What is email marketing automation?

Email marketing involves sending emails to current and potential ideal customers with the aim of creating interest, building strong brand relationships and gaining higher conversion rates.

In modern day marketing, a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer appropriate. You can’t send the same email to 10,000 contacts. Instead, email content needs to provide value, be highly targeted and personalised, and reach the right audience at the right time.

Enter marketing automation.

Marketing automation is the use of software and technology to automate repetitive, manual marketing activities. Its purpose is to solve one of the biggest marketing challenges faced by businesses – the amount of time it takes to execute these marketing activities on a mass scale.

Three pillars of email marketing automation

The following steps will set your business up with the right foundations to support your email marketing activities now and in the future.

1. Build a segmented list of contacts

Put plainly, without a list of contacts, you don’t have anyone to email. You also want this list of contacts to be of high quality, targeting your ideal customer, rather than a cold list.

An important part of this is mapping the customer experience to understand who should be on this contact list and how they should be segmented. Ask yourself: Who is your ideal customer? Where are they from? How do they buy? What are they looking for?

Segmenting your list will identify what’s truly unique about your customer base and tailor your communications to serving those niches.

Consumer demands are constantly changing and it’s important for you to keep up-to-date with your customers’ purchasing patterns and behaviours, re-evaluating and re-segmenting as needed.

2. Choose an email service provider

When selecting a provider, it is crucial to choose one that you’re comfortable using and has high functionality, capable of scaling with your business.

You need to ensure that your chosen provider will integrate seamlessly with the other platforms and applications you are using in your business processes.

Using a platform like ActiveCampaign takes the hard work out of automating your email marketing, so you can spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time working on your business.

3. Automate and analyse

Through platforms like ActiveCampaign, you can use data segmentation and custom fields so that when customers interact with your brand, automated emails will be triggered.

Integrating marketing automation into your business can help you understand your customers better and convert more business. To do this, you need reporting that provides actionable data.

Data can be overwhelming, but focus on the metrics that matter:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Unsubscribes
• List growth rate
• Forwarding rate

Looking at the above information will give you a sense of what is working and what is not, so you can guide your strategy accordingly and create better business outcomes.

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Elevature provides business automation solutions and integrates different software platforms so that their clients can operate a connected digital environment. Learn more here.