How Email Marketing Automation Helps You Drive More Sales
By Lilach Bullock
Email is a great marketing equalizer. I mean think about it. Everyone uses email. In fact, according to recent studies, there are over 3.8 billion email users worldwide. And that number is steadily rising. With such a big number of people using email and billions of emails being sent and received every day, it seems pretty hard to stick out right?
Well, that’s what you’d ideally expect. However, surprisingly enough, email is still one of the most effective channels of marketing. And if the June 2016 survey conducted by Demand Metric and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is anything to go by, email has four times higher median ROI compared to other marketing formats which makes it the perfect marketing to go to tool. Plus, everyone sort of just expects to get an email at some point in the day so it makes perfect sense for marketers to take advantage of that.
But the real question is: how will email marketing automation help you drive sales?
In this article, we are going to explore the ins and outs how email marketing automation helps you drive more sales.
But before we get to the juicy part, how about we look at what email marketing automation is and the benefits of automating your email marketing.
Sound good? Then let’s get right to it.
How Email Marketing Automation Helps You Drive More Sales
What is Email Marketing Automation?
In a nutshell, email marketing automation is simply the process of converting the dispatch of emails from a manual process to an automated one. The purpose of automation is to help you send time triggered emails to subscribers instead of having to do it yourself. There are plenty of email marketing platforms that will let you automate your email campaigns.
Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
Now that we have gotten the question of what email marketing automation is out of the way, let’s get to the benefits of email marketing automation.
It Helps You Target Potential Customers in a More Personalized Way
One of the perks of automating your email marketing is that it helps you reach customers in a more personalized way. The truth is not everyone will buy into your idea the very first time. In fact, according to studies, 50% of leads may be qualified but not exactly ready to commit to making a purchase. Therefore, once you’ve captured quality leads, you’ll need to nurture a relationship and build trust so that they eventually make a purchase. You can also use some popular email marketing automation tool to further customize subsequent email content.
It Improves Customer Happiness
Email marketing automation isn’t just for turning new prospects into customers. It is also important in helping you improve customer retention. For instance, automation allows you to offer rewards and incentives which show up on your customers email automatically based on their purchasing behavior.
In addition, as part of your customer care strategy, you can also create an automated follow-up sequence which will be emailed to customers once they've made a purchase. This will help motivate your customers to make more purchases and help drive sales further.
It Helps You Segment Leads
With automated email marketing, you can capture a larger number of leads and then automate follow-ups using an appropriate segmentation strategy. The segmentation capability also helps make it easier to send out personal product recommendations to make your communication more relevant.
However, it's important to ensure that you are only capturing high-quality leads that have a higher likelihood of turning into customers.
It Helps Keep Your Brand Consistent
Email automation removes the need to keep scheduling and segmenting each email to a specific audience. This helps free up some time to craft the perfect content and keep your brand consistent across all your customers. With a consistent brand, it's much easier for customers to trust you and make a purchase which then helps drive sales.
It Reduces Errors
If you’re sending the emails yourself, then chances are you will get exhausted and do a couple of errors along the way. Maybe misspell the customer’s name or send the wrong content altogether which might cause customers to have less trust in you. With email marketing automation, your emails can be proofread before they are put live. This means that they'll be fewer errors and more chances to get customers to buy into your idea and maybe even make a purchase.
It Saves Time
When everything is automated, it takes the worry of having to do everything yourself and frees up time to focus on other aspects of marketing like nurturing leads.
Conclusion
As you can see, email marketing automation is a great way of driving sales. By automating, you can focus your energy and time on other efforts that will further help you drive sales. If you really want to drive your sales up the roof, then you’ll want to automate your email marketing.
As always I hope this blog post has been helpful.
Good luck!
Forbes Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer. 21 years of marketing experience. Currently obsessed with AI implementation done well. Lives in London, speaks worldwide, writes a weekly newsletter that 15,000+ founders read on Sunday mornings.
