A Five-Part Series on How to Use Email Marketing for Your Business
Part 2: Automation, Analytics, and Sweating the Small Stuff
Welcome back to our Five-Part Series on How to Use Email Marketing for Your Business. Short answer: It’s easy. By now, we’ve covered the importance of reaching customers through personalized email campaigns, the power of social media networking, and how the right frequency and timing can really impact your ROI.
This round, we touch on automation (making your already-great email marketing campaigns even more efficient and effective), analytics (everybody needs a system of checks and balances), and the oft-overlooked details (subject lines, content, all the meat and potatoes).
Let Automation Work for You
You’ve probably seen the statistics: Digiday says 57.9% of respondents in a survey in April 2015 said automation would save time mining consumer insights, 44.9% collecting and managing visual media; Epsilon says automated emails get a staggering 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails; eMarketer tells us that B2C marketers who connect with customers through automated emails see conversion rates as high as 50%. The numbers go on, but they all add up to one thing: Email marketing automation works.
So, what is it? Put simply, email marketing automation refers to the software designed to help prioritize and execute marketing tasks in a more streamlined way. Think of email marketing automation as the eye-popping window display that drives traffic into your business, converts that traffic into leads, and closes those leads into customers. In short, it’s generating revenue for your company through an automated system.
Here’s the thing: Email marketing automation allows marketers to do more with less. Automate and schedule personalized email campaigns to best accommodate subscribers and potential subscribers. Use autoresponders (offered by email marketing platforms like Aweber and MailChimp) to follow up with customers, keep them interested and coming back, build customer loyalty, and, ultimately, make sales. Set up triggered cart and browser abandonment emails (according to Ometria, cart abandonment emails sent within 20 minutes, reminding customers what they’d left behind, saw an average 5.2% conversion rate). Gain insight into (and, therefore, control over) which elements of data are the most valuable to your business, giving you the information to act upon the results.
