Email automation is one of the best ways of ensuring that you save time and fulfill your email marketing tasks all at the same time. But it’s more than just about saving time and making your process more efficient. Email automation is also about providing personalized content and increasing conversation rates.
So how can you use email automation to drive sales?
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The Power of Segmentation
To begin with, segmentation is one of the main features that companies can take advantage of. Email marketing platforms, like Campaign Monitor, provide sophisticated list segmentation so that businesses can send more relevant emails to their subscribers. Segmenting your list has evolved from simply separating males from female and now combines data points like age and gender with geo-location and transactional history. By doing this, marketers can create truly create personalized messaging to individuals on a 1:1 basis. For example, an online women’s fragrance retailer wanting to promote a Kardashian perfume can create a segment group targeting women between the ages of 13-30 who live in New York and have purchased from them in the last 6 months as a test email campaign to determine who is most likely to buy this product before rolling it out across their customer base.
Segmentation allows marketers to send personalized messages and offers to people who have a far better chance of being interested.
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Selling Based on Subscriber Source
Many companies get subscribers from a range of channels. By using automation, emails can be sent based on what content the subscriber consumed when opting into the email list. This is significant because the people who subscribe from an industry white paper will have different interests from those who subscribed via a how-to article.
Knowing where a new subscriber came from and what type of content they were consuming gives context to what messaging you use when sending them emails.
Increase Sales Through User Action
What you must remember is that certain customers will use only certain products from your business. For bigger companies, there’s going to be a lot more variation. Take the social media management product, Hootsuite, as an example. Some of their customers may be interested in scheduling social posts ahead of time, whereas others may be interested in tracking brand mentions across different social media channels. You can use email automation to dynamically send information to them that is specific to what they’re interested in. This builds up your reputation as the best solution to solve their problem.
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For example, if a potential Hootsuite customer visits a landing page that’s specifically about their brand mention tracking feature then email marketing automation can be set up to automatically send them a series of emails about the importance of tracking brand mentions throughout social media channels.
Marketing to Customers in Varying Stages of Interest
Another part of dealing with customer behavior is dealing with customers who are in varying stages of the buying cycle. For example, it’s possible to track which customers clicked on an offer, which customers bought the offer, and which customers ignored the offer entirely. Email marketing platforms give marketers insight into which emails in a given email sequence each recipient is engaging with. This provides a clear picture about where they are in the buying process. For example, if a subscriber continues to consume email content that is all about how to use a product to solve a problem then marketers can use email automation to continue to send more educational content about all the ways their product solves that problem.
Another way businesses can market to customers who have indicated interest at a given point in the sales process is to remarketing to customers who clicked through an email to a purchase page but didn’t complete the purchasing process.
There are literally hundreds of ways in which you can segment customers and attempt to sway them.
So, What’s the Best Way to Get Started?
First, understand that email marketing automation is about so much more than saving time. The core of it is user behavior and how you should react to that. Some of this is trial and error, but if you segment your customers correctly you’ll be able to increase your sales and drive more revenue.
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This is not everything you needed to know about email marketing automation, but it’s the launching point every company needs.
How will you use email automation as part of your business?
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