps customer retention rates high.

It’s much harder trying to convince a new customer to buy your product than to keep an existing customer buying from you.

Not only will it save you time, but it will also keep costs down a whole lot.

When a customer subscribes to your website and buys a product, make sure to have an automated message sent to them now and then. It could be weekly or monthly, but it’s important to remind them of your business and any promotions.

Make sure to keep it personalized though, a simple promotional email most likely won’t grab anyone’s attention. If you have any promotions on something a certain customer would want, then it’s important that the promotional emails only go out to them.

4. Allows smaller businesses to cater on a larger scale.

Sending emails to your customers and subscribers can be very time-consuming.

Even worse, would you even be able to cope with the number of emails daily, if the number of customers doubled today?

Most likely not.

To keep up, you would most likely have to hire an assistant, to manage a sizeable junk of the new customer base.

Instead, if you have an automated email system setup, you will still be able to handle all your emails, but without needing the extra manpower.

Freeing up any staff you already have by getting an automated mailing system will allow them to shift their efforts to more important things.

How can email automation be used more effectively?

Automated emails can be tricky to figure out at first, and it might even take a while to get your setup correct to truly take full advantage of it.

But it’s worth it.

With some trial and error, and very close monitoring of your analytics, you should be able to identify how many emails a customer needs a month to keep them interested, which customers should get which emails, and even the best time of day to send those emails.

A tip to remember is to make sure you keep all the information you can get. Every time an automated email is sent, you can get important information from it.

Speaking about promotions.

Using this valuable data, you should be able to target specific customers for related promotions. Sending a promotion to only customers who have a higher chance of buying your product, will help you avoid wasting resources on customers who aren’t interested.

You’d also be saving money on marketing costs since you’re lowering the number of people the promotion is sent to.

Another great way you can maximize what you get out of automated email systems is what we call in the marketing business a “drip campaign.”

This is when you target potential customers, who regularly visit your website, but never buy anything. An automated email is set up to gradually send out emails that are related to the content the customer is looking at. You could even throw in a promo if that’s what would get them to buy from you.

Get to work building your customer relations today!

Email automation has not only changed the way businesses run digital ad campaigns and interact with their customers, but it has changed the expectations of possible customers. Most online users today will expect some sort of customized experience, as well as a fast and easy-to-use website.

A well-timed response is a great way to get a possible customer to become an actual one.

Automated emails allow you to keep your customers happy, in the loop, and feel like their expectations have been met.

Never has there been a better time to get your automated email game on, like now!

Read more: Email marketing affiliate programs
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Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.

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