Marketing automation is a buzz word you might have heard of recently. Although there are lots of marketing automation technologies we’re specifically looking at email automation for this article.
Automation has applications across all industry sectors and allows you the opportunity to provide additional information to your customers/subscribers in order to improve the customer relationship or encourage repeat orders.
The basic idea is that you setup a number of emails in advance for a variety of different topics, along with triggers that determine when and how they will be sent. These are then sent to your users as and when they trigger the automation. This enables you to drip feed your business to them over the course of months or even years.
Your marketing automation can feasibly split into 3 key areas: New / Potential Customers, Engaged Customers, Lapsed Customers.
A few examples for you of how you could automate your email activity:
E-Commerce
- Birthday promotions – Set to email once a year with a new voucher code offering a small discount, or set to send a series of emails over a period running up to the users birthday in order to encourage them to make a birthday purchase (i.e. to wear on their birthday).
- Loyalty Point Updates – To remind users once a month of their current loyalty points value and messaging to encourage them to spend the points.
- Series after visiting website – A series of emails triggered if a user fails to check out on the website, starting with a simple message eventually building to a voucher code over the course of a week.
- Post purchase feedback – Follow up any purchase with the request for product reviews
Business, Brands or Service sector
- Series after user subscribes to mailing list or fills out contact form – This could trigger a number of emails that explain your brand, products and services offered and attempts to Onboard new customers. By the time you get to speak to this user in a sales setting they already have a lot of the information to hand and you can get right down to business.
- News / Blog – You could set your news / blog system to populate and send a quarterly email newsletter.
- Educational – Provide useful how-to’s over a series of emails – for example for to implement a content strategy in 6 easy steps (over 6 emails)
