How Does Email Marketing Automation Benefit Your Business?

In the information age, we’re starting to see the beginning of the end for a lot of the older forms of advertising. Traditional commercials just don’t give companies the level of information that internet-based ads do. Since data is everything when it comes to improving a marketing campaign, the old ways are becoming less useful to companies.

While people usually include forms of advertisements such as TV commercials and print media ads in this category, one type advertising campaign that some people include—but really shouldn’t—is email marketing. Email may be from the old days of the internet, but it has gone through massive changes to stay relevant. One of the more recent changes was the integration of automation.

Sending automatic emails might not necessarily be new, but the process has become so good these days that it certainly feels like a fresh way to go about your email marketing campaign. If you’re unsure of the ways in which email marketing automation can benefit your business, then keep reading our guide to learn more.

It Increases User Engagement

One thing that many companies using automation for their email marketing campaigns report—across the board—are higher levels of engagement. Through the use of specific targeting, personalized messaging, and drip campaigns, businesses can create content that encourages people to want to learn more and interact.

Specific Targeting

In the past, some companies tried to create different emails based on consumer preferences—items they’ve bought—or simple demographics. While this showed promising results, companies with massive email lists didn’t have the time to implement such a system. With automation, you can send out multiple email variations with the press of a button.

This improvement makes targeting specific groups via email much more effective. Of course, you still need a team to write these emails and create reusable templates, but once they’re put together, the division and sending process is a cinch, making this method worth the time investment.

Personalized Messages

Once you start looking at your email messages as marketing templates, you can personalize them even more. For every email you send, you can create a system that uses the name of the person the email is being sent to. You can also include details such as the time of year or where they live, making the email seem like you tailored it specifically for them. You can even set up birthday emails to give your customers a unique discount. Sending a personalized email makes people feel special and will make them more likely to engage with you.

Drip Campaigns

It’s important to note that people receive a lot of emails these days. To receive clicks on your emails, you’ll need to be persistent. Sending out one or two emails and giving up on that prospect after getting no response isn’t going to provide the results you’re looking for. Instead, you need to set up a drip campaign that keeps your name showing up in their inbox.

Thanks to automation, this process is easier than ever. After establishing your parameters, your automated drip campaign will know how long it’s been since the last email was sent and can immediately send another one. One such parameter you can base it on is the time of year. If your sales tend to increase around the beginning of summer, you can be a bit more aggressive in the spring and then ease back off come fall. You can even remind customers that they left some items in their cart online.

Another thing you can use drip campaigns for is your remarketing campaigns. If you base the parameters on the last time the customer made a purchase from your store, you can easily turn an average customer into a loyal one. After providing the system with your preferred email template and parameters, the rest will take care of itself.

It Makes Emails Feel More Professional

While all these strategies sound great on paper, they don’t really do much if you don’t give them a professional feel. People will likely ignore an email if it looks unfinished or reads like a scam. Fortunately, automation can help your team improve the professional tone of your entire campaign.

Fewer Mistakes

Since your email marketing team will now focus on creating emails that they’ll reuse multiple times, they can focus more on quality and less on quantity. Obviously, that will mean fewer spelling and grammar mistakes, but it will also help them work on the overall tone of the content.

Of course, mistakes can happen in other places, too. When sending out emails manually, errors are bound to happen. Your team might end up sending a bunch of Christmas emails in the middle of July or forget an entire group of recipients when managing these campaigns on their own. Automation all but eliminates these issues. Computer programs don’t forget, and they can be programmed well in advance, giving your team plenty of time to find potential problems before they go out.

Catalog of Activity

The level of professionalism in your emails can work in the consumer’s favor as well. These days, most people receive important documents and notifications via email. The days of receiving bills in the mail are long behind us.

That means if you’ve set up your automation system to send customers an email detailing their recent online purchases, you’re doing them a huge favor. They’ll be able to easily track their purchases from your company through their email manager. Many consumers prefer to track purchases this way, so creating a catalog of activity can help you retain more business like other companies that are already doing this.

It Makes the Email Marketing Process More Efficient

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the biggest benefit that email marketing automation can bring to your company is the increased efficiency among your team. This applies to both the time and the money put into campaigns.

It Saves Time

Regardless of the industry, switching to automated systems or services always saves companies a ton of time. Tasks that used to take an employee an hour to complete can now take as little as a few seconds for a computer to do. Because of this, employees can spend their time doing more important things such as other aspects of their work.

Even though we’ve already covered a lot of the details on how email automation saves time, one aspect we didn’t go over is the tracking of engagement. Most email marketing programs have the ability to create data sheets detailing who opened which emails and which of those led to purchases. Having all that information at your fingertips will make future decisions for your email campaigns much easier. You can shift your focus towards more engaged groups and away from others.

It Saves Money

Removing the need for employees to do the menial task of sending out countless emails will save you a lot in the payroll department. Of course, you’ll still require employees to write out the content of the emails and work the program, but you won’t need nearly as many.

Even though the program you use will end up costing you money, the number of sales that will start coming in due to the improvements made by the automation will make that money back—and then some—in no time. Once you reach that point, you’ll be making more revenue than you ever did with the old system.

It’s Easy to Outsource

After learning all the ways in which email marketing automation can benefit your business, it’s certainly hard to argue that it isn’t worth your company’s time or effort. The results speak for themselves. If you simply don’t have the time or money to set up an automated system, you could always turn to an outside source to run these campaigns for you. There are many reasons to hire a professional email marketing agency, but the main one is you’ll know that they’ll create a quality campaign for your company every time.