In today’s fast-paced world, consumers demand swift solutions and instant gratification. While achieving this might appear challenging, email marketers possess the tools to promptly address a portion of their customers’ requirements. This is precisely where the concept of automated emails comes into play. Whenever your customers take specific actions or express their needs, automated emails enable you to promptly address those needs with remarkable efficiency.
Within this article, we will elucidate the concept of email automation, underscore its indispensable role for email marketers, and explore eight types of automated emails that warrant a prominent place in your email marketing arsenal.
What is Email Automation?
First, let’s answer the biggest question: what’s email automation? Email automation is the act of sending an email when specific triggers from the customer journey are activated, whether that’s a customer taking a specific action or a certain amount of time passing by.
Once you decide on your customer journey and initial trigger(s), you can build on your automation process by adding on steps.
You’ve defined your customer journey, which is done by choosing the initial trigger that’ll start the entire process, you simply add steps to the journey. Each step will be a new email that’s sent to subscribers who meet the criteria or trip the trigger. Once you’ve saved the new journey, it’s ready to go and will automatically start sending out emails as soon as you’ve activated it.
Depending on which email marketing service you use (we use Klaviyo!) the automation process can be simple to set up and even be time-saving, but more on the benefits in the next section.
Why is Email Automation so Crucial for Email Marketers?
Aside from simplifying your day-to-day manual tasks, why is email automation so vital to your email marketing strategy? Perhaps most importantly, automation helps fulfill your customer’s need for communication. Remember that people subscribed to your mailing list because they believe that you and your brand have something worthwhile to offer. If you’re losing touch with your audience by sending underwhelming communications — either in quality, frequency, or both — you’re putting a valuable subscriber at risk of leaving.
Another reason to use automation is to improve your brand’s customer service and, as a result, improve your customer’s perception of your commitment to serving them better.
In 2019, 84% of consumers considered customer service to be a key factor when deciding whether or not to purchase from a brand. That said, if you aren’t communicating consistently with your subscribers, chances are they aren’t going to be leaping from subscribers to paying customers. When it comes down to brand loyalty, 95% of consumers stated that customer service was an important factor in who they chose to be loyal to. If they can’t rely on you and your team, why should they be loyal to you?
Building brand loyalty and trust is essential. When it comes to trusting brands, customer experience plays a significant role, and, when done right, email automation can help you create the ideal customer experience.
8 Automated Emails Your Business Needs
Email automation benefits both you and your subscribers, so if you haven’t already started utilizing this marketing tactic, it’s about time to get started! There are 8 automated emails your business needs to integrate into your automation campaigns, and we’ll go through each one in detail. Let’s get started!
1. Welcome Series
An email welcome series is one of the most commonly used automated email campaigns by email marketers. 80% of customers anticipate receiving a welcome email from brands they subscribe to, and, as a result, they have a way higher open rate than any other email. In fact, the conversion rate of a welcome email is over 50% higher than other automated emails!
So, how do you take advantage of those increased open rates? Send your own welcome series. Typically, a welcome email series includes a minimum of two emails that are triggered when a new person signs up for a brand’s emailing list. The process of signing up triggers the first email to be sent out, which is typically one of three:
■ Email 1: A confirmation email requiring a second opt-in
■ Email 2: Welcome to the brand/brand introduction
■ Email 3: Note/thank you from the team/CEO
A double or secondary opt-in is important to help confirm your new subscriber meant to subscribe. Once they confirm their subscription, you can start introducing and welcoming them to your brand with a series of emails.
There are no set rules on the number of email messages you send as part of your automated welcome campaign! We’ve outlined 3 — double opt-in, welcome/brand introduction and a note/thank you from the team — but if you think 2 works, or even 4, then go for it! This is where A/B testing comes in handy so you can figure out which of your welcome emails works best.
2. Thank You Email
Thank you emails are another typical part of a welcome series and can be sent for a variety of reasons; it can be a part of your automated transactional campaigns or even your welcome email campaigns. The point of thank you emails is to show your appreciation for your subscribers. After all, they’ve taken their valuable time to perform an action for your brand! Remember, a little acknowledgment can go a long way when it comes to building relationships with your subscribers.
3. Transactional Email
Transactional emails are sent out after your subscriber has taken a particular action, and are particularly effective for those in eCommerce. Transactional emails can be triggered by shopping-related actions like buying a specific item or putting an item in your cart and then abandoning it. These emails often include a summary of a purchase or the items you were looking at, along with any relevant shipping information that the consumer may need to keep an eye on their product.
Believe it or not, transactional emails have approximately 8 times more opens and clicks than any other type of email message, so these aren’t emails that you want to overlook!
4. Event Invitations
Event invitations are another excellent example of a message that can be adequately segmented and automated to go out to either your entire emailing list or those who’ve chosen to receive details on upcoming events. When it comes to marketing for an event, 40% of event creators state that these automated emails are the most useful piece of their marketing materials.
Automated event invitations are great for both marketers and subscribers as well. They help to keep readers informed on what’s going on with your brand, all while providing them with interactive materials to help them learn about why they should be interested.
5. Email Newsletter
Aside from an automated welcome email series, email newsletters are the next most popular automated emails that every business should use. Email newsletters are incredibly versatile; they can be used to share new content, make announcements, and promote new products or services all in one email.
If you aren’t utilizing an automated email newsletter, here are a few stats that might convince you that you should be!
■ Approximately 83% of B2B marketers utilize email newsletters for content marketing. – Content Marketing Institute
■ Publisher newsletters have an average open rate of 22% – Smart Insights
6. Product Announcement/Launch
Product announcements and launches are excellent automated emails for brands whose primary goal is product sales. We live in a time when consumers want to be informed of the newest products on the market, so when you have something new on the horizon, you want to start teasing it early to generate excitement. As the final release date draws near, you’ll have already piqued your consumer’s interest, and they’ll be waiting with anticipation for the final release announcement to “Learn More” or, hopefully, press “Checkout.”
7. Inventory Update
Inventory-focused automated emails are great for keeping your email subscribers engaged with your website. Many brands utilize cookies and other technology to keep track of pages or specific projects that their consumers have visited. So, if a subscriber shows particular interest in an item, these cookies make a note of it. Should the product be out of stock, it’ll send them an announcement once your inventory has replenished so they can complete their purchase.
8. Feedback Emails
The final automated email you should be adding is a feedback email. Your customers want to be heard, and the best way to let them voice their opinion is by inviting them to partake in surveys or offer their feedback. Give your customers plenty of opportunities to leave their feedback on products, services, and their overall thoughts on your brand, and let them know what you plan to do with their feedback — use it to improve and serve them better!
Wrap Up
There are dozens of different automated emails that every business can use, but these 8 are a great place to start. Once you establish a baseline automation process, you can continue to tweak, expand, and improve upon your automations to serve your customers better as time goes on. These email automations are just the beginning!