Email Strategies You Should Be Automating

Email strategies may be overwhelming, but it’s a beneficial and effective method that can provide consumers with valuable info while.

The benefits of automation are various: it cuts down on tiresome physical tasks, decreases human mistake and increases consistency. It also helps establish a regular message “tempo” with recipients and delivers marketers a regular baseline upon which to build metrics and improve measurements. Automation is not best for every campaign, however. To most successfully leverage this method, view it as the first step in a broader event-based marketing initiative. The more marketers can tie emails back to a trigger point – and a recognizable event, a specific date – the more consumers will anticipate receiving the message. Event-based campaigns to consider might include:

Renewals & Reminders

If contacts subscribe to a business’s products or services, it’s likely that those subscriptions are set to expire. Marketers are pressed for time, so it’s nearly impossible to get a firm grasp on which subscribers are within a 30-day or other, renewal window at any given time. This is where automation comes in. Marketers should use subscription deadlines to set triggers for reminder email campaigns. This kind of campaign can be used for diverse types of businesses or subscribers. For example, those who have viewers with contracts or subscriptions expiring, previous consumers who have purchased a product that is usually consumed or expired within an average span of time or even contacts who have received a time-sensitive promotion from a specific brand, all stand to profit from these automated emails.

Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are a significant way for brands to establish a relationship with new subscribers and are some of the most easily automated. The trigger is clear – senders need to set their emails to be sent after a certain amount of time has passed from the time a contact first subscribers to their mailing list. The purpose should be to have these welcome emails delivered within the first 24 hours of sign-up. Internal data suggests that the ideal time frame to send welcome emails is between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Transactional Emails

Similar to welcome emails, brands can also leverage automation for their transactional emails – the emails that are sent when a consumer interacts with a brand in a direct and important way. For triggers, businesses use certain actions (or inactions) such as purchases or password changes as an example. Companies can distinguish their transactional messages from other email deliveries by refraining from using sales language and including critical information exclusively that the consumer is expecting, such as buying confirmation, delivery information or new password verification. By doing so, brands can influence receiver anticipation around these emails to increase overall campaign open rates.

Helpful Tips

Rather than trying to sell something, businesses will want to use some campaigns to promote usage of a previous purchase/service. For example, if a B2B marketer notices that many consumers are not exploiting a service included in their package, a helpful reminder will assist them in using the product to its maximum. In this case, use the absence of certain events (e.g., no download) as the campaign trigger.

Feedback Requests

In the same way that marketers like to help their consumers, some consumers might want to help them. Businesses can use recent purchases and subscriptions as triggers to automate emails asking for product reviews or survey participation. Senders should set email automation so that only the most active contacts receive these emails, as they’re most likely to provide valued comment.

Reactivation Campaigns

Businesses can also rely on automation to help increase interaction with inactive email addresses – be sending final, friendly emails with incentives to interact. If these messages don’t work, senders should delete these email addresses from their contact lists once and for all.