With its proven, revenue-generating results within the eCommerce industry, email marketing has become a go-to for brands and businesses of all kinds. But, like most things in marketing, there aren’t many things that are “quick” or “easy” in the world of email. It takes time to develop the skills needed for effective copy, design, and implementation… and, put simply, skill-building cannot be sped up.
However, there is one guaranteed way to save time, energy, and money with your email marketing efforts — and that’s automation! Automation is a way to automatically complete certain email marketing tasks across your sales or customer experience; no hands-on intervention needed.
Here are 3 ways automation can boost your brand’s email marketing efficiencies.
Email Marketing Automation Gives You More Time Back
One of the most significant ways email automation improves efficiency is by saving you time.
By automating time-consuming, repetitive tasks — like welcome emails, follow-ups, or birthday greetings — you’ll save yourself the effort of manually personalizing and sending these emails while giving yourself back hours of time. Then, you can reinvest the time automation has given you back into more fulfilling tasks, like creating compelling content, analyzing data and results, or planning future strategic campaigns.
What’s more, automation gives you the power to schedule emails and SMS far in advance. This saves you from working after hours, on weekends, or on holidays to send your campaign, while ensuring your customers get the information they want – and need – to see. Automation makes this kind of consistent communication easier and less time-consuming, meaning better results, less manual intervention, and more free time.
Email Marketing Automation Makes Personalization Easier
Email marketing automation can also improve efficiencies by optimizing personalization efforts.
Personalization in email marketing is hugely important, but it can take a long time to do manually, especially for large subscriber lists. Imagine manually sorting through hundreds of thousands of subscriber profiles to segment them yourself. It would take weeks — if not months!
Automation tools can do the same task in a matter of seconds, leveraging customer data (i.e. demographics) to segment your audience in any way you need it to. You can also use automation tools to assess the different behaviors of your segments/subscribers, seamlessly customizing email communications based on past purchase history, for example.
Personalization is the best way to build a stronger connection with your subscribers, and automation makes it easier to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
Email Marketing Automation Improves Internal Efficiencies
Finally, email marketing automation improves and streamlines internal workflows.
Many email marketing platforms offer robust features like drag-and-drop builders, easy-to-use scheduling tools, and intuitive analytics or reporting capabilities. These in-platform options allow you to enjoy a smoother management process from start to finish, centralizing your management operations while integrating with other platforms and systems, too.
You can also automate various aspects of email creation and testing to eliminate the need for manual assessment. For example, A/B testing subject lines or CTA buttons can easily be automated. Automated testing can free up your employees’ time while also increasing output; automation tools can create and implement as many test variations as you’d like!
Automating internal processes can give your team a break from previously manual tasks, freeing up their time (and minds!) to get more strategic and creative in their work.
Wrap Up
From sending automated email flows that guide customers through your sales funnel to pushing out review requests and SMS reminders, email marketing automation can help your team in seemingly infinite ways. But, at the end of the day, embracing automation isn’t just a move toward simplicity. It’s a strategic choice to prioritize optimization and better your internal workflows, helping your brand get ahead in the email marketing industry… and stay ahead, too.