5 tips to Build a Great Email Marketing Automation Strategy

Email marketing is one of the oldest and most reliable mobile marketing strategies out there. When the right elements are put in place, emails could be your ultimate weapon in marketing and improving your marketing campaign, but what is email marketing automation?

Email marketing automation is basically sending out email campaigns automatically based on triggers (or automation workflows), categories or segments, and schedules you create and set. You no longer have to type and send out a hundred emails every day manually (very time consuming!). You can arrange a set of messages and schedule when and whom should receive them.  

These email addresses are then collected and viewed on existing customers’ and prospective clients’ smartphones and laptop computers. But as we know, thriving business, like any other war, has to be meticulously planned; hence you need an email marketing automation strategy and a perfect one. 

A successful email marketing automation strategy can:  

• Improve engagement along the customer journey 
• Increases revenue   
• Increases efficiency   

Are you excited yet? Now you’re probably asking, “How do I build a successful Email Marketing Automation Strategy?”   

There are several different ways to do this, but we are here to give you the best. 

Here are five fail-proof steps for you to follow:  

1. Select a marketing automation tool 
2. Segment Your Potential Customers 
3. Personalize your message and call to action  
4. Perfect Your Mobile-Friendly Design
5. Analyze Results

1. Select an email marketing automation tool  

Firstly, you will need to choose an excellent platform that will build your email marketing campaign and apply the best strategies to yield results. A platform that has your prospective customers at heart and has what works best for you. And that is our duty at Maropost. We deliver quality and provide positive results and have done so since 2011.  

When choosing a platform, look for credibility, reliability, and ongoing professionalism. Anything else would have your emails landing in the spam box, low conversion rate, and virtually no open rate. Look for people who know what they are doing.

(If you need help to select the right email marketing platform, read our checklist: Does Your Email Marketing Platform Have These 10 Essential Features?).

2. Segment Your Potential Customers  

A widespread mistake made by people when working on their email marketing automation is; “ooh, I can send multiple messages every day, why don’t I compile everyone in one list and send them everything, to get more responses?” NO! That is a very wrong strategy.

Instead, you should segment email lists or categorize your customers based on the actions taken, how they discovered your product/service, the item purchased, and so on.  

Don’t confuse this with the usual “thank you for ordering” or “thanks for signing up,” remember we are talking about marketing, so these are going to be strategically written and segmented. Let’s say you have a segment of clients who purchased a particular product, your email for them should come along the lines of  

“Hope you are enjoying the V1000 battery? Here is a list of similar products like the V1000 battery”.   

To improve your segments, build a targeted list because truth be told, a lot of people subscribe and then never visit or patronize you again. With a targeted list, you have a clearer AOC (Area of Concentration).  

3. Personalize your message and call to action 

The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day exceeded 293 billion in 2019. So, of course, you have to make yours stand out. Not just by the regular “Dear [Insert Name]” form of personalization.

At this point, your segments are also vital because then, you have records of what was purchased, who purchased it, how they registered, etc. to add and modify your email marketing strategy and make them hit just right. 

Personalizing your message is the best way to get the subscribers’ attention and creating a better bond with them. It improves the quality of your customer service and makes each receiver feel less like a needle in a haystack.

Personalizing your message through email marketing automation does not mean being overly familiar; you should equally apply boundaries in your speech and understand that these are esteemed customers and not a ragtag set of people whose emails you picked.  

4. Perfect Your Mobile-Friendly Design  

Do you know something very annoying? Try opening a horrible mail on your phone. We know that emails are accessible by both smartphones and laptops, but the configurations for both are quite different, so you have to work on how the email looks when opened on either device.   

Creating a mobile-friendly email design is truly imperative with the existing and climbing 68% mobile open rate. Furthermore, improve your mobile-friendly design by adding sufficient clicking space for links. Keep your emails concise and make an effort to create captivating subject lines.

Contracting the right email service provider is vital to giving you a qualitative yet sophisticated template design that would allow you to drag and drop content for delivery quickly.  

5. Analyze Results  

“Try, try, try again, even if you don’t succeed, just try, try, try again” This is a rhyme we sang as children but never fully understood. There is no guarantee that your first attempt will be successful, but that doesn’t mean you should jump right into another process.  

On your first attempt, go with split testing. In split testing, you divide your contact list and try different templates. Then when the results come back, here are the essential lead generation metrics to check:  

• View rate  
• Open rate  
• Click through rate  
• Conversion rate  

(If you want to learn more about email marketing KPIs, don’t miss our article 10 Essential Email Marketing KPIs and Metrics).

As similar as these look, they’re individually significant. Compare the results. Which template did better? Are you pleased with the results KPI-wise?  If not, get back to the drawing board, and don’t be afraid to try, try, try again.