Email automation has become an essential part of any effective marketing campaign. With automated emails you’re able to build lasting, personalized relationships with your customers, sell your products more often, and grow your business faster than ever.
The good news is you don’t need a big marketing budget to effectively use marketing automation software and take full advantage of email automation. In this article, we’ll talk about several topics, including what is email automation and what are the most popular automated email responses you should be sending.
If you’re in a hurry, feel free to use the table of contents below to jump to the section that you find most interesting.
What is email automation?
Email automation is an email marketing feature that allows you to send emails as a sequence, with specific time intervals in between them. Just like you set up your out-of-office messages, you can send your email marketing campaigns automatically. You would use this approach, for example, if you wanted to send an email course where each message would comprise an individual lesson. Marketers often call these drip campaigns or follow-up sequences.
How does email automation work?
To send automated email campaigns, you’ll need either an email automation or a marketing automation platform. Whichever tool you use, the logic remains the same.
Before anyone can start receiving your messages, first you have to specify a set of conditions and put them into a workflow. Think of it as a scenario — when a subscriber meets the conditions you’ve specified in the scenario (e.g., they’ve filled out your newsletter signup form), it triggers the system to send out your email.
The good news is that when you set up your workflow and hit publish — you’re done! From that point forward every time your customer meets a specific condition, they will get your automatic email. In this way, email automation is like sending a personalized message for your customers without having to write one every single time.
Also, many automation tools offer prebuilt marketing automation templates you can use immediately. The video below shows you how the workflow templates work in GetResponse.
Benefits of email automation
Here are the five main advantages of using email automation.
- It saves times
According to the data from the Email Marketing & Marketing Automation
Excellence 2018 report, the most impactful benefit of email automation is its ability to save you time.
Imagine that you have to manually send a welcome email every time a new person signs up to your list. By putting this kind of communication on autopilot, you’re saving a tremendous amount of time that you can allocate to other areas of your business.
- It makes your marketing campaigns scalable
Thanks to email automation, you’re able to scale your marketing campaigns more effectively.
The amount of time you save increases with how many automated campaigns you deploy, and how many people enter your workflows.
Equally, no matter how many people receive your automated email responses, it doesn’t change how much time you have to spend to set them up.
- It lets you personalize your customers’ experiences
Although some automated emails may feel robotic, using email automation is one of the best ways to make your communication more personalized and engaging.
That’s one of the main reasons why automated (or triggered) emails get much higher engagement rates than what you would see for standard email campaigns.
The chart below comes from the Email Marketing Benchmarks Report and shows the comparison of the average engagement rates generated by each message type. – Read more
