Implement Email Marketing Automation in These 5 Steps

Whether for a greeting at the first newsletter contact, a birthday congratulations or when your customers abandon their shopping cart - the list of occasions for which you can use email marketing is long. It could become tedious if you had to send emails manually at exactly those times.

You can avoid that if you successfully use email marketing automation. It offers you a Variety of advantages, including a very individual target group approach and a high time saving.

But how exactly do you implement automated mailings correctly? We'll show you in more detail in this article and also take a look at the difference from traditional email marketing.

These are the differences between email marketing automation and newsletter marketing

Before we delve deeper into implementing email marketing automation, let's take a look at how it differs from traditional newsletter marketing, or how both areas can also complement each other.

In principle, both areas differ in their respective objectives, methods and scope. We'll show you what this looks like in email marketing automation and newsletter marketing:

What characterizes an email marketing automation

With email marketing automation you can automate marketing processes software-supported - for example, after registration on a website, a welcome mail is automatically triggered. In addition to this type of mailing, you can also implement them for birthdays, as a guide on how to use products or in response to specific customer behavior (e.g. shopping cart abandonment). You cannot use email marketing automation for urgent news or weekly reviews.

It is particularly suitable for customer retention, increasing sales and as a targeted email marketing method. In addition, there are these further advantages of email marketing automation:

• predictable, efficient
• created once
• time and resource saving
• simple success measurement

What characterizes newsletter marketing

In the classic newsletter marketing, mailings are sent as information about the company, new products or services. You can acquire new customers as well as increase reader interaction. Other types of mailings can also announce discount campaigns, internal news for your team or invitations to events.

In contrast to email automation, your mailings are not recipient-based, but the classic newsletter marketing offers you the following advantages:

• targeted, predictable, efficient
• room for creative content that triggers emotions
• regular reader contact
• increased trust in the brand

These goals have automated mailings

Email marketing automations primarily pursue sales-marketing goals, which are subdivided into these additional points:

• Revenue increase: With automated mailings you can reach your target group at the right times and increase sales faster. So users who react with an apparently individual birthday code are more likely to react to your mailing than to a mailing sent to multiple recipients at the same time.
• Strengthening customer loyalty: The more often you approach your customers at the right time, the more they feel connected to you. You have the opportunity to strengthen the bond with your customers much more because you send your mailing in a targeted way on certain occasions.
• Gaining new customers: Just as you can strengthen customer loyalty, you have the opportunity to gain new customers with automated mailings. They are more likely to feel addressed by individual mailings than by weekly newsletters.
• Cost savings: Via various Email marketing tools you have the possibility to automate your mailings and don't have to send them manually. This saves you important resources that you can invest in your recurring newsletters.

How to use email marketing automation successfully

With email marketing automation, you can turn the sales handle properly and generate additional sales. This can be implemented with email marketing tools in which you can create the mailings and motivate your customers to buy using options such as CTA buttons, integrated vouchers or discount codes.

In addition, a segmented dispatch can help you optimize your email automation. Here you divide your customer groups into different segments, e.g. according to gender, interest or residence. This way, you can adapt the content of your mailings even more to the respective requirements and hit your customers' interest. You also increase your mail's interaction, because it's much more likely for your customers to click on buttons, photos or other links in the email.

Email marketing automation using the example of rapidmail

We'll show you exactly what Email marketing automation looks like in practice using the email marketing tool rapidmail. You should take the following steps into account:

1. Choose the type of your automation

Inside the software, you have the chance to choose between these three different automation types:

• Welcome mailing : greet new contacts, e.g. after newsletter registration, after website registration, after purchase in the online shop
• Annual mailing: Contact at an annually consistent date, e.g. birthday mailing or Christmas or New Year's greetings as well as on holidays or at the end of the year
• One-time event mailing:   Punctual automated email based on recipient-based date, e.g. customer anniversary, registration for trade fairs or other events, webinars or lectures

With rapidmail you can create three different types of email automation.

2. Specify recipient list

For each of your automatic mailings, you can set exactly which recipient list should receive the automated emails. As a start condition, you should also specify which recipient-based date should trigger the dispatch.

Dates (e.g. birthday) can be created in rapidmail and selected in the automation settings.

3. Adjust settings

Once you have laid these two foundations, you can adjust further settings for your email marketing automation:

• Sender and sender address of the email
• Subject line including personalization option (e.g. first or last name) and inclusion of emojis (in the subject line scoring of rapidmail you can display how well the chosen email subject was and what optimization possibilities there are)
• Preheader including personalization option and inclusion of emojis
• Shipping time: e.g. for birthday mailings 1 week before the birthday, on the birthday or for welcome mailings 10 minutes after the first purchase, 24 hours later or directly on the third day after registration

Subsequently, you can set not only the general mailing settings such as sender profile and subject line, but also the individual dispatch time of the automations.

4. Content adaptation of your mailing

In the rapdimail mailing editor you can design and populate your automated email intuitively and as you like. With pre-made personalization formulas, you can address each of your contacts, for example, by first name. In addition, images can be edited and designed directly in the editor.

5. Activation of your automation

In the overview of all automation mailing lists created, you can activate or pause mailings. An automatic live report additionally gives you a good overview of how well your active email marketing automation work. For example, how many were opened or clicked.

Conclusion

Email marketing automation complements your email marketing strategy by providing more flexibility in how you can target different occasions. For birthdays or as a first contact point you can target your customers and significantly boost sales with appropriate discount codes or vouchers.

To successfully implement your automated mailings, numerous email marketing tools are available to you. When it comes to features, you should make sure you can choose from different types of automation. It's also important that you create suitable recipient lists for different types. With these steps in mind, nothing should stand in the way of a successful email marketing automation.

You can also find more suitable tools for your email marketing on our software review platform OMR Reviews. Here we present the tools like rapidmail in more detail and show you the reviews of all tools from our community.