Automation has changed the marketing game.
With over 4 billion email users worldwide, automated email marketing has shown great potential when it comes to tapping into your target audience, generating more leads, and growing sales.
What’s more, with automated planning and scheduling, you can now set triggers to send your emails at a time that would guarantee the most number of open or click-through rates—all with just a few clicks.
To score the best results with email planning and scheduling, however, you need to support skill and strategy with your automation software.
Keep reading for some tips and tricks to make the best of automated scheduling.
Get to know your audience
According to 2021 marketing automation reports, marketers who used segmented campaigns have noted a 760% increase in revenue.
Most marketers segment their email recipients based on each individual’s position in the customer life cycle. The customer data and the insights you’ve gathered in your CRM and automation software can help you manage this feat: an email marketing tool like HubSpot, for example, segments your email recipients by lifecycle stage.
Segmenting your list and determining your audience makes it easier to plan your campaign strategy—deciding the message and the content you’re sharing with them, while optimising your campaign to align with their buyer personas, interests, and other shared criteria.
Once you have determined your target audience, and have segmented your recipients, you can send messages directly to individual groups within your customer base.
Knowing your audience is the first step in planning and scheduling your campaign as it gives you an identifiable target to personalise your messages to.
Set your enrollment criteria
How do you want your contacts to be entered into a workflow?
With the help of email automation software, you can create personalized email workflows that are automatically triggered in a number of different ways. For example, you can make it so that your leads get added to your list when they submit a form on your website, click a link in your email, visit a page on your blog, or click on one of your ads.
You can also set up email workflows based on any information you already have in your database; this includes information such as page views, email or social media clicks, content downloads, and contact details.
Communicating with your customers based on their activity—gleaned with the help of enrollment criteria—encourages more natural interaction that builds trust, loyalty, and boosts sales.
Include calls to action
Although it doesn’t seem like it with the popularity of social media and other contemporary means of communication, email marketing is still one of the most popular ways to capture an audience.
This means, in order to convert your leads effectively, you need to follow the best email practices that will not waste the opportunities email marketing provides: such as creating email marketing content with a clear call to engage with your business.
Most of your audience receives a flood of promotional emails every day and are likely to scroll through without paying too much attention to the little details.
Getting them to convert means you need to get their attention, and keep it.
To make sure you get their attention and get responses, ensure that you include clear calls to action in your email marketing automation efforts. Anything from Contact Us Now to Subscribe can work wonders for your lead generation and sales.
Remember to design calls to action that correspond with your industry and the tone of voice you adopted for your email marketing.
Schedule email delivery at a specific time
The delivery time of each email determines its efficiency.
Some emails like error reports, password resets, and welcome emails need to be delivered as quickly as possible. Others, however, need to arrive at a particular time to be most effective.
Automated planning and scheduling features in most software send emails to their customers at a time when they’re most likely to see and open the message.
You can also customise these times to meet the engagement patterns of your target audience. Here are a couple of tips.
- Get your data ready
With tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, you can learn about your audience’s demographics, locations, and interests. This data allows you to make informed assumptions about their lifestyle and when they’re most likely to engage with your emails.
- Consider your success metrics
Analysing your open rates gives you insight into the best days and times to send your emails to guarantee the best open rates.
In addition to your open rates, other key metrics such as your click-through rates, conversion rates, and bounce rates also need to be considered before customising your send time.
Track your progress and review your campaign
The final tip to keep in mind with automated planning and scheduling is to track your progress, analyse your results, and review your campaign.
Whenever you see an increase in unsubscriptions, drop in your sales, or drop in click-through rates, for example, evaluate the campaign and see the causes behind it.
The same practice needs to be adopted when you see positive results as well. If you notice a spike in engagement, review your campaign data to see why it happened so you can know which strategies work the best.
Analysing how your campaign fares will help you determine the future of your strategy; as a result, you will know the key criteria to look out for when planning your content, determining schedule times, and setting your subscriber enrollment metrics.
Once each campaign is complete, you can delve deeper into the analytics and learn more about what worked and what didn’t with a particular campaign. Leading email marketing automation platforms include extensive tracking and reporting options that you can leverage.
Successful automated planning and scheduling can help you make the most of your automation software
Even when you have automation software in place, you need to understand the tricks of the trade to make the best use of it.
With planning and scheduling best practices, marketers can streamline their campaigns, optimise the resources available to them, and ensure a higher ROI.
To learn more about automated planning and scheduling, feel free to schedule a free consultation with Launchy’s automation experts!
