In the DMA’s recent Email Marketing Census 2013, 36% of email marketers and companies surveyed said they use an Email Software Provider (ESP) for automated email campaigns. This however, still leaves 64% of marketers running their campaigns manually and missing a trick.
Automated emails have been making the lives of email marketers easier, and helping companies achieve better ROI, for years. And if you’re one of the 64% still not taking advantage of the numerous benefits of email automation, or not convinced by the idea, then I intend to have converted you by the end of this 2-part post.
Email Automation
What is Email Automation?
So let’s start at the beginning, what is email automation? In its simplest form, automated emails are emails sent out by a piece of software based on an event or ‘trigger’. A trigger could either be a customer action or behaviour, for example getting a quote online and receiving a confirmation email, or generated by pre-defined rules in a customer life-cycle, for example a cross-sell email 6 months after purchase.
The most common use of email automation is transactional emails. When you purchase something from your favourite online retailer, I guarantee you will always receive a purchase confirmation email that was automatically triggered. If you can find a company that doesn’t do this, then let me know and I’ll introduce them to Enabler.
The Benefits of Automation
Time-saving
There are many benefits to email automation. First and foremost, it saves us email marketers heaps of time. With some up-front effort, research and careful planning, you can implement a well thought out strategy that, in the long run, will essentially look after itself and your customers, while saving you time and allowing you to focus on the other items on your to-do list.
Consistency
Secondly, automation means your communications with customers remain consistent. Consistency is key to building a good brand reputation in all digital channels, but particularly email (providing your emails are well designed and tested). Therefore automation increases the chances of your email communications being effective, and customers engaging with what you send them.
Customer Acquisition
Automated emails can be extremely effective in the customer acquisition environment. For new customers, an automated acquisition strategy is paramount to a successful business. When a prospective customer signs up for more information, gets a quote, or subscribes to a service, this is the prime time to convert them into a customer. This is the time they are most engaged with your brand. If you ignore someone at this stage, the likelihood is they will ‘switch off’ to your business.
If you hit customers with some well thought out emails in the first 7 days of them engaging with your brand, you’re dramatically increasing your chances of conversion. We spent a lot of time testing and developing an automated strategy with one of the UK’s leading insurers, and found that by following up with a benefits email 48 hours after quote to non-converters, conversion rates dramatically increased.
Since implementation, we’ve seen quote-to-sale conversion increase by 2.5% from this campaign. This may not sound like a lot, but in the context of their multi-million pound online sales, it’s not something to be overlooked.
Customer Retention
It’s easy to get caught up in sales funnels and ROI and forget the other wonderful uses that email automation has to offer. Retention and maintaining your customer relationships is just as important, if not arguably more so, and there are many automated campaign tricks you can use to make a customer feel ‘special’ and loved. According to Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customers is 60-70%, compared to between 5-20% for new customers.
Amazon's retention strategy is one to be admired. They collect every bit of data possible around customer purchases and behaviour, following up regularly (a little too regularly for some) with suggestions, recommendations and relevant emails based on purchase history and even what you view. It would be unreasonable to expect the rest of us to replicate this with the resource we have available in comparison, but there's still a lot we can learn from big brands like Amazon and best practice we can adopt to suit our own business models.
By Charlotte Sumner, Email Strategist at Pancentric.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus