When you think of the term ‘automation’, things that usually occur to your mind must be mechanical processes, such as cars and other vehicles, or futuristic and technological processes, such as aliens and evil robots. This is because the concept of automation either sounds too far-fetched or too mundane.
However, the world has become so digitized that there are many areas where automation is both attainable and beneficial. One such area is email automation. In this post, we will talk about the benefits of email automation, give you some email automation tips, and discuss how you can use email automation to grow your business. So let’s get started.
What is Email Automation?
Email automation means setting up a system that automatically sends out messages to your selected audience for running email campaigns. It is similar to transactional emailing, but it is not the same if you're familiar with it.
Transactional emails are emails triggered or prompted by a specific action taken by the user, such as a purchase. Automated emails are not triggered by such actions. They are automated according to the predefined criteria set by the sender.
Examples of Automated Emails
Examples of automated emails include monthly surveys, onboarding emails, feedback requests, account payment reminders, and emails celebrating a user's birthday. These are very helpful in increasing the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns. Let’s look into some of these in a bit more detail.
1. Onboarding Emails
These often contain a lot of information about the brand, website, or product that it’s for. The sender must ensure that the information is presented in a way that’s easy for the user to access and comprehend. The purpose of these automated emails is to ensure that every new user is given enough information about the product or brand they’ve started engaging with, without the need to follow up with them individually soon. Many companies use email automation for this purpose.
2. Cart Abandonment Emails
These include the birthday emails mentioned above. These cart abandonment emails take advantage of the metrics of their website visitors to send automated messages. Most websites collecting email addresses through a subscription or some other form can save the details of consumers who back off from the desired action at the last minute. The sender uses these details to remind these consumers about the brand or website by sending them automated emails under this category. This type of email automation helps companies pull past traffic back to their website.
3. Loyalty Emails
These automated emails help you promote user experiences without the need to track each consumer’s loyalty separately. A company would typically send an email with details about its loyalty program and see which consumers respond. In other words, this kind of email automation is used for creating awareness about customer reward programs.
3 Main Benefits of Email Automation
There are many benefits of email automation. Let’s say you are getting an app developed, and you’d like to start promoting it before it is launched. You think of using automated emails for this purpose. How will you achieve your goal of building brand awareness and creating a good user experience through email automation? How is it beneficial to use email automation for this purpose?
1. Make Your Workflow Efficient
Every businessman wants to increase the efficiency of his business operations. This is what email automation gives you. It improves your workflow efficiency. For instance, if you are building an app, you’d want as many people as possible to know about it. You’d also want to reach out to your users consistently. But at the same time, you wouldn’t want to spend all of your time sending them emails manually. Email automation will enable you to send them emails simply and consistently. You can save a lot of time by sending an email to ten people in one shot instead of sending it to the ten people one by one. This will give you more time to focus on the other aspects of your marketing.
In other words, when your email campaigns are running automatically, you don’t have to work so hard and spend so many hours just to get a single lead. You can generate leads at any time of the day without putting in any extra work for each additional lead. Thus, email automation makes a massive difference in the productivity and efficiency levels and digital marketing efforts. This, in turn, means you can get higher returns on your marketing expenses and have more cash available to reinvest in your business growth.
2. Provide a Better User Experience
Everyone loves a good buying experience or even a good experience of engaging with a brand, for that matter. Spending a little time creating emails that give your users a pleasing experience is suitable for your brand image. But how can you take the time to do that if you are so busy sending all the emails manually?
Email automation allows you to pay more attention to the kind of emails you send by saving your time in the actual email delivery process. This, in turn, enables you to build better and longer-term relationships with your customers.
3. Retain User’s Interest in Your Brand
Email automation is an excellent way of retaining and maintaining customers' interest. As long as opened, automated emails give customers a positive experience. Even though some automated emails serve as payment reminders or deadline warnings, they make customers feel special because you particularly remember them and value them.
Maintaining your customers' interest in your products and services is crucial. It is a lot more cost-effective for a company to get repeat sales from its existing customers than to make sales from new customers. That’s why the higher a company’s customer lifetime value, the better it is for its sustainability. Email automation helps you remember your existing customers or subscribers at different events. At the same time, it also allows your customers to not forget your brand.
Email Automation on Strikingly
If you use Strikingly to create your website, you’ll have access to our email automation feature in our Pro plan. The feature involves a custom trigger that sends a custom automated email to all those in your website’s audience who meet the trigger’s criteria.
The audience list of your website can be viewed by clicking the ‘Audience’ tab on the left panel of your Strikingly editor.
Image taken from Strikingly
Let’s take an example. Suppose you set up email automation for a free giveaway on your site. You will create a subscription form on your website, informing visitors that whoever submits their email address through it will receive a digital giveaway.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Everyone who makes an entry in the form will be triggered by the system to receive an automated email with the downloadable link to the free giveaway.
Here are the steps you will take to set this up.
- Under the ‘Audience’ tab, select ‘Email Automations’.
Image taken from Strikingly
- Click ‘Create New Automation’.
Image taken from Strikingly
- Select ‘Submits a form response to…’
Image taken from Strikingly
- Fill the form that appears. It will show a sample automated email preview on the right.
Image taken from Strikingly
- Click ‘Send test email’. This step is optional. You can do this to check the deliverability of your automated email and confirm what it looks like before actually sending it to the audience.
- Once you approve of the test email, click ‘Activate’. Your email automation is all set.
The features of Strikingly are developed, keeping the ease of use of our users in mind. Our platform is not built for programming experts, professional web developers, or those who have mastered coding skills. Our platform serves all those individuals and organizations running a business in different industries and areas of expertise but is not adept at programming or coding. They can be small, medium, or large businesses. The important thing is that we want to provide our support to them by simplifying the process to create a professional website for representing their brand.
With a website built on Strikingly, you can be tension-free about any technical issues your website may face. Our customer support team can resolve any such issues 24 hours a day. All you need to do is get in touch with us via live chat. Our features like email automation, sending newsletters, tracking orders, building product pages, and integrating social media help you in your marketing and sales processes. Using our platform saves you time and rids you of the burden of paying hefty amounts to a full-time website developer to do all these jobs for you.
