Email Marketing Automation: All advantages at a glance
Updated: Sep 7, 2019
I explain to you how email marketing automation enables you to reach your customers in a targeted, individual and needs-oriented manner in all situations with little time.
Automation is the magic word for time-saving, personalized and highly effective email marketing (with the right software), but certainly not rocket science.
What is Email Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation describes the automation of marketing processes with the help of suitable software. As part of e-mail marketing automation, e-mails are set up once using
this software and automatically sent as soon as a defined event occurs. What sounds very technical and impersonal up to this point, however, allows you to send individual, target group-oriented mailings. For example, this can be when a prospective customer signs up for your newsletter, downloads a whitepaper after a lecture or has your birthday already registered as one of your already registered customers.
The goal of Email Marketing Automation is to significantly reduce your efforts while sending emails to each recipient according to their needs and actions.
By personalizing and adapting e-mails to defined events, the so-called trigger e-mails achieve a particularly high response. The positive side effect: you feed your recipients and customers in the long term with appropriate content and thus strengthen their loyalty to your company.
E-mail marketing automation in practice
Automation combines two basic processes: data management and campaign management. In order to create specific campaigns and to send them individually, you need the corresponding information about your e-mail recipients in the previous step.
data management
Data management means the administration of your customer data, ie the administration of all data of your newsletter subscribers, buyers, interested parties, event participants, ... As a rule, you know their name and e-mail address. Purchases, frequency of purchase, open rates or the behaviour of your (potential) customers in newsletters and on your website can be used to derive additional data.
The e-mail marketing software can be used to form segments that bundle your customers and readers into interest groups. In the case of an online electronics market, for example, a group of 35-45-year-old male customers with an interest in TV and sound equipment and a group of 25-35-year-old female customers interested in video games could emerge. These segments show that it takes two completely different pitches to target the different
recipients.
By means of the appropriate software it is possible to find similarities between specific persons and to assign these to different recipient groups.
Personalized campaign management
The next step is to define an e-mail process for a specific target group in the Campaign Manager of your e-mail marketing software. A newsletter-welcome-series could for example run like this: "If" the prospective customer subscribes to your newsletter, "then" he receives "after 2 hours" a "welcome mail" and "after 2 days" an "info-mail" (eg about the publication date of the newsletter, regularity, special offers, etc.). "Then" he is transferred to the "Standard Newsletter Campaign".
So if a prospective customer signs up for your newsletter, he will always be greeted automatically. This way, you can engage your recipients individually and with campaign-
related emails when their interest and openness are highest, rather than just addressing them weeks later. Best of all, you will have already collected information about the new
recipient in order to better reach him later, after being transferred to the standard newsletter campaign.
The Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
E-mail marketing Automation brings a multitude of advantages: It enables you to send individual, personal mailings that are precisely tailored to the needs, interests and living situations of your recipients. With the right data and campaign management, you can achieve almost a simulation of 1: 1 communication.
Time savings
Probably the most important advantage is the time savings and the simultaneous increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of your mailings. Who has time to greet each newsletter subscriber individually? E-mail marketing Automation creates completely new ways of communication with considerable time savings: from the welcome page to satisfaction surveys, information series on events or the sending of tailor-made, needs-oriented product information before and after a purchase.
Targeting through better knowledge
With email marketing automation and the right data management, you get to know your recipients and customers better than ever before. How does a reader react in your newsletter? Which contents and products interest him? Appropriate monitoring of behaviours and smart data management will give you a holistic view of your customers and
individual targeting - a trend that is currently reflected in all areas of marketing under the buzzword "personalization".
More highly qualified leads
At the same time, a greater number of highly qualified leads are created. While it often happens that marketing leads to cold leads being passed on to the sales department,
needs-oriented communication enables Leads to be individually processed and sustainably qualified. Where are the interests of the lead? Does the lead even fit into the
customer grid? What information is the lead ready to give?
Higher open rates, click through rates, conversion rates & improved ROI
As a result of individualization, the open rates and thus also click rates, conversion rates and the return on investment increase. At the same time, all processes and substeps can be executed in such a transparent way that optimizations can be made precisely where they are needed.
More competitive appearance in the market
As a small business, your larger competitors will virtually always have more resources for marketing and more sellers than you. Nevertheless, that does not mean that you are not competitive. Because e-mail marketing automation does not mean that the company with the higher advertising budget wins, but the one that can specifically provide its recipients with personalized and relevant content.
Email Marketing Automation with mailchimp
Marketing Automation is ideal for better understanding and communicating with customers. With the help of mailchimp and automated e-mails, you are involved in the customer life cycle: You recognize what your contacts are really interested in and when exactly a particular topic is relevant. The email marketing software tracks openings, clicks, filled web forms and takes information from web analytics tools.