Main menu

Pages

email marketing automation strategy

 

email marketing automation strategy


Email marketing automation is one of the most important parts of creating a sustainable business. The success of your email marketing strategy is directly dependent on how well you understand your customer’s pain points and how you execute to solve those problems.

There are two parts to this:

  1. Understand your customers and their pain points.
  2. Create clear, effective solutions that solve those problems.


What is email marketing automation?

Email marketing automation is a series of techniques that let you target your email campaigns. These tricks are useful for marketers who want to reach specific audiences on a regular basis rather than waiting for the perfect moment. Email marketing automation is also useful when your audience is highly engaged with your brand or your message, or you want to monitor how much engagement they have with other email campaigns and other messaging.


Email marketing automation is an increasingly popular way of optimizing your email list, but it doesn’t mean you can’t still make great emails without it. You can still keep emails relevant and useful without email marketing automation software because as long as you’re designing them to interact with people in ways that engage them, they will be engaging their recipients in their own way.


mailchimp marketing automation

mailchimp marketing automation, There are many different ways of doing this — some companies like MailChimp offer a free version of their platform called ConvertKit — but here we will focus on the most common method: A/B testing.

email marketing automation strategy



A/B testing divides data into two groups: the control (your standard emails from normal people) and the test group (your test emails). This allows you to see if any particular variation of your message works better than others in its target group. A/B testing isn't just about seeing which variations do better, though — it's about seeing what does best for all brands and messages in general. For example, if you're running an email campaign targeting a specific demographic (such as the "young under 35" segment) or all audiences (such as "all ages", "all genders", etc.), then A/B testing will give you a much better idea of what's working best overall and which variations might be worth running more regularly across different segments to improve results further down the line. After having done some initial research on what kinds of variables would be useful for testing A/B variations against, we'll go through our first set of tests (we'll use both basic versions and more complex versions later).


We'll start by looking at the simplest way: changing either spelling or font typeface in an existing piece of mail-to-mail content (for example, an email from someone who has asked for a new product review) so that it looks different from one variation to another depending on whether it's received from someone who has requested it or not. This means altering two pieces of content at once: one that is always used by everyone who asks for something new;


Your Email Marketing Automation Strategy

I’m not going to cover email marketing automation strategy in detail here, as it is one of the most complex topics in Email Marketing. However, I will answer a few questions you may have about it.

First off, let’s talk about the different types of campaigns and when you are doing them:

  • SaaS campaigns (e.g. for an app or for a web or mobile site).
  • In-app marketing is where the user has to download an app (usually) and pay for it through their own payment account (e.g. with Apple).
  • Non-SaaS campaigns (e.g. word-of-mouth referrals from your product’s blog posts).


Non-SaaS campaigns (e.g. word-of-mouth referrals from your product’s blog posts).

  1. You aggregate them into reports that give you key metrics about your customer base (average time spent on your site), and what they do on your site:  they're coming to it, they're leaving it and they're engaging with other customers' sites/products/services too;  you can also use those metrics to create content relevant to them;  if you want, you can even create ads that serve these reports;  for example, if someone arrives at your site first time and has really good experience then he will probably be interested in buying a product from the site too;  you could even perform a search on keywords related to him and show him ads based on audience segments he's likely interested in; and more… 
  2. You use those same statistics to create emails that people receive from your accounts: If someone says "Hey! I love this blog post!" then maybe he will be interested in writing for his blog too or perhaps he might be interested in promoting his business through social media… etc; 
  3. And if you want people who are not engaging much with your website or app but still want link clicks, just add them as "lead" accounts…. 
  4. And if people click on the links in these emails then they might visit your website/app again... etc...


As far as I know, there is no way of knowing which of these options would work better than another one without rigorous testing — all businesses should test out every possible combination before launching into production so that they can spend their time optimally instead of wasting time. 


Where do you start?

If you are an email marketing automation strategy developer and you have been around for a while, there is a good chance you know the standard questions:


  • Who are your target customers?
  • What kind of email marketing system do you use?
  • How do you know which clients to support?
  • What’s the pain point of your customers?


In this post on the marketing blog, he offers some thoughts about those questions. The first three are pretty obvious, and you can probably guess what the other two men are. But it will be worth your while to spend some time considering them in depth.


First of all, who are your target customers? This is one of the hardest things to do as a developer. You probably wouldn’t want to tell me how many web users visit your site each month or how many Twitter followers they have. The trick is to think about what these numbers tell you about people — in particular, what they value. In fact, I would argue that having a mathematical formula for this is not only for developers but for anyone who works with data — rather than just giving answers that aim at being “right” (rather than true), we need to think more carefully about when we can or should disclose certain pieces of information and when we should keep them confidential — and start getting some advice from experienced researchers in this area (and it doesn’t hurt if we have read their books). So here are a recipe:  use data analytics tools to find out how people interact with your website. Now here is something else that might be interesting:  use data analytics tools to find out how people interact with your website, email automation platform.


Building an email marketing automation strategy

In the next few weeks, I will be launching a new course on our website, called Email Marketing Automation for Dummies. I hope you’ll take a look, as there’s a lot of information in this course that you’ll want to learn!


marketing automation examples

Today's post is part of an ongoing series on the email marketing automation strategies we've been developing over the next few weeks. 


This is a continuation of our exploration of how to make your email marketing efforts more effective over time, marketing automation examples.


The last one is about our product versioning strategy how it relates to version control and what we can do with it later on. To close off this series (which is actually just two parts), here is part 3 of my series on how we track and manage our product versions:


Any questions? Feel free to ask below or at [email protected], and I hope you enjoyed this short survey.


Implementing your strategy

Before we go into the details of email marketing automation strategy, we need to take a step back and look at some basics. Email marketing automation is not a new concept but one that has evolved over time and is best defined in three simple terms:


  1. Marketing automation (the process of sending emails).
  2. Email marketing (the content of the emails).


The first two terms are important for marketers so we’ll use them here. The third is less commonly used but is equally important:

Customer engagement (how you keep your customers engaged with you — through messaging, social media, etc.)


What do these three words mean to you?  If you’re like most people in our industry, you probably don’t fully understand what they mean or how to apply them. To help with this discussion, let's use an analogy:  Imagine your car. You can open the hood and see all the wiring inside it; however, when it comes to answering questions about its operation or maintenance, you’re still left in the dark on these things. This analogy holds true for email marketing automation strategy as well.


It’s like looking into a car's engine without a manual and having to figure out how it works without reading the manual first. It also means that there are many different cars out there that perform differently and can be customized using different parts. While this may be true for cars in general — and there are some great cars out there — it doesn't necessarily hold true for email marketing automation strategy as well. There are many different ways in which email marketing can be implemented today; however, the same core principles apply across all of them:  that is why we call them “core principles” rather than “rules” because they are guidelines to follow when implementing email marketing automation strategy that will work for any kind of email content (and hence any kind of market) as long as it falls within our “core principle" terminology. These principles can be broken down into four types: content-specific rules, system-specific rules and policy-specific rules, customer-specific rules, and business necessity rules. Each type has its own set of examples to follow but all have some commonality across them: What types of content should I send? How should I send it? And more importantly, when should I send it? What type(s) of a customer should I


Measuring success

If you spend any time on the web, you’ve probably come across two common metrics for marketing success:

  •  Email open rate: The number of emails opened that are ultimately clicked on to become actionable.
  • Open rate: The ratio of email opens to emails sent.


While these are really useful for understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, they are not very useful in terms of converting those emails into actual sales.  The reason is that the thresholds used (open rate >3%) and the way they’re set up (in a linear scale) are not very user-friendly and therefore don’t capture many important conversion details.  This is where a self-service analysis tool comes in handy:  it can help you take a closer look at your data and identify things like the moment when an email went from a "lucrative prospect" to one who just signed up for your newsletter, or the moment when an email actually got opened and converted into something more valuable than just "reading it".


It also helps you see if there is any correlation between different parts of your email campaign – such as re-directs, click-throughs, or unsubscribes – which might give you insight into where improvements could be made if you want to optimize future campaigns around these particular metrics. It also has some interesting insights into what works well with certain audiences (such as younger people) and what doesn’t work well (such as older people). If you have mailings in multiple channels (including newsletters), this tool can show each channel separately by providing its own chart showing how it compares with all other channels for each metric.  Because of its many features, it really helps make sense of all your marketing data in one place, which means easier planning of future campaigns and more productive use of your time!


Types of Email Automation

email marketing automation strategy



In this post, I’m going to look at a variety of automation features you can add to an email campaign.

The first thing you need is good email marketing automation software. That’s what David and I have been using and we’ve made some good progress, but we’re not done yet! There are dozens of different product offerings out there. The following are a few suggestions.


Full Contact List Engagement (FCE) – We use this one regularly because it allows us to set up a series of emails that will be sent to the same subscribers in response to the same actions they take on our website or in our app. This aspect of email automation makes it easy to build campaigns into your overall marketing efforts; for example, if someone buys an item from our site, we might send them an email about it. That is a full contact list engagement campaign that would be triggered once the user bought an item from us (or other people who use our site/app).


The downside is that it takes a lot of time and effort; however, with this approach, we can avoid having to build all those other things into each campaign, like advertising and social media ads and so on — which means we spend less effort on building our email marketing campaigns overall.


Autoresponder: A similar feature but more convenient than FCE because you can create a sequence of emails based on events that occur within a certain period after someone has received or opened your message or sign-up for your service/product. For example: if someone clicks on your banner ad or article from within your website, then receives an email from us asking them to sign-up for our newsletter… you know what happens next!


We use this one heavily because we want people who receive our newsletter to know that they need not do anything else at all; they just need to open the newsletter and receive emails from us whenever something important happens! The downside here too: it requires more work than just setting up FCE… but here again, with this approach, we can avoid building all those other things into each campaign (like advertising and social media ads) which means we spend less effort on building our entire marketing efforts overall.


Capsule: Another type of email automation product with similar features as FCE except that instead of sending individual emails (which can be time-consuming), these products allow users to set.


Email automation examples

Email automation is the modern-day equivalent of the telegraph. Early in the 19th century, scientists had begun to study how to send messages from one person to another without a physical line. Telegraphy developed over 100 years ago, but it was not until about thirty years ago that email became widely used for this purpose.


By now, you’ve probably seen at least one example of how email automation can be done in one form or another. I’m going to look at a couple of ways that email can be automated and present some real-world examples that show the different approaches you can take. First, let’s look at one tool called “MailChimp“. In this case, I have a small mailer ( which is what we call our sales page) written in PHP/JS and then I have an API that allows me to bulk create an entire mailbox pool and automate bulk emails on it (which is my main use case).


Content-based email automation

So many people already have some form of email automation, it’s hard to know where to start. Here are just a few examples:


  • Automatically reply to emails that come in at ~ 3 a.m. EST.
  • Retrieve and organize your email inboxes (and provide actionable information).
  • Track time spent in various inboxes and groups through automation scripts.
  • Automatically flag unread messages as read as well as alert you when new mail arrives (and vice versa).
  • Track your social media posts, even if you don’t use any of them at the moment or don’t want to (or can’t) see them on the timeline Our goal is to make email automation accessible for everyone. 


We want anyone who wants it to be accessible; our goal is not to force you into using it and we’re committed not to force you away from it either; there are other tools out there that do the same thing and we believe that email automation should be accessible for everyone who uses email or wants it — so why shouldn’t we?


The first question is: Do you need email automation? Many startups use this tool simply because they have found that a particular task needs to do better than they can do themselves, and they are happy with a relatively low degree of control over their tasks (for example, task scheduling).


But if you need more control over your tasks, isn't automating that much work worth it? And if you need to be in control of your tasks, isn't automating that extra work worth it? The answer is yes, but these companies do not feel that they need any or all of these features; They wanted something easier than managing email inboxes manually - something similar but simpler than Outlook or Gmail - and now they have all those nice things like automatic replies, multiple notifications for different conversations in one inbox, etc., which makes them a lot happier overall With their current setup! 

There are three additional questions I want to address here:


  1.  Is this feature valuable enough for me?
  2.  Should I automate something else instead?
  3.  Should I automate my whole life like this? 

If none of the above answers apply to you: then you can probably get by without our product instead of having us make it more useful for you! : So...maybe...but then maybe not!


Campaign-based email automation

There are many email automation tools on the market, and most of them have a fairly clear idea of what they do and what they’re trying to do, but few of them go into any detail about the specific elements they use.


The situation is similar when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), which is one of the most misunderstood topics in the business world. It’s not just that there are no good, simple rules for it; people tend to make an assumption that Google will give you whatever you want for free, so you can forget about it as a strategy altogether. But there are some simple rules that can be used by anyone to optimize their own site for better rankings, and in this post, I’m going to present a few such strategies.


The first thing you need to know is that SEO isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. It doesn’t mean looking only at the top 10 pages on Google or Bing; instead, it means using methods like content analysis or user behavior analysis or experimenting with unique features to increase your traffic and site rank while still focusing on high-value content.


The second thing you need to know is that there aren’t really any solutions for SEO as a whole. Instead, there are just different parts of SEO:


  • Search Engine Optimization: Remove the noise or make your pages appear more relevant by changing link profiles and other strategies (e.g., setting up PBNs).
  • Mobile Optimization: making sure your pages load fast regardless of their size (and optimizing mobile sites).
  • PPC Optimization: improving your ads through paid search engines (e.g., driving more clicks from paid advertising).


What comes above these two points? It depends on which part of SEO you want to optimize directly: making sure your pages load fast regardless of their size; making sure your ads appear relevant in search results; making sure those ads show up at all (even if those results come from affiliate programs); etc. The latter two we already covered in this post are blog posts and landing pages. But optimization before these two points means something more simple than just improving speed — it means getting your site ranked higher overall!


Probably the most important part of all this is knowing how websites work and what works best for each page type, thus being able to make informed decisions based on real-life experience rather than implicit assumptions based.


Time-based email automation

Perhaps the best way to think about automating emails is to compare it with creating a calendar. It’s something that most people are familiar with and do, but it doesn’t have the same pull or effect as a calendar. 

Here are some examples of email automation:

  • Company emails: Some companies have a single email address for all of their customer communications, which is handy if you want to send them notifications about your events.
  • Non-company emails: For example, if you run an online business and get new customers, you want to send an email every time someone signs up. One company I know does this as well as any, though I’ve never seen anyone else do it with any consistency.
  • Personal emails: People who live in different places or work on different projects (or even vice versa) can use tricks like auto-responders to send regular communication every now and then.


So what kinds of automation(s) should we be looking at? Well, here are some examples (from around the web):


  1. Email Templates: This one works on two levels: you create a template for an email (and provide a link to it), or you can create your own templates from scratch that aren’t tied to any specific situation and can be used for all kinds of communication. If you don’t mind writing code and can do so from a comfort zone, this is definitely one worth looking into!
  2. Message Forwarding: There are lots of good reasons why people use email forwarding services; for example, when someone contacts your company for help or inquires about your products/services you want them to have access to it right away so they can get back in touch quickly without having to set up an account first. You might even include a link where they go get access immediately if they choose not to receive alerts through their inboxes (which is really simple).
  3. MailChimp Free Trial: It seems like no one else has done this yet but there is also no reason why we shouldn’t try taking on this challenge at least once! This service by far has the most features available — but also offers up the least amount of flexibility in terms of customizations. You get what you pay for here!


Conclusion:  email marketing automation strategy

The most important thing to take from this article is the importance of automation, no matter how simple or complex it may be for you. Understanding automation and using it correctly can save both you and your team a lot of time and money.


In the meantime, let’s discuss what things we can automate and why.


How Many Emails Should I Send?

This is a question that could be answered in many different ways:


  • The number of emails sent in a single day can vary significantly from one company to another, depending on specific features being used by the company (e.g., some companies use up to 20% fewer emails per day than others).
  • It depends on the number of users having an active account with your company (aka likes, subscribers, or active users) and also whether they are receiving messages that are relevant or not (e.g. if they have multiple accounts or have opted-in to receive messages not relevant to them). This is one of those cases where it’s better to be conservative than too aggressive when setting your marketing automation strategy. It’s better to say “We send x number of emails per day” than “We send y number of emails per day”; so in this case, 10% should do fine for now.
  • It depends on your own internal metrics(d) and whether you are using any other external metrics besides email stats. E.g., if you don’t use any external metrics, then it should be safe to assume that 100% should be fine for now.


What Is Inbound Marketing?  

and How Does It Differ From Outbound Marketing?  

And What's The Difference Between The Two?  

And Does That Mean I Can Use All Of Both And Combine Them Into One Other Marketing Strategy At Some Point After This?


 Well, as far as I know, there is no such thing as "outbound marketing" or "inbound marketing". 


They're just marketing strategies aimed at different audiences (or sometimes they're both used together in a broad sense), but they have nothing at all to do with each other -- outbound marketing sends emails to people unrelated to your product/service while inbound marketing sends emails after people who already bought something from you (or someone else). That's merely a semantic difference that happens because outbound marketing targets people who might come into contact with your product.

Comments

table of contents title