From re-engaging an audience through an email campaign to reminding customers of their abandoned cart, here are 15 answers to the question, "Can you share your most effective strategies for how a business can use email automation?"
Run a Re-engagement Campaign
Add Email Validation to Sign-up Forms
Automatically Reply to Your Subscribers
Systematize Crucial Financial Tasks
Nurture Leads With Follow-ups
Generate Drip Campaigns
Follow-up Post-purchase
Build Better Customer Relationships
Send Educational and Awareness Emails and Newsletters
Segment Your Audience
Automate Review Requests After a Positive Experience
Keep Customers Engaged
Boost Your Engagement With Automated Welcome Emails
Set Up a Cart Abandonment Series
Run a Re-engagement Campaign
Automated email re-engagement campaigns can save a small business a significant amount of time by automating reaching out to inactive customers. These tools also allow businesses to segment their customer list and target specific groups with personalized content, increasing the chances of successful re-engagement.
You can also find detailed analytics, enabling businesses to easily track the success of their re-engagement campaigns and make data-driven decisions that increase the ROI of these campaigns. Automating our re-engagement email campaigns resulted in a 37% increase in click-through rates, and our number of inactive customers and qualified leads has decreased considerably.
Joe Flanagan, Founder, 90s Fashion World
Add Email Validation to Sign-up Forms
Set up your sign-up forms with an email validation API. This will ensure that the emails you receive are accurate and up-to-date, which can be leveraged to send personalized, automated emails.
This form of email automation is great for nurturing leads and helping customers through the sales funnel. You can set up automated triggers, such as when a customer leaves items in their cart or subscribes to your newsletter, so they keep getting reminders about products or services they may have an interest in.
Additionally, you can send regular updates about new content or products—again, these are personalized and tailored messages since you're using accurate contact information from your sign-up forms. Email automation is an essential tool for businesses today, as it helps manage relationships with both current and potential customers more efficiently and accurately.
Michael Fischer, Founder, Elite HRT
Automatically Reply to Your Subscribers
With email automation, you can send automatic replies to your subscribers based on the content of their messages. For example, if a customer contacts you to ask about a product, you can set up an email automation that will automatically send a reply notifying the customer that you will get back to them shortly.
This saves you time and prevents you from having to manually send individual replies to each customer who contacts you. Additionally, it ensures that all customers receive a consistent customer service experience, regardless of whether they contact you via email, phone, or in person.
Matthew Ramirez, CEO, Rephrasely
Systematize Crucial Financial Tasks
Email automation can help streamline vital financial tasks, often prone to human errors. Sending automated emails keeps finances on track by allowing businesses to quickly send invoices and follow up with clients who have yet to pay them.
Such timesaving measures can save a company both money and resources and increase customer retention by ensuring invoices are sent in a timely manner with frequent reminders for those that may have been forgotten or overlooked. This proactive approach can help businesses remain financially solvent and continue building strong customer relationships.
Michael Sena, Founder and CEO, SENACEA
Nurture Leads With Follow-ups
As a marketing agency, we use HubSpot's email tools to build out automated lead-nurturing emails for our leads. That is, when a lead downloads a free offer, such as a whitepaper or eBook, on our website, they get automatically enrolled in a series of three to five emails to encourage further engagement with relevant content that we provide.
We tailor these for the offer, so if the person downloads an SEO checklist, then they'll get emails about SEO-related topics, with links to articles or other content. And, we've split these lead-nurturing workflows by buyer journey, so those leads that have engaged with more than one offer get a more "decision" stage set of communications.
For example, we might suggest they talk to our sales team for a quote. This system builds re-engagement and helps our marketing team to provide warm leads to sales.
Generate Drip Campaigns
Email automation allows businesses to set up a series of emails that are triggered when certain actions take place. For example, you can email a welcome series for new customers or a special promotion for customers who have recently made a purchase.
Drip campaigns allow you to create automated emails that are sent out at predetermined intervals based on user activity or other data points. This helps ensure your messages are fresh and relevant and also makes sure that users receive timely information without having to manually manage it themselves.
By leveraging the power of email automation, businesses can use drip campaigns as part of their overall marketing strategy to drive engagement with their products and services.
Asker Ahmed, Director and Founder, iProcess
Follow-up Post-purchase
Email automation is a great way for businesses to optimize their post-purchase follow-up. It can be set up to send out thank-you’s after purchase, check in on customers' experiences, and even offer discounts on future purchases or refer-a-friend programs.
This helps to build loyalty and encourages repeat customers, giving them a sense of support that you're there to help with any issues or concerns. It also allows you to get immediate feedback from customers, allowing you to make changes if necessary and respond quickly in order to keep customers happy and retain them as long-term buyers.
So I believe it helps the process of post-purchase follow-up become easier and more efficient while creating an excellent customer experience.
Arkadiusz Terpilowski, Head of Growth and Co-Founder, Primetric
Build Better Customer Relationships
Email automation is powerful—but most companies only use it in the most basic way. But if you put the time into segmenting your contact list appropriately, you can use email automation to improve relationships with your customers.
For example, knowing who your best customers are means you can send exclusive VIP offers in just a few clicks. Knowing which of your customers is on the cusp of churn means you have one last opportunity to win them back with a well-timed email. This is the next level of email automation—and not enough brands are actually doing it.
Whitney Blankenship, Content Marketing Manager, Drip
Send Educational and Awareness Emails and Newsletters
When a business promotes itself as an entity that is not only out there to earn profits but also to educate the audience and spread awareness, customers find it easier to connect with the brand.
Email automation enables brands to generate and line up content as blog posts, infographics, newsletters, and more and send them out regularly to their audience. This way, users expect the literature they regularly receive in their inboxes and relate every product and service associated with this niche to what the brand offers.
Of course, the education and awareness the brand imparts and spreads are added advantages of such a mutually beneficial relationship.
Brendan McGreevy, Head of Strategy, Affinda
Segment Your Audience
Instead of engaging a large group of followers at the same time while also sending them the same email, segment them into multiple groups so that you can easily customize your communication approach.
One method to effectively do this is to use the customer's purchase as insight to determine how to communicate with them in the future. By analyzing specific actions of your customers, you can segment them to allow you to provide more personalized experiences and connect with your audience in a way that makes the best use of email automation.
Dakota McDaniels, Chief Product Officer, Pluto
Automate Review Requests After a Positive Experience
One unique approach to email automations is sending a sequence of emails requesting a review to clients or customers. Ideally, this sequence would start after a positive encounter with your business, such as a successful customer care conversation. Starting this process is easy.
After a customer's positive experience, you can write an automated sequence of 1-2 emails requesting a review. To trigger the sequence, you'd need to tag the customer with an appropriate tag in your automation email.
You can also personalize the sequence with items such as the product the customer purchased or the name of the customer care employee who served them. Overall, an automated review sequence is a fantastic way to increase review volume and online reputation.
Axel DeAngelis, Founder, Jumpcoast
Keep Customers Engaged
It is quite common for people to register for an account only to find out that the promo code they have is expired. They picked it up from an old post somewhere and realized it after signing up. People also abandon their carts, thinking they probably don't need the product right away. Their self-control gets triggered at the very last minute, and they disappear into the internet abyss.
To fix this, a business can set up a triggered email campaign targeting these groups. People who tried using expired promo codes or abandoned their cart can get an automated email like "Looks like that code has expired, but here's a new one!" or "Here's a special discount for you! Come back and get your product."
Triggered email campaigns are targeted and personalized, as they are only sent to customers who have already expressed interest. Unlike traditional marketing emails, which can easily end up in the dreaded spam box, triggered emails have a higher likelihood of being taken seriously.
Andreas Grant, Founder, Networks Hardware
Boost Your Engagement With Automated Welcome Emails
Any customer engagement strategy must include welcome emails, and automation may elevate them to a new level. Businesses may provide new subscribers with useful information and forge a personal connection straight away by setting up an automatic welcome email series.
For instance, as a media company that caters to engaged couples, we use pre-written welcome emails to introduce our brand and offer advice on arranging a wedding. Besides having high open and click-through rates, welcome emails are a powerful tool for attracting and keeping subscribers.
Automated welcome emails are a necessity for any company trying to forge enduring ties with their clients because they can save time and guarantee that every new member receives the same excellent experience.
Dustin Sitar, Managing Editor, The Groom Club
Set Up a Cart Abandonment Series
The rate at which online shoppers add an item or service to their cart and then just leave the website altogether is very high. That being said, just because they might not be ready to buy right away, doesn't mean they won't be soon, and an automated email is a perfect way to remind them of what they're missing.
By setting up automated cart abandonment emails, you are not only prompting them to complete their purchase but you are prompting them to come back to your site and who knows, they just might end up leaving with more than they had the first time around.
Kelsey Dech, Content Marketing Manager, John Fluevog Shoes