What is email automation?

What is it?

Email automation is one of the best and most becoming successful ways of effectively engaging with your customers old and new. It allows you to send emails out to them automatically at certain times or days or when certain criteria are met.

It is useful for businesses especially small ones who don’t have the time to respond to every email sign up they might get. Using email automation saves them time by setting up on an email platform that does it for them when the customer takes or meets specific actions.

While this might sound robotic or even distant, it actually allows a business to develop a much closer tie with their customer and build stronger relationships by maintaining an effective communication line and allowing them to build awareness of their brand.

How does it work?

Email Automation is rather simple to set up. Let’s say for example you’re a business and every time a customer signs up for your newsletter on your website you want to send them 10% off their next order.

The first thing you do is sign up with an Email Provider that offers this. There are quite a few out there which offer it; two free ones we recommend because they are so simple to use are MailChimp and MailerLite.

Once you’ve signed up, you create a new group called ‘Website Signups’ and then you create a new workflow. You next set up the action that when anyone joins the group ‘Website Signups’ they get sent an email 24 hours later. You can then create the email template and hit save – always make sure to test with your own email address to make sure it works.

Then, that’s it you now have a working automated email set up, meaning when anyone signs up for your newsletter via your website, they get a thank you email and already feel welcome.

The Benefits

There are a lot of benefits to using Email Automation. If you’re still unsure, don’t worry because we got a few more that might bring you round;

• Email marketing is still one of the most popular and effective forms of marketing for most businesses. They are the third highest and most influential sources of information in the B2B world.
• Using Email Automation will save you time and money not having to send each email out individually and gives a high return if done correctly.
• Automating emails allows businesses to focus on what they love and are good at, meaning their emails always have something to say.
• For brick and online shops, using email automation provides a useful method of reminding customers to make further purchases.
• It allows you to stay on a personal level with your customer offering discounts or even just a Happy Birthday on their special day.

Examples

A welcome/thank you email for signing up to a website is just one of the examples of using Email Automation, here are some others your business might find useful.

• As for feedback once you’ve completed a project, if you work on so many like we do – you can sometimes get confused, but email automation takes care of that worry for us.
• If you provide an online course or tutorial, you can break it up into a series that is delivered over the course of a few days, weeks or months using email automation to deliver it.
• When it’s someone’s birthday or anniversary, you can send a congratulations email with an offer or discount on.
• If someone downloads a guide from your website, send them an automated email to remind them if available if they need further help or advice.
• Following up after a purchase, set up an email automation that sends the customer an email their purchase and recommend additional products to them.

That’s only a few of the methods you can use email automation and with the growing increase of social media and technology, it is guaranteed to be useful in the future for businesses.

If you want to know more about Email Automation or think it’ll be a useful asset to your business, get in touch here.

Otherwise, let us know on Twitter @VittyCreative if you use Email Automation and what for using the hashtag #VittyAutomation.