11 Tips to Improve Automated Email Marketing Workflow

Email marketing is a powerful way to connect with your customers and keep them up to date on your latest products and services. However, it is often time-consuming as it involves creating and sending out mass emails. Besides, personalizing each email for marketing may take a long time.

One way to improve your email marketing workflow is to automate your email marketing. This allows you to send out mass emails without having to personalize each one. In addition, automated email marketing can also help you keep track of your customers’ activities and preferences to send them more targeted emails.

How to automate your email marketing workflow?

Set Up Your Goals

Before you start automating your email marketing, you must first set your goals. What do you want to achieve with your email marketing? Do you want to increase sales or improve customer retention? The goal will act as a guide to help you determine the best way to automate your email marketing.

When setting up your goal, ensure that it is SMART. This means that it should be:

• Specific - Your goal should be clear and concise.
• Measurable - You should be able to track the progress of your goal.
• Achievable - Your goal should be realistic and achievable.
• Relevant - Your goal should be relevant to your business.
• Time-bound - You should set a deadline for achieving your goal.

Once you have a goal in mind, you can avoid sideshows and overcome challenges that may come up along the way.

Create An Email List

The first step when automating your email list is to create an email list through the following:

• You can use the signup forms on your website or blog. Once you have a list of email addresses, you can start segmenting your list to send more targeted emails.
• Ask your readers to comment on your blog posts and include their email addresses. This way, you can build a list of people interested in what you have to say.

Once you have an email list, you can merge them into one master list. This will make it easier for you to manage your email list and avoid duplicates. Several tools can help you with this. For example, the Mailchimp merge list feature allows you to combine multiple lists.

With all your email lists and data in one central place, you can easily analyze and segment your data. This will allow you to send more targeted and relevant emails to your customers. You can also track user engagements more effectively.

Subscribe To An Email Marketing Service

An email marketing service is the best way to automate your email marketing workflow. It provides you with tools and features to automate your email marketing. For instance, they can help you segment your list, personalize your emails, track user engagement, and more.

These email marketing services can increase your return on investment by over 3000%. However, these returns depend on what service you are using. There are several platforms that you should ensure you are settling for the best.

Here are features to look for in an email marketing service:

• User-Friendliness - The platform should be easy to use to save time and increase productivity.
• Affordability - The service should be affordable so it does not waste your profits.
• Segmentation - The platform should allow you to segment your list to send targeted emails.
• Analytics - The platform should have robust analytics so you can track your return on investment.
• Email Deliverability - The platform should have a good reputation for delivering emails to your subscribers.

With the proper email marketing service, you can easily automate your email marketing workflow and save time. Once you have subscribed to an email marketing service that meets your needs, you can start setting up your automated email marketing workflow.

Segment Your Email List

Segmentation is one of the most important aspects of email marketing. Segmenting your email list allows you to send more targeted and relevant emails to your subscribers.

You can segment your email list in several ways:

• By demographics such as age, gender, location, etc.
• By interests. For example, if you sell different products, you can segment your list by product type.
• By engagement. You can send more targeted emails to people who have engaged with your brand in the past.
• By behavior. You can send a special offer to people who abandoned their shopping carts.

You can send more targeted and relevant emails to your subscribers with segmentation. It also ensures that your readers and leads get the message they want to hear and relate to and not just a message that looks promotional. This will help increase your open and click-through rates.

Optimize Your Email Messages

After segmenting your list, you need to optimize your email messages and personalize them to be relevant to your subscribers.

There are several ways you can personalize your emails:

• You can use the person’s name in the email’s subject line or body.
• You can use the person’s location in the email, like ‘Hey [city], are you ready for summer?’
• You can use the person’s interests in the email. For instance, if you sell different products, you can mention the product they are eyeing.
• You can also use dynamic content in your email messages. Dynamic content is a type of content that changes based on the reader’s interests. Hence, if you sell different products, you can have different images or links for each product. This way, the person only sees the product they are interested in purchasing.

However, ensure you don’t spam your readers with several irrelevant contents in trying to push through with marketing your brand and products and services. The messages should be well-designed and present a clear call to action (CTA).

Use Responsive Templates

With more people reading their emails on mobile devices, it is vital to use responsive templates. These templates look good on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. You do not have to create separate email versions for different devices using a responsive template, saving you time and money. Likewise, responsive templates improve the user experience and make it more likely for people to click on your links.

Test Your Emails

You should test your email before you send it to your entire list. This is to ensure that everything looks good and that there are no errors. You can send a test email to yourself or a small group of people. You can also try sending different subject lines of the same or even different email content to a group of people and see which one performs better.

Additionally, you can use A/B testing to test your email subject lines, sender name, email content, CTA, etc. With this, you can find the best-performing version of your email before you send it. Once you have tested your email and everything looks good, you can send it to your entire list.

Use Triggered Emails

Triggered emails are an excellent way to automate your email marketing workflow. They are sent based on a user’s behavior. For example, you can send an abandoned cart email to someone who left items in their shopping cart.

You can also set up triggered emails for other events such as birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Triggered emails help increase customer engagement and sales.

To set up triggered emails, you must first identify the events that will trigger the email. Once you have identified the triggering event, you can start setting up the email sequence.

To set up an abandoned cart email, check when the user abandons their shopping cart. You can set up an email sequence that is triggered every time a user abandons their shopping cart.

The email sequence can be a series of emails sent over a while. For instance, you can send the first email immediately after the user abandons their cart. You can then send a follow-up email a few hours later and another a day later. The goal of the email sequence is to convert the lead into a customer.

To increase conversion chances, you must ensure that your emails are well-written and relevant to your target customers. You must also try to offer an incentive in your emails to make people more likely to buy from you.

Use Automated Customer Services

Customer service plays a significant role in business communication as it is the first point of contact between a business and its customers. Automated customer service can provide your customers with the help they need without hiring someone to do it for you, saving you time and money in the long run.

The same applies when using email marketing. Automated customer service can include live chat, email support, FAQs, etc. This ensures that your business has lively and engaging conversations with buyers any time they interact with your business. They can easily find answers, ask for help, and get support when needed. This will go a long way toward preventing them from unsubscribing to your email list.

To set up automated customer service, know your customers’ needs and meet them. Once you have identified your customers’ needs, find software that meets those needs and use it to set up your customer service.

Track Your Results

It is crucial to track your results to see how well your email marketing campaign is performing. There are several metrics that you can track, for example:

• Open rate - the percentage of people who open your email
• Click-through rate- the percentage of people who click on a link in your email
• Conversion rate - the percentage of people who take the desired action after receiving your email

You can use these metrics to track the performance of your email marketing campaign and make necessary changes to improve your results. The best way to track your results is by dividing them into milestones, so instead of measuring the whole outcome of your email marketing, you should measure the results of each milestone. This could be how many people opened your email, clicked on a link in your email, etc.

By tracking your results in milestones, you can see what is working and what isn’t. This will help you improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign at every step.

Analyze Your Reports And Get Lessons

One of the most important things you can do to improve your email marketing campaign is to analyze your reports and learn lessons. Ensure you do these after every email marketing campaign. This will help you understand what works best for the campaign and what tanks eventually.

You can also use this opportunity to get lessons you can apply to future email marketing campaigns. Suppose you notice that your open rate is low. Thus, you can try to improve the subject line of your emails. You can try to make the CTA clear once you notice that people are not clicking on the links in your email.

By analyzing your reports and getting lessons, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. It also ensures that you are always learning and growing as a marketer.

Conclusion

Email marketing is strategic in reaching out to your customers and building relationships. However, it is essential to note that it is not a one-time thing. You must continuously work on it and improve it to get the best results.

The tips discussed in this article will help improve your email marketing campaign to improve customer engagement. Yet targeting your audience and prospective customers through email isn’t as simple as it sounds. You have to consider several strategies to boost your conversion and click-through rates, and strategically pattern your emails to suit the receiver’s taste. Furthermore, your automated email marketing, especially its content, should be tailor-fitted to your target to ensure eventual sales and revenue.