Introduction
Email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for marketing your business today, but it’s evolving.
While newsletters and one-off campaigns will always have their place in your email marketing strategy, the smartest companies are starting to set up automatic email campaigns that trigger off of a user’s actions.
Why? Because these automatic emails are timely, personalized and hyper-relevant to the reader. As a result, they are opened and clicked more frequently and drive visits and revenue for your business.
Let’s go deeper into exactly what automation is and look at 10 different types of automated email campaigns you can use in your own business to grow your revenue.
What is email automation?
As opposed to newsletters and one-off campaigns that you create and send to a whole list of people in one go, an automatic email campaign is set up once and then automatically sent to a particular individual when that person meets a certain trigger.
To give you an example, imagine you’re Facebook and you want to send an email to somebody when they signup for an account. This email will welcome them to Facebook and show them how to get started adding friends and uploading a profile picture in an attempt to get them to become a frequent user.
It would be a huge waste of your time to manually create and send an email campaign to every person when they sign up, so instead, you could set up an automated welcome email that gets sent whenever a new person joins your “Signups” list.
That’s the beauty of email automation, you can set up the email once and then as more people continue to meet the trigger you defined, the email will continue to be sent to them without you ever having to lift a finger. It essentially automates your marketing for you.
Grow your business
Because email automation works on a basic trigger and action system (i.e. when a specific trigger happens, send this specific email or set of emails) you are really only limited in what you can do by your creativity and business needs.
To give you some ideas and help you get started, we’ve compiled this list of 10 automated emails you can start sending today that will help grow your business.
Welcome new subscribers.
According to research, 96% of visitors to your website aren’t yet ready to buy. However, these people have clearly shown interest in what you have to offer and are perfect candidates to continue communicating with to try to get them to buy later on.
A great way to do this is to get them to subscribe to your email list. Subscribing to your list is a much smaller conversion action than handing over money to make a purchase, and therefore people are much more likely to do it.
Once they’ve subscribed, you can then use an automated email campaign to welcome them to your list and offer a special subscriber-only offer that compels them to buy.
The email is visually appealing, has a prominent call to action and features a subscriber-only offer to get 15% off the next purchase.
This kind of automated welcome email can be set up in just a few minutes. You simply need to add an email subscribe box to your website that adds people to a list in your chosen email marketing tool and then set up an automated email to go out whenever someone joins that list.
If your ecommerce platform supports it, you can even generate a discount code and include it in the email. Not only does this provide a great incentive for people to purchase, but it allows you to track the effectiveness of the campaign and see the impact it has on sales.
Increase product usage.
Most online applications utilize some sort of free trial period to get potential customers to try the product and ultimately become a paying customer.
Before people will convert into a paying customer though, they need to realize the value of your product during the trial period, otherwise, why would they start paying for it?
At Campaign Monitor, before a person would consider upgrading to a paid account they need to realize the value of the product. This usually means they need to create a campaign, upload their subscriber list, and send it out.
So in order to encourage people to progress through those steps and realize the value of our product, we utilize a series of automatic emails that go out to people when they create an account.
Welcome email
This email goes to out to everybody that creates a Campaign Monitor account and contains some basic information about their account they’ll need moving forward, such as their login URL and email address.
