5 Ways to Use Marketing Automation for Your Emails

5 Ways to Use Marketing Automation for Your Emails

Marketing automation has become a valuable tool for achieving all kinds of business goals. According to a Forrester report, B2B marketers can increase their sales pipeline contribution by 10% on average with marketing automation.

I have noticed some marketers aren’t taking advantage of all the benefits

of marketing automation for email marketing.

Here are 5 of the many ways you can take advantage:

Welcome and Thank You Emails

If someone in your audience subscribes to your blog, signs up for a free trial of your service, or makes other major steps down the sales funnel, you can keep up engagement by sending out a triggered welcome or thank you email.

A blog welcome email could promote your popular articles, allow readers to adjust their subscription settings, and feature other content offers, for example.

Here’s a great welcome email from Whistle, highlighting their product’s features:

Interest Targeting

Marketing automation makes it easier to track your audience’s behaviour on your website, which can give you some insights into their interests.

Track visitors’ page views and content downloads, and use these to trigger email campaigns targeted to those topics.

Here’s an example of an interest-targeted email from Nordstrom:

You could just segment your lists based on gender to send out something like this, but that wouldn’t capture the mother shopping for pyjamas for her son. Tracking with marketing automation would.

Converting Leads

With the help of marketing automation, you can create a triggered email campaign that targets prospects who are almost ready to convert.

For your trigger criteria, use top-of-the-funnel content like ebooks and webinars.

Then, you can target this group with special offers that are designed to convert. This live training session by Zapier is a good example of that:

You can also target them with content you know is the most effective in turning leads into customers.

How do you know what that is?

Use attribution report analyses, another helpful feature of marketing automation.

Abandoned Shopping Cart Reminders

For anyone in e-commerce, abandoned shopping cart reminders are simply a must. According to surveys by Baymard Institute, average cart abandonment is almost 69% in e-commerce.

Abandoned shopping cart reminders are a great way to capture these almost-conversions.

Marketing automation tools can help you track shoppers who leave your site without completing their purchase and target them with a reminder email.

Here’s a persuasive example from Ralph Lauren:

One reason I like this one, in particular, is because it also features similar items, encouraging their audience to head back to the store if they really didn’t want what was in their cart.

Evangelist Targeting

I can tell you from experience, not all audience members are created equal. Some are hyper-engaged with your brand, and you can take advantage of their enthusiasm by encouraging them to become brand evangelists.

Create a triggered campaign based on high levels of engagement with you across platforms, such as:

• Site visits
• Email clicks
• Social media post engagement
• Form submissions

You can target with email messages encouraging them to share your best content on social media. Since they’re already so engaged, they’re much more likely to help you spread the word to others.

Here’s an email from Hydro Flask promoting a contest. Their most engaged audience members would be the best to target with this message:

Target your evangelists to get more reach for your most important content, contests, sales and other promotions.

Sign up for a 14 day free trial of Sendlane™ today to start taking advantage of email marketing, and see all the ways marketing automation can improve your targeting.

Know any other great examples I missed? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks so much for reading. If you found this to be helpful, chances are your friends will too! Please “like” and share this on Facebook and your other social networks! 

Source

Top 5 Metrics All Email Marketers Should Be Tracking

Top 5 Metrics All Email Marketers Should Be Tracking

There are numerous different ways that email marketers can try to determine just how well they are doing from a performance standpoint. While the overall list of potential metrics is exhaustive and goals for an email campaign vary from person to person, there are several metrics and KPIs that EVERY email marketer

should be looking at, and optimizing their campaigns based on. Today we will take a look at these metrics, and how Sendlane™ can help you analyze and optimize to get the best performance out of your emails.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of total emails sent that were not successfully delivered to a recipient’s inbox

There are two different kinds of bounces, soft bounces and hard bounces. A soft bounce could be due to a temporary server issue or something else that prevents the email from being delivered, but once the problem is resolved the email will be sent through or you can try re-sending. A hard bounce would result from an email address that is no longer valid, meaning that you should immediately remove any hard bounce email addresses from your list. Sending to too many hard bounces can hurt an email sender’s reputation.

Click-Through Rate: The percentage of recipients who clicked a link in any given email

CTR gives an email marketer a very quick and easy look at initial performance in their campaign without having to dive in too deep. It allows a glance at how current efforts are performing, and also gives a good look at performance over time. Additionally, looking at CTR can be a great way to run various test with your email marketing, whether it’s copy, creative, headline, etc.

Unsubscribe Rate: The number of unique users who unsubscribe from your list

If you are utilizing a well-maintained and properly used email list, unsubscribe rates should be no more than one percent at the absolute most. If you find that more than one percent of your list are unsubscribing from your emails, it is time to look at how emails are being collected, what types of creative/messaging you are using and whether your list should be cleaned up.

Conversion Rate: Percentage of recipients who clicked through on your email and completed a desired action

Once a user has clicked through your email the next step is generally for them to convert on whatever you are offering – whether that is filling out a lead generation form, purchasing a product or anything else that you have set as a goal. Conversion rate is one of the most important KPIs to look at in regard to the goals you have set for your campaign and can give you a very good idea of where optimisations can be made if you are falling short of goals (or want to continue to push performance forward).

ROI: Your overall return on investment, the revenue you have made in comparison to money spent

Just like any other marketing effort, ROI should be tracked very closely as it tells you whether or not you are making money on your current venture. While the other metrics listed above are great for you to look at when you are deep in the data weeds, ROI is a very easy way to show just how well things are performing and to show how effective email marketing really is.

Sendlane™ makes it incredibly easy to track all of these important metrics, along with many others that you may be interested in looking at. We provide all of the analytics and data you need to track the success of your email marketing. Sign up for a free two week trial here to find out how we can help you get the most out of your email efforts!

Let us know in the comments how you have used metrics to improve your email marketing. 

Also, please help us spread the word by liking and sharing this post! 

Source

3 Ways Every Small Business Should Be Using Automation

3 Ways Every Small Business Should Be Using Automation

Whether you’re a large SaaS company or a small mom and pop shop, email marketing is a vital part of business.

As far as pulling it’s weight in ROI, email marketing brings in a staggering number of 3800% and an average of $38 for every $1 spent.

Can I hear a hallelujah! But, realistically, there is only so much time in the day.

While many of us would love nothing more than utilizing this heavenly tool, few of us have the time to plan, write and send out emails every week.

Thankfully, the marketing gods have blessed us with a wondrous tool called automation.  (*sparkle-sparkle*)

With automated emails, you simply spend time putting emails together ONCE and then you essentially never have to touch them again.

This means a one-and-done deal that helps you make more money. From small to large businesses, everyone can use automated emails.  If you are ready to start implementing automation into your process today, sign up here for a free 2 week trial of Sendlane™.

Here are three types of emails that you should start implementing today.

1. Indoctrination

Essentially, this is just a fancy word for a “Welcome email”.

The moment a person comes to your site and signs up to your email list, an email is triggered to send to them that gets them acquainted with your business.

Ryan Deiss with Digital Marketer put together a formula for this that he calls the “perfect welcome email.”

Here’s the flow that he talks about:

• Introduce yourself/your company.
• Set expectations for what they will receive
• Restate the benefits of being a subscriber/lead
• Get them to make micro-commitments
• Open a loop

The first 3 in this list are rather easy to put together. But what about the last two?

Micro-commitments is easy too.

Simply ask your new subscriber to follow you on a desired social channel. This allows you to gain additional reach to them while making it easier for them to connect and interact with you.

Depending on the type of market you’re in, opening a Loop can be a bit tricky, but not if you’re creative enough to try and find it.

This loop is where you give them something but not quite yet… Sort of like when someone says the start of something really important and then leaves the room.

That’s the start of your loop.

For example, if you were a local restaurant, your loop could say, “Want to save $10 on dinner? Keep an eye out in your inbox tomorrow for a special deal.” Then you would have another email triggered to send to them the next day with the deal and then close the loop.

This keeps them engaged, waiting, and then you reward them with something for doing so.

For more ideas of great welcome emails, you can take a look here.

2. Personal Touch

Have you ever received an email from a CEO of a company asking if you had any questions about the service you signed up for?

I have and I’m sure you have too.

This is what I like to call the Personal Touch. This email can give your business a face and help connect the emotional void that customers feel.

It can work no matter what type of business you run and it doesn’t need to be that complicated.

You could keep it as simple as this:

“Hi, {name}. I noticed that you signed up to our email list a few days ago. Thanks! I’m excited to connect with you. I’d love to know if there’s anything you need help with. ~ {Name, Title}”

This is a VERY boiled down version that you could tweak to cater to your personality and business. And you can set these up to send a certain amount of days after that initial signup with the welcome email.

3. Re-engagement

Let’s say that you have a customer who hasn’t been opening your emails lately and they haven’t bought anything from you in a while.

What do you do? Leave them be and hope they buy from you again?

Well, you could do that, but it would be better if you sent a re-engagement email instead.

The purpose for this, as I’m sure you’ve already put together, is to get your past customer to engage with you once again.

Here’s how it works:

You gain an email subscriber, and then they buy something from your site. But then…

A few months go by and things are pretty silent from them. (a.k.a. No more money coming your way.)

At this point, you can send setup a triggered email to people that fit the bill here and offer them something so tantalizing that they can’t help but buy from you again.

Here’s a great example of how Starbucks does this.

I mean, who doesn’t love a free treat from Starbucks?

This offer promotes action on the part of a customer and you both get something you want. You can do something similar by sending an offer to a customer who hasn’t been buying anything from you recently or even opening your emails.

Of course, your subject line for the email needs to be enough to get them to open it, but something as simple as, “A Free Gift Just For You” can certain do the trick.

Wrapping It Up

Over 75% percent of email income is made from triggered (automated) emails compared to other types of emails sent.

That’s a big margin that you can be taking a slice out of no matter what type of business you’re running. If you take the time to plan your emails and then set them up to send automatically, you can be doing a lot to help your business and profiting more than you thought you could from a few little emails.

When it comes to email automation, what have you found to be the trickiest part? Or perhaps what techniques have you found to be the most effective? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. 

When you are ready to start taking your own chunk of the major income being made from automated emails, sign up here for your free trial of Sendlane™!

Also, if you found this information helpful, chances are your friends will too! Please like and share this post on Facebook and all of your relevant social networks!  

Source