Automated email marketing is a potent tool for any business. It can help you build relationships with customers, drive sales, and increase brand loyalty without spending hours crafting individual emails.
But setting up automated workflows isn’t as simple as pressing a button. You’ll need to take various steps to succeed in your email automation initiatives.
In this article, we’ll cover the basics of email automation and how to set up effective automated email marketing workflows, helping you to nurture leads, convert customers, and maximize your return on investment.
Steps To Set Up Automated Email Marketing Workflows
Here are the steps to consider when setting up automated email marketing workflows.
1. Understand The Basics Of Email Automation
First, it’s essential to understand the basics of email automation. Email automation is a process that allows you to send emails to customers or leads at pre-defined intervals based on specific triggers.
Triggers can include signing up for an account, subscribing to your newsletter, making a purchase, or viewing specific pages on your website. These triggers can then enable automated emails with personalized content based on each customer’s needs and interests.
Another important aspect of email automation is segmentation. It allows you to target different customer list segments with automated emails tailored to their needs and interests rather than sending a blanket message to everyone.
By understanding the basics of email automation, you’ll be able to create more effective workflows that align with your business goals and help drive ROI.
2. Define Your Goals For Automated Emails
Before setting up an automated workflow, you must define what you want to achieve with your emails.
Are you trying to increase sales?
Generate leads?
Improve engagement with customers?
For example, if your goal is the latter, using animation videos to improve user engagement is a great way to capture people’s attention and motivate them to take action.
Once you know your goals, you can set up the right automated workflows to help you reach them.
3. Set Up A Lead Nurturing Workflow
Lead nurturing is essential to any marketing strategies, and automating this process makes it much easier and more efficient. Creating an automated workflow for lead nurturing allows you to send informative emails over time that guide leads through their buying journey until they are ready to purchase.
For example, if someone subscribes to your newsletter or signs up for an account on your website, you can send them emails with helpful content related to their interests. This will help you build a relationship with them and increase the chances of converting them into customers.
So how do you create engaging and nurturing workflows?
Storytelling is key.
If you’re an avid reader, using familiar storylines that hook people in and keep them invested throughout your email sequence is also a great way to engage leads. For example, a common theme you can employ in your information-nurturing emails is the hero’s journey.
Here’s how it works:
- The hero (the lead) is introduced to a problem or challenge.
- The hero overcomes the challenge with the help of a guide (your product or service).
- The hero achieves success and is rewarded for their efforts.
Using this story-telling technique, you can capture your leads’ attention and keep them engaged through the entire email sequence.
Here is a collection of movies based on books you can check out to get ideas for structuring your automated emails. If someone took the time to convert books into movies, you could rest assured that these storylines engage and resonate with people.
4. Create An Abandoned Cart Workflow
An abandoned cart workflow is an automated email sequence sent to customers who have added items to their shopping cart but did not complete the checkout process. This workflow can be used to re-engage customers and remind them of what they are interested in, making it more likely that they will return to complete their purchase.
For example, you could set up an automated email sequence that sends a message 24 hours after the customer has added items to their cart. The email should include helpful content like product reviews or recommendations based on similar products they’ve viewed. You should also include a reminder about their cart items with a link to your website for easy checkout.
You can also recycle the same content often using an article rewriter to create multiple email variations. This will help you engage customers and ensure that your emails don’t look too repetitive or spammy.
5. Design An Engagement Series For New Subscribers
Engaging subscribers immediately is essential when you have new people on your email list. Creating an automated workflow for engaging new subscribers is a great way to build relationships and encourage them to take action.
Your engagement series should include multiple emails introducing the subscriber to your brand, product, or service. These emails should contain helpful content like tips and tutorials related to their interests. Using video marketing as part of your engagement series can also help capture the subscriber’s attention and keep them engaged.
You should also include emails that ask your subscribers to take specific actions like subscribing to additional newsletters or following you on social media. This will help ensure your subscribers stay active and engaged with your content.
6. Build Re-Engagement Campaigns to Win Back Inactive Customers
Creating re-engagement campaigns is an effective way to win back inactive customers who haven’t interacted with your business. This can help keep customers engaged and remain loyal to your brand.
Your re-engagement campaign should include emails that encourage subscribers to stay connected. You can use micro-interactions like polls, quizzes, and surveys to get people interacting with your content. You should also include links to resources or products related to their interests.
7. Measure and Optimize Your Results with Analytics Tools
Measuring and optimizing your results is essential to get the most out of your automated email campaigns. Several analytics tools can help you track open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates.
You can use these tools to identify which parts of your campaign are performing well and which need improvement. This will help you make changes to your campaign to achieve better results.
Additionally, you can use A/B testing to try out different versions of your emails to see which ones perform the best. This is a great way to fine-tune your automated email campaigns and ensure they are as effective as possible.
Being meticulous with tracking and analytics will help you ensure your automated email campaigns always perform at their best. This will help you maximize the success of your campaigns and ensure that your customers remain engaged with your business.
7 Mistakes To Avoid When Setting Up Automated Email Workflows
Now that you know the basics of setting up automated email workflows, here are a few mistakes to avoid when creating your campaigns:
- Failing to understand user intent: Before you create your automated emails, it’s essential to understand why someone might be subscribing in the first place. This will help you craft emails tailored to each subscriber’s interests and needs. For example, someone that came to your website through the keywords “Red Light Therapy for Skin Care” should receive different emails than someone that subscribed to your newsletter through a blog post about “The Benefits of Organic Skincare.” These two people have different wants and needs, so it’s important to tailor each email campaign accordingly.
- Underestimating the role of social media: Social media can be essential in engaging subscribers and driving traffic to your website or product pages. Using social media videos to promote your automated email campaigns can help you reach a larger audience and boost your results.
- Neglecting personalization: Personalized emails have been shown to perform better than generic emails. At the very least, include the subscriber’s name in your emails and customize the content to their interests.
- Not segmenting your list: Segmenting your email list will allow you to send more targeted and relevant emails. This can help improve engagement and conversions.
- Sending too many emails: It’s essential to strike a balance with the frequency of your automated emails. Sending too many emails can lead to unsubscribes while sending too few can make it difficult to keep subscribers engaged.
- Creating long, complicated workflows: Automated email workflows should be kept short and simple. More comprehensive workflows can become confusing and tedious for subscribers, leading to decreased engagement.
- Forgetting to optimize for mobile devices: Most emails are now opened on mobile devices, so it’s essential to ensure your automated emails are optimized for different device sizes. This includes ensuring the text is readable and the images are sized correctly.
- Not testing and monitoring results regularly: You should periodically monitor the performance of your automated email campaigns and use A/B testing to try out different versions of your emails or messages. This will help you optimize your results and maximize success.
By avoiding these mistakes, you’ll be able to create effective automated email workflows that will help drive conversions and engagement.
Conclusion
Creating automated email workflows can be a great way to engage and retain customers. But in order for them to be successful, it’s essential to plan ahead and avoid common mistakes.
The above tips are a great starting point for creating effective automated email campaigns to help you achieve your business goals. But, as with any marketing strategy, it’s important to continue testing and refining your processes over time to ensure maximum success.
Author Bio
Hanson Cheng is the founder of Freedom to Ascend.
