DIGITAL INTERACTIVE SERVICES

Email marketing and steps for automation

Businesses build the strongest relationships through personal connections. Without a personal connection, relationships can fall apart quickly. In the marketing world, 72% of consumers only respond to personalised emails. But how do large businesses scale this up for many customers?

This is where email marketing automation interacts with the customers at every stage of their journey. Research shows that automated and personalised emails generate 320% more revenue, with 90% more customers likely to buy your product or service.

This article explains what email automation is and its benefits and steps.

What is email automation?

Businesses can use email automation to connect with existing and potential customers at specific times. Use pre-defined or custom-designed workflows to send emails to specific segments in your list.

With email automation, you can send relevant emails to the right people at the right time without human intervention. You can also link your CRM system with the email automation system to nurture new subscribers or leads and create a sales funnel.

Examples of email automation include –

1. Order confirmations.
2. Birthday greetings.
3. Welcome message to new subscribers.
4. Abandoned cart notifications.
5. Shipping and delivery confirmations.
6. Cross-sell and upsell emails.
7. Product abandonment emails.

Why should you automate marketing emails?

From personalised messages to higher retention rates, email marketing automation has numerous benefits –

Personalised customer experience

Research shows that 90% of customers find personalised content appealing and tend to act on receiving it. Email marketing is one of the best ways to do personalised communication with potential or existing customers.
Automation can help you create a sales funnel with minimal or no human intervention, thus increasing sales and nurturing relationships.

Maximise your marketing budget returns

Email automation has changed the way businesses communicate with their clients with minimal manual effort. Your teams spend less time manually compiling email lists and scheduling the messages. Instead, your marketing team can utilise that time on other valuable tasks such as relationship building and analysis of email campaign results.

Achieve a higher customer retention rate

The cost of selling to a repeat customer is much less than doing so for a new one. With automation, you can stay in touch with existing customers and send them relevant messages to maximise the impact when they are ready to purchase your product or service.
Personalisation with reference to the customer’s previous interaction with your business can give you extremely high retention rates.

Scale up the marketing

Manual email marketing is limited to the size of the staff that handles it. Will your existing team be able to handle email marketing if the customer base increases 2x or 3x quickly? This is where automation helps you scale up fast.

Customer behaviour and interaction with your website tell the email marketing system what message to send at a given time.

Steps to automate email marketing

The following steps outline how you can set up your email marketing automation –

Step 1 - Choose an email marketing automation software

This is the foundation of your email marketing automation, and you must choose a system that best serves your business. Here are some of the key features to look for –

1. Basic to advanced email automation capabilities.
2. Personalisation features.
3. Integration with CRM and CMS systems and e-commerce platforms.
4. Exceptional real-time analytics and reporting.
5. Easy-to-use email templates.
6. Dynamic list segmenting.
7. Advance features such as A/B testing.
8. Mobile optimisation.

Step 2 - Segment the list of subscribers

Your marketing team must spend time on segmenting the customers based on the categories relevant to your business. The categories could be based on demography, location, profession, purchasing history, etc. Each segment could have a sub-segment.

The email marketing platform should let you create custom fields that you can integrate with the CRM for dynamic segmentation. Personalisation based on email segments not only builds trust but also maintains transparency with the subscribers.

Step 3 - Set automated workflows

Once you have the segments sorted, you can start targeting the customers at different stages through automated workflows. Here is what you can do –

1. Nurture the leads.
2. Welcome new customers (buyers or subscribers).
3. Increase product or service acceptance.
4. Collect feedback.
5. Delight the customers with a surprise.
6. Promote freely without dependency on external platforms.
7. Increase brand affinity/camaraderie.
8. Get lost customers back onboard.

Step 4 - Gather data and optimise the emails

After a few email campaigns, your automation system will start generating reports and uncover trends in customer behaviour. The relevance of this data will depend on your audience size, industry, content diversity, baseline conversion rate, etc. You can analyse the outcomes and adjust the campaign accordingly.

For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.

How can Infosys BPM help?

The Infosys BPM marketing operations (MarkOps) helps you across digital content and campaigns. Your business can leverage our business-oriented marketing solutions to scale fast with cutting-edge data security.

Read more about marketing content operation solution at Infosys BPM.