Learning how to build email automation? This guide will show you how to send automatic emails.

Are you overwhelmed by emails? Those countless promotional emails can be quite irritating sometimes (most times).

As a content marketer, your brand is likely familiar with marketing and transactional emails. Email automation is a critical tool used by marketers to provide operational updates and promotional messages to their customers and prospects.

In this “how-to” guide, we’ll discuss how automated emails to your target audience add tremendous value to your existing email campaigns.

But before we get into more details, what is email automation?

What is Email Automation?

As the name implies, email automation is the process of sending out emails to customers and prospects automatically. Sending automated emails is based on schedules (or triggers) defined by the content marketer.

It sounds simple, right? Well, for the most part, email automation is quite simple and straightforward. Even so, like with any other online marketing skills, the more you learn about them and test them to improve your email marketing strategies, the more you actually learn.

And the more you learn about sending automated emails, the better placed you’ll be to improve those skills further as you apply them in your email marketing campaign.

The trick here is to be as consistent and impactful as possible with your automated email campaign and you’ll record promising results.

Sending automated emails is different from those on-off emails that brands often send to their prospects and customers. Email automation basically means you’re setting up emails once, then automatically sending them to customers that meet certain triggers or criteria.

Why Should You Be Sending Automated Emails?

Believe it or not, this is actually one of the most common questions content marketers ask themselves. My take on it: you should have a more comprehensive answer by the end of this post.

Compared to new communication technologies such as mobile text alerts, retargeting, Facebook ads, email just feels… well, old.

But that’s beside the point.

Despite being one of the oldest forms of communication (over 40 years and counting), email is still a vital lead generation channel you can use.

With this in mind, if you’ve not already ventured into email marketing, you’re probably missing out on A LOT! Literally.

Today’s email system not only sends instant messaging and other relevant information to your customers; it can now do so automatically.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Email still takes precedence on the list of B2B lead generation channels. Therefore, if you’re not already using it or not capitalizing on its full potential, you’re definitely missing out.

Some reasons why you should invest in email automation right now:

1. Communicate with the Audience

All forms of marketing rely heavily on constant communication with customers and prospects. Automated emails make this possible as they improve communication with your audience. Your audience will also feel they can always reach out whenever they feel like talking to you.

Email automation makes it easier for customers to become loyal to your company and your products/services.

If you think about it for a second, people love and appreciate good emails. Sit back and think about the last time you received marketing emails from a brand you love. The chances are that you actually enjoyed the contents of the emails.

No, it wasn’t disruptive because you were looking forward to getting the latest updates on the brand.

You probably enjoyed the experience and even decided to keep in touch with the brand.

2. Generate Traffic to Your Site

Automated emails generally keep your customers and prospects on toes at all times. You’re sequentially sending them automated emails to remind them of your brand’s existence and the need to interact with your brand.

It’s one of the most effective strategies to generate more traffic to your website. Customers will always click on your call-to-action to see what new products/services you have or the latest updates about your brand.

Again, people just love good emails, especially ones that come from brands they love and are already familiar with. If this is you, then you’ll have an easier time generating traffic to your website. Your prospects will also be inclined to click on your emails to see what products/services you offer.

Sending automated emails is an excellent strategy to get your audience consistently engaged with your brand and products/services.

3. Increasing Leads

Just as you would improve sales through email automation, you will also increase your leads with this marketing strategy. In fact, email marketing is much more effective with the inbound method as it nurtures more leads and improves conversions.

Bear in mind this example; your client downloaded a lead magnet then started receiving drip emails from your brand. Eventually, they decide to subscribe for a demo of one of your products/services or learn more about your company. You will have just earned yourself a qualified lead.

A strong email marketing campaign can boost your qualified leads to ensure your sales team isn’t wasting time chasing after bad leads.

4. Reaching the Right People at the Right Time

Every successful marketing campaign begins by reaching the right customer at the right time. This is one of the most important points you’ll learn the hard way if you’re not too careful.

One of the best things about email marketing is that you always reach your target audience whenever you send emails. That’s because people always check emails no matter where they’re from. The internet smartphone devices have made it possible for people to check their emails on the go and on multiple devices.

That’s to say that technology has worked more in content marketers’ favor as the success rate of email marketing has improved significantly in the past few years.

This means you can now get in front of your audience regularly and in real-time to keep your brand on top of their mind.

5. Providing Value to Your Audience

As a brand, you should always strive to provide value to your audience if you want them to continue coming back for more.

Email marketing provides the best opportunity to cultivate loyal customers since you can always add value to your content even when your prospects aren’t making a purchase. Remember, they’ve already accepted and opted-in to your mailing list. That’s a win already.

However, you don’t want to chase them away by providing several junk emails that don’t add any value.

Ideally, you’ll want to use email marketing to provide even more resources to customers and prospects who’re interested in your products/services. By continuously providing value to your audience, you’ll grab more people’s attention and produce a higher return on investment.

That’s something you should look forward to the next time you set up automated emails.

Setting Up Automated Emails

It’s definitely not enough knowing the benefits of email automation but not understanding how to automate your emails. You can brainstorm different ideas about possible email campaigns. But what matters is knowing the basics of sending automated emails and getting it right.

This will form a solid foundation that you will use to build a strong email marketing campaign.

With this in mind, here are some critical email automation tips to consider when setting up your automation process:

1. Choose Automated Emails Service Provider

To send automated emails, you’ll first need an automated email service provider. Fortunately, there are dozens of email companies that provide this email automation software.

While most of the services provided by these email service providers are similar, it’s always important to do in-depth research to determine the best fit for your brand.

Email automation tools like Mailchimp or Aweber are some of the best in the market. They also have a long history of service reliability, effectiveness, and trustworthiness. We would recommend considering these websites before switching to other options. But that’s just our opinion. Opt for whichever emailing service provider works for you best.

2. Segment Subscribers

Most content marketers often start email marketing campaigns by blasting everyone’s emails on their subscriber’s list with the same message. But just because email automation allows you to do this doesn’t mean you should.

Serious email marketing platforms know best to offer subscriber segmentation options that allow you to divide your subscribers based on different criteria. This allows you to send more personalized emails to your subscribers based on:

• Location
• Industry
• How they learned about your brand
• Product/service they purchased or didn’t purchase

By segmenting your subscribers based on their actions when interacting with your emails or other identifying elements, you can significantly increase your CTR odds. Customers will be more likely to take the actions you want from them.

3. Map Out Your Workflow

Another critical fact to remember when crafting and sending emails is that quality and consistency are vital for establishing and maintaining credibility. Your customers will consider you a trustworthy brand once they see the level of detail and professionalism of your email layout and design.

How you start your email message also matters and says a lot about your brand and who you are as a company. Therefore, you want to be careful when setting up the email flows.

Everything about your email, from layout to type of emails, the volume of emails, email design, and even proofing must be mapped out perfectly.

4. Write Compelling Email Copy

The more access to the internet space consumers get, the smarter and more demanding they become. People are becoming harder to convince as more brands and competitors crop up every day. Competition is stiff.

You have no other choice but to be on your A-game constantly. Put your serious face on and write email messages that move your customers. Anything less and your competitors can just as easily divert your customers and prospects from you.

BiQ’s Content Intelligence has the necessary features to help you draft content that is very high-quality, relevant, to the point, and engaging. You want consumers to see you as their go-to brand each time they open your emails.

With BiQ Content Intelligence, you can be sure to draft email messaging that’s SEO-friendly and optimized for your target audience. The SEO tool will provide you with content-driven strategies to ensure you write relevant emails that your customer and prospects can relate to.

5. Setting Up Trigger Emails

These emails are triggered by your audience’s behavior (or lack of it). Triggered emails are the most common automated email types because they remove the tedious task of crafting and sending messages every day.

They usually include:

• Welcome emails/getting started with new products or services/ onboarding
• Abandoned cart emails
• Milestone emails (birthdays, anniversaries, join dates, etc.)
• Refer-a-friend emails
• Re-engagement emails

You can also set your automated emails to be triggered by specific actions your email recipients make, also known as behavioral email marketing. It encompasses all the points mentioned above and more, like rewards emails and bonus emails.

6. Personalize Your Messages

Personalizing your messages is one of the surest ways to establish rapport and foster a relationship with your target customers.

Therefore, it should go without saying that blasting messages out to everyone on your subscriber’s list without any real personalization will receive a lot of backlash and un-subscription notifications. Use personalization features such as your subscribers’ names, location, etc. to really grab their attention.

7. Connect Your Emails to Customized Landing Pages/Websites

It wouldn’t make much sense to write a fitting email then send your readers to an irrelevant landing page. This will only end up creating more doubts in your customers’ minds.

Therefore, you must ensure that you tailor your landing pages/websites to your email campaigns. The secret lies in creating a seamless transition between your email and your landing page/website. Readers will also feel much more comfortable clicking your call-to-action requests.

8. Consider the Email Automation Sequence

The time you send your email and the volume of emails you send can make or break your email marketing campaign. Send too little, and your readers might not get enough of your content. Send too much, and they may not get the opportunity to go through all of them, or worse, mark your emails as spam.

Therefore, it’s crucial that you send your emails at just the right time and volume. Don’t bombard customers with emails every hour.

9. Split Test Your Emails

A/B testing your emails allows you to determine which iterations of your emails perform better. You can split test your landing pages and calls to action. A/B testing emails allow you to determine which ones generate the most number of clicks and which ones generate the least clicks and engagement.

This way, you’ll know which emails perform better than the others.

10. Analyze Your Results

You will need to frequently analyze and track certain key performance indicators. This is so that you are able to know if your email marketing strategy was successful or not. With this critical data, you will determine better strategies you can use to improve your email marketing success rate next time.

These may include:

• Email delivery rate
• Open rate
• View rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate

These are the most important metrics to analyze and measure when using email automation. Use them to optimize your email marketing campaign further and improve your success rates in the future.

Conclusion

With the world becoming more and more personalized, email automation will undoubtedly make email marketers’ jobs easier. Automated emails will enable you to enhance your email marketing campaigns without manually sending email messages to individual customers again.

Get down to the basics today and see for yourself the benefits of using email automation. And the best part about it is that you can set up your automated email in minutes today, right now.