Marketing your products and services using emails is a concept as old as email itself. It was one of the first forms of digital marketing and has stayed relevant in the midst of continued technological changes and marketing innovations.
What makes email marketing so relevant even in this day and age is the effectiveness it offers as a medium of marketing and the highest in-class returns on investment. You may not believe this but email marketing generates an astounding 4000% ROI.
Owing to advances in software functionality, it has become easier to run marketing campaigns using emailing as a medium to reach your customers. A business can send millions of personalized marketing emails at one click.
Coupled with Email marketing’s effectiveness, reach, returns, and relative ease of operations, it has become the go-to option for fulfilling sales and marketing objectives for big, global, small, and medium businesses alike.
The past decade has seen the implementation of automation and AI in Email marketing which has overwhelmingly changed how email marketing is done.
It is now easier, time-saving, efficient, and effective to use email marketing compared to any other form of traditional and digital marketing medium.
Email Marketing Automation - Making easy, easier!
Running businesses, even the small ones, on a global scale pushes the operational horizons far beyond the traditional and offline business realm. The extent of exposure you have to the audience in the online space is vastly more than that of offline space.
A traditional hoarding beside a highway will grant you exposure to 10000 viewers a day on average. When it comes to email marketing, you technically have access to over 3.5 billion email accounts and you can reach them with a single click.
That of course, isn’t productive and is ineffective, but the point is, you have a hundredfold reach, you only have to think about getting to the right people!
Email marketing campaigns have an average conversion rate of 2%-5% across various industries. So, if you want 100 new conversions, you’ll have to send marketing emails to at least 5000 individuals.
Traditionally, Email Marketing tools have allowed businesses to run automated email marketing campaigns. Though these are effective and offer high returns, they aren’t as efficient if you purely consider just the numbers.
Technology has made it possible to send automated marketing emails to millions of your subscribers and audiences. The ability to send such a large amount of emails justifies using a marketing method with such a low conversion rate.
Image Courtesy – Constant Contact
Moreover, emails as a marketing instrument are compact. A marketer only needs to ensure the email design is appealing, that it has powerful CTAs and that it reaches the right person at the right time. Automation makes this simple process even simpler.
The downsides of email marketing are well compensated by the savings made in terms of human efforts and business resources. Automation only magnifies these gains and thus should be incorporated into your email marketing strategy.
All a business needs is a growing mailing list, a good email marketing tool, and a well-designed email marketing strategy to rake in new customers at very low costs.
How does Email Marketing Automation work?
Automation allows for far more advanced operations in terms of email marketing, running an automated marketing email broadcast is only the tip of the iceberg.
Email marketing tools offer various features to make your email marketing campaigns more effective. The main aim of these features is to free up human and other business resources.
Not every service provider offers the same feature set but here are some industry-standard automated features that most email marketing tools provide:
Segmentation -
Offering a slight degree of personalization can make a huge difference in making any email marketing campaign successful. However, when your mailing list is over a hundred thousand recipients, offering personalization seems impossible.
Automation makes such things possible, all you have to do is define parameters, behavioral or demographic, based on which you want to segment your mailing list. Segmentation will be done automatically and you’ll be able to send emails personalized to the likings of each segment. This significantly raises the impact of your email marketing campaign.
Syncing and updating mailing lists -
Multiple platforms are responsible for adding to a business’s mailing list. Previously, all the incoming additions needed to be pooled together and then were added to the final mailing list in timely intervals.
At present, using the power of automation, all a marketer has to do is integrate the different platforms used by a business with its email marketing tool and the tool will auto-update and sync the mailing list across platforms in real-time. This results in a smoother and productive email marketing campaign run.
Syncing and updating mailing lists -
Image Courtesy – SPCDN
Follow up emails -
Image Courtesy – SPCDN
Triggered emails -
Image Courtesy – SendPulse
If an audience activates some trigger on a specific product, service, or pricing page, the system sends an automated mail to them with relevant information tied to the specific trigger they set off.
Reminder emails -
Image Courtesy – Neil Patel
Email Marketing Automation and Lead Generation
Over 90% of the people that visit your website are not ready yet to make the purchase, they’re either unsure or maybe are considering alternatives to your products and services. Staying connected to these people raises your chances of making a sale.
There are many ways a business can stay connected to its potential customers but by far the most effective way is via emails. Having your potential customers opt-in for a newsletter by providing them with some value in return is by far the best way of getting their email addresses.
Once you have them on your mailing list, you can use the power of automation to send them a slew of carefully tailored emails that will instill confidence in them to go on and make a purchase.
Image Courtesy – Kaep
As discussed earlier, Segmentation enables a business to group all of its potential leads according to the characteristics they exhibit. This can be how far they are in the sales funnel, what product or service they’re looking for, their requirements, or other predefined parameters.
This will help a business to decide on the best approach they can take to nurture these potential leads. Knowing this will allow a business to send appropriate emails to these leads which won’t just boost engagement but also the conversion chances.
Another thing that automated segmentation enables is for you to personalize these emails to suit the preferences and likings of the recipients. A personalized approach is way more effective when it comes to targeting and converting leads.
Addressing the exact requirements of a potential lead is very important. Automation not only allows you to find a leads’ exact requirements but also lets you follow up on that with personalized and targeted marketing material by way of Triggered Emails.
Reminder and Follow up email feature of Email Marketing Automation can be productively utilized as a form of lead nurturing. Timed emails laced with marketing materials help nurture leads and raise the conversion rate.
Lead Generation has always been most effective using email marketing, It is 2021 and email marketing is still trending in the B2B space. Automation has only taken its productivity and efficiency even further while making the setup and operations as simple as possible.
So Finally
Email Marketing is the oldest but still the most effective form of Digital Marketing and there are solid statistics to back up this claim.
Automation has changed the way business is being done throughout, Email marketing is one of the several business functions that have benefitted from this.
Using Machine learning and computation power to automate tasks that do not require critical decision making and intervention from humans can free up valuable time and resources for a business.
These man-hours and resources can be allocated to higher-value operations to further generate more value from a business.
So how will you make the most of Automation?
