Top email automation strategies for small business

 

Email marketing automation is a game changer for those who are looking to harness that sweet ROI power of this channel but need it to be automated to free up time. Because let’s face facts, if you had to send a birthday email to each and every one of your customers, it would be exhausting. Customers would fall through the cracks. But unlike humans, machines don’t make mistakes. And by using automated email campaigns, you can earn a lot more revenue pretty much on autopilot.

1. Targeting your Sign Up Forms

Great email marketing doesn’t start when you create your first campaign. When you’re creating a strategy for email marketing automation, it all starts when, where, and how you initially capture that email.

Using the targeted sign up forms is useful for a few different reasons:

* You can make sure they don’t show up to those who have already signed up

* You can target specific customers with specific relevant offers

* You can get different kinds of information from your customers with different forms

2. Segmenting your Subscribers

Whether you’re building your list from scratch or you’ve got a beautifully curated list of subscribers, it’s time to segment them. Your customers are far from exactly the same- and they won’t respond the same way to every message you send. So you’ll need to separate them into smaller groups to create messages that are truly relevant to them.

There are a few different ways to segment:

* Profile data: demographics, interests, etc

* Campaign activity: frequency of engagement, last engagement, inactive, etc.

* Shopping behavior: last purchase, purchase frequency, purchase amount, cart abandonment, browse abandonment etc

3. Nailing the Customer Journey

Much like incorporating new channels into your marketing automation workflows, it’s important to create workflows that respond to typical stages of your customers’ journey.

In your automation workflows, you should have each of these staple workflows:

* A welcome automation series: to introduce your customer to your brand, give them their sign up incentive (if you had one) and show them what to do next

* A birthday series: to give your customer a little something special on their birthday

* An abandoned cart series: to bring your customer back to complete their sale

* Order and shipping confirmation emails: to keep your customer up to date and foster trust with your brand

* Follow up and feedback emails: to get feedback on recent purchases and propose a cross-selling product or two

* Reactivation emails: to bring inactive customers back into the fold