As the number of marketers using email marketing as their primary channel for lead generation reaches 89% this year, we can say with confidence that contemporary businesses are well aware of the power of email marketing.
When you choose to automate your email marketing campaigns, you take the potential of email marketing to the next level.
Today, 64% of B2B respondents say that they use automated email marketing tools and techniques to better their campaigns.
But how do you ensure that you’re getting the best out of your email marketing tools?
Even with the most cutting-edge email marketing tools by your side, you may have experienced instances where you fail to meet the ROI you expected or to meet the open rate you estimated. Often this is because you overlook steps like automated email list management and other efforts that polish up your marketing tricks.
If these seem like familiar problems your brand is facing, then maybe it’s time to streamline your automated email marketing campaigns. Let’s dive into how this can be done.
1. Segment your customer journey into behavioural triggers
Triggered campaigns generate over 75% of email revenue, which is why implementing behaviour-based triggers is one of the best email automation practices to streamline your campaign.
Take, for example, when your contact downloads an eBook. They can insert their name and email into your form, and in exchange, you send them the link to their eBook in an email. This, however, is only one of many possible ways to trigger an automated campaign.
You can also trigger an email sequence based on behaviours and actions like:
- A contact views the pricing page more than once
- A contact downloads an eBook more than twice from your site
- A contact stays on the product page for more than a certain period (more than 60 seconds or 90 seconds, for example)
You can also trigger sequences based on certain criteria, like their buying behaviour. For example, if a customer has been an email subscriber for more than six months or has purchased products worth over a certain amount.
2. Remember to build follow-ups
Emailing your leads and customers just one time isn’t going to cut it.
Depending on the product or service you offer, you need to keep following up and staying in touch so that you can:
- Stay at the top of your lead’s mind
- Showcase the reliability of your organisation
- Encourage your leads to interact with your organisation
- Show interest in maintaining communication with your leads
- Add value to each of your emails by providing information specific to your leads
You can also tailor your follow-up email in several ways:
Following up with a similar message
If you trigger an email when a subscriber looks at your services page, you can send them an email to book a demonstration.
After 3-5 business days, you can follow up to ask them to book a time with you.
Follow up with varied content
Triggers such as downloading lead magnets may require you to take a more long-term approach.
Here, instead of following up swiftly to remind a person to take you up on your initial offer, you can offer them different resources—like blog posts, case studies, webinars—this all depends on which of these provide the most value to your leads.
A good follow-up strategy can be a great way to educate your leads and bridge the gap between lead and client.
3. Encourage individuals to take immediate action
You can use your email copy to encourage your audience to take immediate action and interact with your brand.
While certain emails will, in fact, remain purely to offer value, you should have one CTA or a Call To Action in each email so you can:
- Encourage immediate action
- Direct your readers to one clear action
- Track CTR and segment your most engaged email readers to benchmark your email content
Remember, your CTA can be any number of actions—it could be a chat prompt that brings users back to your website and starts a conversation with your team or a button that takes your readers to check out a recent blog post or watch a pre-recorded webinar. Maybe it’s even to purchase a product or book a demo.
You can model the CTA based on what behavioural data you’re using for your campaign. For example, if it’s an abandoned cart campaign, you can go straight to asking readers to continue their purchase. If the individual has downloaded an eBook, on the other hand, you may want to follow up with more helpful resources.
4. Maintain email list hygiene
List hygiene is a crucial part of email marketing best practices.
Email contact lists are often extensive, and will only get larger as your business expands. On top of that, it’s constantly in flux, which makes it quite difficult to run a smooth marketing campaign if it’s not managed properly.
To run your email campaign effectively, you need to have several sublists, based on categories like contact type, demographic data, and even based on their last interaction with your brand.
Regular email list scrubbing is also a necessity. By keeping your list clean, you can reduce your email bounce rate, increase email deliverability, avoid your emails going into the spam folder of the recipient, and reduce your sending costs.
To streamline these efforts further, you can execute automated email list management and customise your list into two email statuses.
- Unengaged Marketable Status: Contacts who are eligible to receive your automated emails, but are tracked as not having engaged for a certain number of months. The default time frame for this is 4 months.
- Unengaged Non-Marketable Status: These contacts will no longer be eligible to receive your automated marketing emails unless they engage with an email they’ve already received from you.
By setting up automated list management, you can improve your deliverability rate, increase your sales, and boost the overall image of your brand.
Streamline your automated email marketing campaigns for better results
Global email users are forecasted to reach 4.3 billion by 2022, and this figure is set to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025.
To make the most of this opportunity, it’s essential that you take the time and effort to follow through with some of the aforementioned best practices of email marketing.
If you’re looking to learn more about automated email marketing, don’t hesitate to schedule a free consultation with Launchy today!