Email in marketing remains the most effective channel in terms of conversion. Nevertheless, data protection regulations, contact volume or personalized messages make it laborious and difficult. Email marketing automation allows to remove all these obstacles.
In this article, we will focus on what email marketing automation is. We will discuss its benefits and see the best practices for effective email marketing automation.
What is email marketing automation
Email marketing automation is a digital marketing practice that involves sending emails to customers or potential future customers automatically. Initially, it is implemented to limit the repetition of small actions and thus save time.
In short, automation makes it easier to comply with the RGPD (for Europe) or to launch a campaign at the most appropriate time. It also provides a better user experience and therefore, better results.
What are the benefits of email marketing automation?
There are many benefits to email marketing automation. We'll cover the most important ones.
Increase the profitability of a campaign
When you automate your email marketing campaigns, you increase the profitability of it through several factors:
- Cost reduction: time is money. The automation aims to make you save some.
- Increased sales: automation allows you to send marketing emails at the best time to increase the number of sales.
- Customer loyalty: only regular contact allows you to build customer loyalty. Except that communicating regularly with an address book of several hundred contacts is only possible with automation.
- Campaign targeting: it is easier to target and personalize an email marketing campaign with automation. This is essential to drive open and click-through rates.
Improve the user experience
The challenge in marketing is to make the user feel supported in all circumstances. This requires being ultra-reactive throughout their buying journey. Marketing email automation responds perfectly to this constraint, as it allows sending emails autonomously.
Analyze data and optimize campaigns
The best marketers in the world agree on one thing: there is no perfect marketing. It's all about testing and improvement. But improvement without measurement is meaningless.
With automation, you can retrieve essential data that will help you determine points of improvement:
- The opening rate is often linked to the subject of the email or its first lines
- The unsubscribe rate reflects the relevance of the message for the contact
- The click rate is often linked to the copywriting and the effectiveness of the Call to Action
Examples and best practices for email marketing automation
Email marketing automation is essential at almost every stage of a customer's buying journey. In some cases, it even helps capture new customers. However, the RGPD rules remain very strict on email prospecting.
Automation offers the advantage of triggering a direct response following a predetermined user behavior. For example:
- The purchase of a product on your online store triggers the sending of a personalized thank you and order confirmation email.
- On his birthday, your customer receives a voucher of X € on your store.
- You have just had a sales meeting with a potential customer and you want to maintain the relationship with him.
The possibilities in email marketing automation are countless, such as email signatures generators. Nevertheless, some rules must absolutely be respected to have convincing results.
To begin with, segment your mailing lists for marketing campaigns. By sorting your customers into groups according to a purchasing behavior, a social characteristic or other, you facilitate the personalization of your emails.
In this regard, personalization is essential to gain efficiency. Nobody wants to talk to a robot. That's why, in your email, insert personalization variables such as the first name, last name or purchase history of your recipient.
Furthermore, opt for A/B testing to optimize your conversion rate. This consists in sending 2 emails with the same message to two groups of individuals with the same characteristics, but with a different subject, image or call to action. After analyzing the results, you keep the more effective version.
Push email marketing automation with Abyssale
At Abyssale, we understand the challenges of email marketing automation and we work every day to make it more affordable.
Our tool allows you to automate the personalization of the visuals integrated in your emails in order to improve your customers' satisfaction or to increase your conversion rate.
You will find several tutorials to help you do this. For example, we explain how to send personalized images in your emails with Mailchimps. This is also possible on Lemlist. We explain how in this article.
With further automation, you can also insert dynamic content for your Mailchimps campaigns to adapt the same message to different targets. Dynamic content can also be inserted to Sendinblue.
Finally, email marketing automation is not just a time saver. It is above all a way to optimize email marketing campaigns and improve their conversion and profitability. It is no longer a benefit, but a real necessity.