A month or so ago, we published a blog about email marketing being an effective campaign to drive customers to your site and make conversions. Despite touching on automated campaigns, we’ve never been into detail about this, but, now we are.
As your business grows, it can become a lot harder to engage with your customers on a one-to-one basis. This is where automated emails can really work to your advantage to appear to be engaging directly with your customers.
You’ve got multiple types of personalised emails that can be automated. Here’s some that work really well.
1. Welcome Email
Has someone just signed up to your email newsletter for your business? Now would be a great time to send them a ‘Welcome’ message, letting them know that you’re glad they’ve joined the mailing list. This is not just saying ‘hello’, but a great way to include calls to action to get people coming back to the website.
Alton Towers Resort are very good at calls to action (CTAs) on their ‘Welcome’ emails. Just recently, I signed up for the newsletter and received the email from them (pictured). The great thing about this email is that it’s completely automated. Meaning, whenever anyone signs up using the sign-up form on their website, they get automatically added to a mailing list.
Of course, the people at Alton Tower’s marketing team set up the email template and created the list that linked to the sign-up form. This may have taken a few days. However, once set up, this can run indefinitely for years if they wanted to leave it that long.
2. Specific Date Emails
If you’ve created a sign-up form and asked for the dates of birth of people to find out what demographic of people are visiting your website, there is something else you could do involving email automation.
Every time someone enters their date of birth in the form this could add them to a list for that specific date, and then when this date comes, the email software automatically sends them a generic birthday email that you have created beforehand.
Not only does the birthday message make customers feel more attached to your brand but make them feel more valued as customers too. A great automated birthday message is from Littlewoods online who offer a 10% discount on the recipient’s next order (see pictured). This is a brilliant incentive to get customers who may have forgotten about the company to go online and order something with the extra money they may have gotten on their birthday.
3. Content Emails
Although content emails can be automated, a lot of the time, businesses prefer not to do that and write them fresh and current. However, it is possible to automate a content rich email. It’s possible to send an email out to your subscribers when a new blog is updated. If you have segmented your audience effectively, you could gear this to those who are interested in that specific subject area.
For example, you own a construction news website and you’ve uploaded a story that directly concerns structural engineers. You don’t want this sending to anyone else, so this way, your audience is receiving the content that they desire. Whilst those who would not be interested, will not be notified it’s on there.
Finally…
Now that you know most types of automated emails, you need to get a few things straight before you do anything. Firstly, it’s important to plan ahead before anything else that you do. If you want to deliver a series of emails to the same list, for example, multiple welcome emails to the same person, you need to ensure you prepare the timings of these and when it’s best to send them.
Now, you can’t get anywhere without a list of contacts, hopefully you’ve already built a decent email subscriber list, if not, now is the time to do it! Make sure they are all quality subscribers who will WANT to receive your emails.
Once you’ve followed these two steps, you need to get yourself an email created. It’s possible to do this on numerous email marketing softwares, however you can make it even more personalised if you can code your own as every pre-set template has its limits. This is the part people often struggle with, it’s about making sure your content is engaging and the subject draws in the recipient (see our previous blog on email marketing).
Now that you’re ready to send them to your list of subscribers, you need to make sure you can measure their success. It’s essential to remember that a lot of email marketing campaigns do not work incredibly well without a bit of trial and error to begin with – try changing the time you send them, the space between different emails, different subject lines and altering the content slightly among other things.
If you need help with your email marketing, get in touch with us and we’ll help you through your journey
