7 Email Marketing Automation Tips To Improve Productivity

Are you facing gloomy conversion rates or depressing ROI, in the thousands of emails you flood on a regular basis?

If you nod, you’ve landed on the right article.

So before moving further on the topic, let’s do a reality check of your emails.

Expectation	Reality
Yes! I would definitely go with this brand because it crafted a mail just for me!	Eww! I hate this brand, it is taking me as a liability, let’s move to another.

This is what you expect, and as a result, this is what you are getting.

Do you seriously want your customers to feel more connected with your emails? But you don’t have the time to leave your desk, even for your daily refreshments?

Have you ever experimented with your running eCommerce marketing strategy or tried email marketing automation in your business? Not yet?

Then, perceptively, now you should! And here’s why…

You know how email marketing automation can boost your productivity, don’t you?

Maybe, you thought, it is not very important, but let me tell you, it is critical for your business.

Let’s find out how.

But before that, let’s quickly brief upon what exactly email automation is and how does it work?

What is Email Marketing Automation?

Email marketing automation is the practice of sending promotional or transactional emails to your intended audience based on predefined triggers or events.

Example – When your customer leaves your store without completing the purchase, he would receive an abandoned cart email from your side. Or when any visitor subscribes to your site, he will receive a welcome email.

Broadly, I am seeing some major advantages of email marketing automation in eCommerce. It saves time, boosts the open rates of your emails, enhances click-through rates, and also ensures on-time email deliveries.

Email Marketing Automation is an effective eCommerce marketing strategy to judge and analyze whether emails are working or not(You may also use an email finder tool for a similar purpose if done manually). Even better, automating email deliveries is highly dependent on your customer needs and audience behavior.

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So I hope you now have an idea of what email marketing automation is. So let’s talk about some of the email marketing automation tips that will help you improve your productivity. You can use this table of contents section to jump to your favorite tip.

1. Hyper-Targeted Personalization

A rudimentary rule for every email. You need to make sure your emails look like they are written by a human, not through some tool. People feel more connected with content that is specifically tailored for them.

According to an Experian report,

Now, this doesn’t mean you need to create 500 different emails if you have 500 subscribers. What you can do is segregate your users as per their characteristics and then create a few versions they can resonate with. And you can use tokens to address them with their name so they can feel connected.

There are several email marketing tools available to ease this process. My first recommendation for you to do this would be HubSpot. It helps you create workflows and automated email campaigns in a way that makes prospects feel more connected to your content and brand.

So the question is, how you can get more personalized in your emails? And what are the best practices of individualized email messaging?

Well, I would suggest you analyze your customer behavior and past-purchases first. Then, set-up workflows for your audience as per the research.

Your automated email campaigns should meet the specific requirements for your business. So, make sure you are targeting the right audience at the right time, with the right message.

Track the performance of your email marketing campaigns by measuring the ROI (Return On Investment), by analyzing the click-throughs, purchases, and the AOV(Average Order Value).

Creating tailored messages requires you to segregate your users. And doing that gives you a better understanding of your audience which helps you know them better and feeds you with more productive ideas of targeting.

2. Automating Customer Service

Email marketing automation it helps you trigger emails (based on your subscribers’ behavior) as well as drip-feed email campaigns.

Instead of creating manual campaigns every time, when you talk to your customers, you can go for easy automation. This prevents your customers from leaving you in the middle of the buyer’s journey so you can have a more productive conversation.

How?

Think you run a web designing agency. You got a prospect who is looking for web designing. What would you do?

Usual Approach

The smile gets spread over your face and you prefer cold calling. He doesn’t respond. You start emailing him, after a day. This email is ignored and has been converted to email flood. At last, that so-called prospect leaves you.

Smart Approach

You order a coffee for yourself, first! Then take a 15 minutes break from your core running project. Come back and open your CRM dashboard, design a drip-email campaign of 3 emails.

1st Email: Say, on Tuesday, as an initial email, you introduced yourself as a Web Designing Agency, and ask, if the recipient is looking for anyone your kind?

2nd Email: If he/she didn’t respond, you can catch him/her on Saturday, with an email ”Can we meet?”

3rd Email: Still, on getting no response, he/she would be getting an email like, “Are we still on?” Or “We are currently running with offers”.

It hardly takes 20 minutes to design a campaign, set it on, and return to your current project without much effort and with great results.

Many softwares these days come with features that let you automate your customer service. I’m quite sure your email automation software can also let you do that(if you’re using any).

Automating your customer service is also another way to increase your productivity.

3. Segmentation-Triggered Automation

Before a genuine email blast, you should think, am I emailing the right person? You can carry out segmentation based on your customer’s behavior, demographics, industries, or from where they get information about you.

Some of the ways you can achieve this include smart pop-ups, for both registered and guest users, a simple subscription box in your blog posts, some cool and attractive offers on your site, interactive customer referral programs, page view tracking, social media marketing, quizzes, polls, and email activities.

Before implementing these, you should look for the kind of audience you are targeting. And what are the most important segments you should target?

1. You just need to apply filters to your email list, Whether they are hot leads, cart abandoners, new customers/ leads, or inactive subscribers.
2. Save your segments, based on segmentation criteria.
3. Launch your campaign, by displaying dynamic content to your audience.
4. Create rules and get started.

4. Helpful Reminders And Coupons

Email Marketing Automation possesses huge potential to bring new customers, retain older ones or get users back on your site. You can create auto-responders and automatic email reminders for those to automatically prompt them to make a purchase.

Marketing Automation helps you create targeted email campaigns, dynamic discount coupons, and smart pop-ups to encourage your customers to make or complete a purchase with a series of friendly reminders.

You can drive repeat purchases, nurture your lost carts, pitch them back and improve your conversions by following the right segmentation rule. And all of this will be automatic. You don’t need to push users manually towards a product and they will be nurtured automatically. This will eventually save your time you spend on marketing and will lead you to increased productivity.

5. Responsive Email Templates

Well, I wouldn’t say this would increase your productivity. But it’s a fact that what looks good, sells well. How your email looks, plays a major role in determining, will your email be opened or not?

An appealing email design helps you get higher click-through rates (CTRs). Additionally, a responsive email template adjusts its size as per the device’s screen. Hence, you don’t require to create multiple templates for different devices and screen sizes. One template will do and won’t keep your coders busy which will allow them to focus on other productive tasks.

There are lots of things to keep in mind while designing an email for your subscribers or customers. Some of them are:

1. The email template, you are using, should be mobile optimized and responsive.
2. Use clear, direct, but dramatic subject lines and avoid spam words.
3. Stay attentive to layouts, font size, buttons, and email length.
4. Keep images and text in a balanced way.

You can also skip the process of designing responsive email templates through a simple hack.

You can easily get a variety of attractive website templates for emails. One of the most popular and trusted of these is the HubSpot Marketplace, which is a central Hub, offering highly responsive free and paid templates to all users.

6. Track And Report Customer Behavior

Marketing has got smarter.

With email marketing automation, you can track and measure the performance of your campaign. Not only this, smart CRMs like HubSpot allow you to track the website activity of each and every user. So, whether the user is your regular subscriber or a cart abandoner, if he’s there at your online store, you can track what actions they performed.

You can track each activity by judging the customer’s behavior to connect the dots and take decisions with customer insights, and reporting. Further, running A/B testing would also benefit you.

Here, HubSpot comes as a super helpful email marketing tool that lets you create multiple stages for your contacts, deals, companies, etc.

Breaking orders in deals or contacts in different stages helps you analyze and better forecast the sales and revenue of your store.

7. Declutter Your Email Database

I don’t think anybody reads all of their emails. Or even looks into other tabs like Social and Promotions.

Most of the emails people receive go unread but they still occupy the space in your database since you ignore them. This clutters your email database and eats your time by confounding you for searching important emails. And obviously, you can’t be productive if your time is wasting.

So to untangle this situation, what you can do is unsubscribe the emails you don’t engage with.

There are two ways to do this. Either you can manually unsubscribe to the unimportant ones, this can work if you have a countable mails. But if you have a copious amount of it, you can use bulk unsubscribe tools to execute this. Unroll.me is a considerable option to do this.

Unsubscribing to futile emails will not only save you time and increase your productivity, but also make your mailbox fast and organized.

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Now you know some of the best practices of email marketing automation to boost productivity. But why on earth do you need marketing automation? Or simply, do you really need marketing automation? Let’s shed some light on it.

Does Your Business Need Marketing Automation?

If you also look to grab the above benefits in your business, marketing automation is something you need. Other than these benefits, marketing automation also has some amazing stats. Here are some of them:

• Businesses that implement marketing automation experience an average of a 451% increase in qualified leads.
• Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
• Nucleus found that marketing automation improved business productivity by an average of 20%.

I think the above stats are capable of telling you how email marketing automation helps you drive enough sales at your store. This can be achieved only if you’re opting for the right email marketing automation software that helps you to plan, execute, manage and automate your business campaigns.

If you ask me about the things I’d like to do with my marketing automation software, they would be:

1. Email Automation
2. Dynamic Content Personalization
3. Revenue Forecasting with ROI Tracking
4. Audience Targeting and Segmentation

If you are searching for a relevant marketing automation platform that helps you perform all these above tasks with fluency, HubSpot would be my recommendation for you. It is free, loaded with features, and can drive great results for your business.

If you need any assistance regarding HubSpot, or even have a minor doubt about the platform, you can always connect with our HubSpot experts and get free advice on how to make the most out of the marketing automation platform.

This Wrap Is Delicious…

You can effectively boost the email productivity of your business, by making your customers happy, and perform personalized content marketing, and resolving their issues automatically.

This is true for all your products, content, and services. So, try to act like a human, connect with your customers and reach them smartly. Do not try to be pushy, rather deliver value.

Did you find this blog useful or was it not worth the time you spent reading it? And, I want honest feedback. So, please revert with your opinions and if you need any kind of help, I am there to assist!

See you in the comments box. Put your retinas down or slide your fingers, the choice is yours!